Salma Hayek Details Harvey Weinstein Harassment
by EG
How to Be a Latin Lover star Salma Hayek offered details this week of an allegedly systematic pattern of abuse by producer Harvey Weinstein during the production of a key movie in her career. Hayek alleges that Weinstein repeatedly used his power as a producer to try to get her to engage in sexual activity with him and others. Weinstein denies the claims.
Salma Hayek shared on Wednesday a harrowing backstory of her dealings with disgraced mogul Harvey Weinstein during the making of the acclaimed 2002 Miramax movie Frida.
In a New York Times opinion column, the actress gave a detailed account of her history with Weinstein, his insistent and allegedly inappropriate demands and being "approached by reporters, through different sources, including my dear friend Ashley Judd, to speak about an episode in my life that, although painful, I thought I had made peace with."
Those demands included: "No to opening the door to him at all hours of the night, hotel after hotel, location after location, where he would show up unexpectedly, including one location where I was doing a movie he wasn’t even involved with," Hayek wrote. "No to me taking a shower with him. No to letting him watch me take a shower. No to letting him give me a massage. No to letting a naked friend of his give me a massage. No to letting him give me oral sex. No to my getting naked with another woman."
The actress wrote that she eventually gave in to an alleged demand by Weinstein that, "He would let me finish the film if I agreed to do a sex scene with another woman." She wrote of being troubled the day of performing the scene: "It was not because I would be naked with another woman. It was because I would be naked with her for Harvey Weinstein. But I could not tell them then."
Frida, a biopic of the Mexican painter and artist Frida Kahlo, was released wide in November 2002. The Julie Taymor-directed film, which featured a cast that included Ashley Judd, Antonio Banderas, Diego Luna, Alfred Molina and Edward Norton, went on to be nominated for six awards at the 75th Academy Awards, claiming two honors, for makeup and music. Hayek was nominated for actress in a leading role but lost to Nicole Kidman in The Hours. The film ultimately grossed $56 million worldwide.
Hayek's recollection of her history with Weinstein follows reports in The New York Times and The New Yorker in early October that detailed a pattern of sexual harassment and assault taking place over the course of decades. Hayek's co-star Judd went on the record to the Times for an Oct. 5 bombshell story where she claimed to have been harassed by Weinstein.
"I said no, a lot of ways, a lot of times, and he always came back at me with some new ask," Judd told the Times of Weinstein. "It was all this bargaining, this coercive bargaining." In the ensuing months, dozens of women have shared their accounts in numerous news outlets of being assaulted or harassed by Weinstein, who was ousted from the company he co-founded, The Weinstein Co., on Oct. 8.
Later on Wednesday, a spokesperson for Weinstein sent THR a statement rebutting some of Hayek's claims, in particular, that the "movie opened in multiple theaters and was supported by a huge advertising campaign and an enormous Academy Awards budget." Weinstein also "does not recall pressuring Salma to do a gratuitous sex scene with a female costar and he was not there for the filming."
Get the rest of the story at The Hollywood Reporter.
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