It was only a matter of time before Uma Thurman weighed in on the damning Harvey Weinstein sexual assault allegations that have rocked Hollywood for the better part of six months now. Last November, when asked by Access Hollywood for comment on Weinstein, a visibly upset Thurman emotionally said she was not yet ready to speak out. “I don’t have a tidy soundbite for you, because I’ve learned — I’m not a child, and I’ve learned that when I’ve spoken in anger, I usually regret the way I express myself. So I’ve been waiting to feel less angry. And when I’m ready, I’ll say what I have to say.”
Already hinting for weeks that a bombshell was coming, yesterday, in a scathing interview with The New York Times, Thurman finally spoke her piece and revealed to writer Maureen Dowd that Weinstein indeed sexually assaulted her in a hotel room.
“It was such a bat to the head. He pushed me down. He tried to shove himself on me. He tried to expose himself. He did all kinds of unpleasant things. But he didn’t actually put his back into it and force me. You’re like an animal wriggling away, like a lizard. I was doing anything I could to get the train back on the track. My track. Not his track.”
Traumatized by the incident, Thurman felt anguish for years following the assault and not just for herself, but for the Weinstein victims she knew would follow.
“I am one of the reasons that a young girl would walk into his room alone, the way I did. Quentin used Harvey as the executive producer of ‘Kill Bill,’ a movie that symbolizes female empowerment. And all these lambs walked into slaughter because they were convinced nobody rises to such a position who would do something illegal to you, but they do.”
“I used the word ‘anger,’ but I was more worried about crying, to tell you the truth,” she said about the gripping and dramatic Access Hollywood moment. “I was not a groundbreaker on a story I knew to be true. So what you really saw was a person buying time.”
Being so closely tied to Harvey Weinstein, many have wondered how filmmaker Quentin Tarantino fit into this larger story given he directed Thurman in three Weinstein-produced movies, “Pulp Fiction,” and “Kill Bill Vol. 1” and “Kill Bill: Vol. 2.“ Tarantino weighed in a few months back, rather candidly saying he hadn’t done enough about Harvey Weinstein heinous behavior towards women, admitting he knew about the various assaults, but Thurman threw the director under the bus for a different kind of abuse. The actress said Tarantino forced her to perform car stunt in “Kill Bill: Volume Two,” which resulted in Thurman hitting a palm tree and permanently injuring herself. The car, she said, was undrivable and at best should have been steered by a stunt person.
“The steering wheel was at my belly and my legs were jammed under me,” Thurman said of the accident. “I felt this searing pain and thought, ‘Oh my God, I’m never going to walk again.’ When I came back from the hospital in a neck brace with my knees damaged and a large massive egg on my head and a concussion, I wanted to see the car and I was very upset. Quentin and I had an enormous fight, and I accused him of trying to kill me. And he was very angry at that, I guess understandably because he didn’t feel he had tried to kill me.”
The actual video of the accident is available below (note: there is no sound in the clip).
Uma Thurman says Quentin Tarantino forced her to drive a car she couldn't properly operate during the filming of Kill Bill, resulting in a crash that left her permanent injuries. pic.twitter.com/Ae7tuEI3Tt
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Thurman’s then-husband Ethan Hawke wasn’t too happy about the incident either. The actor is interviewed in the NYT article stating “I approached Quentin in very serious terms and told him that he had let Uma down as a director and as a friend,” telling QT “Hey, man, she is a great actress, not a stunt driver, and you know that.” Hawke did add that Tarantino “was very upset with himself and asked for my forgiveness.”
Worse, Tarantino had acted sadistically towards her on the set of the “Kill Bill” movies, Thurman alleged, “spitting in her face” in the scene where Michael Madsen was shown doing so in the movie and “choking her with a chain” in the scene where the teenage assassin Gogo did so.
It’s such a brutal story, so here are some more shocking story elements told from the Times without editorial, but there’s perhaps nothing as ruinous then when she said Weinstein and Tarantino “turned on me after the accident. I went from being a creative contributor and performer to being like a broken tool.”
Two weeks after the crash, after trying to see the car and footage of the incident, she had her lawyer send a letter to Miramax, summarizing the event and reserving the right to sue. Miramax offered to show her the footage if she signed a document “releasing them of any consequences of my future pain and suffering,” she says. She didn’t.
Thurman was in “a terrible fight for years” with Tarantino, she says. “We had to then go through promoting the movies. It was all very thin ice. We had a fateful fight at Soho House in New York in 2004 and we were shouting at each other because he wouldn’t let me see the footage and he told me that was what they had all decided.”
“Now, many years later, inspired by the #MeToo movement, Thurman says she has come to terms with her “dehumanization to the point of death” during that car stunt mishap, so much so that she “ramped up the pressure to cajole the crash footage out of Tarantino.”
“’Quentin finally atoned by giving it to me after 15 years, right?’ she says. ‘Not that it matters now, with my permanently damaged neck and my screwed-up knees.’”
Though it should debilitate him at least, this story probably won’t kill Tarantino’s career; he’s likely too powerful to be derailed. His actions were outrageous and inexcusable and the online blowback is already tremendously explosive with many wondering whether Sony should pull the plug on his next movie set in the 1960s and actually featuring Roman Polanski—himself an admitted rapist of a minor who fled the United States in the 1970s— as a significant character.
At the very least, this is no doubt a shot to the head to the filmmaker’s reputation. The scorching New York Times interview is a must-read and its an excoriating condemnation of Weinstein and Tarantino. Thurman unloads and clearly she’s been carrying the burden of these demons for years. It’s a tough read to be honest.
Of course, Harvey Weinstein being Harvey Weinstein, the producer nearly immediately released a photo of he and Thurman together yesterday in some strange bid to discredit her. While he did admit he made “an awkward pass” at her, in a statement, Weinstein’s lawyers denied all her claims, describing them as “untrue.”