Hollywood’s problem with sexual harassment and assault isn’t going away just because Harvey Weinstein has been exiled from the industry. “Everybody-fucking-knew” screenwriter Scott Rosenberg asserts, and despite how much knowledge people had of the extent of Weinstein’s behavior, the power structures have been in place to allow it to continue for decades. However, this isn’t just a problem at the upper rungs of Hollywood, but throughout, and two actresses have shared their experiences of being sexually harassed and assaulted.
At Elle’s Women in Hollywood event, Reese Witherspoon revealed she was assaulted as a teenager by a filmmaker, and said it wasn’t the only incident.
“This has been a really hard week for women in Hollywood, for women all over the world, and a lot of situations and a lot of industries are forced to remember and relive a lot of ugly truths,” Witherspoon said. “I have my own experiences that have come back to me very vividly and I find it really hard to sleep, hard to think, hard to communicate a lot of the feelings that I’ve been having about anxiety, honest, the guilt for not speaking up earlier.”
“[I feel] true disgust at the director who assaulted me when I was 16 years old and anger at the agents and the producers who made me feel that silence was a condition of my employment,” she added. “And I wish that I could tell you that was an isolated incident in my career, but sadly it wasn’t. I’ve had multiple experiences of harassment and sexual assault and I don’t speak about them very often. But after hearing all the stories these past few days and hearing these brave women speak up tonight about things that we’re kind of told to sweep under the rug and not to talk about, it’s made me want to speak up and speak up loudly because I actually felt less alone this week than I have ever felt in my entire career.”
Meanwhile, Jennifer Lawrence related a particularly awful audition process for an unnamed movie.
“A female producer had me do a nude line-up with about five women who were much, much, thinner than me,” she said. “We are stood side-by-side with only tape on covering our privates. After that degrading and humiliating line-up, the female producer told me I should use the naked photos of myself as inspiration for my diet.”
When Lawrence attempted to speak up to another producer, she was told she was “perfectly f***able” and “didn’t know why everyone thought she was so fat.”
However, through everything that has unfolded over the past week and more, Lawrence has found women sharing their stories about Harvey Weinstein to be “oddly unifying.” [People/Vulture]