For the last couple of months, women have been bravely coming forward and denouncing abuse that has happened to them through the hands of very powerful men. Harvey Weinstein has been in the eye of the hurricane and his latest victim that is speaking out is Salma Hayek.
The actress chose to tell her story in the New York Times. “HARVEY WEINSTEIN WAS a passionate cinephile, a risk taker, a patron of talent in film, a loving father, and a monster,” she says. Hayek says that people knew of the abuse and she was even asked to come forward with her story and that for years she had been cordial to a man who hurt her so deeply.
“When so many women came forward to describe what Harvey had done to them, I had to confront my cowardice and humbly accept that my story, as important as it was to me, was nothing but a drop in an ocean of sorrow and confusion. I felt that by now nobody would care about my pain — maybe this was an effect of the many times I was told, especially by Harvey, that I was nobody.”
It wasn’t until she started hearing about the millions of girls and women like her who’ve had the courage to speak out against these men. “I am inspired by those who had the courage to speak out, especially in a society that elected a president who has been accused of sexual harassment and assault by more than a dozen women and whom we have all heard make a statement about how a man in power can do anything he wants to women.”
She confesses that she wanted to be part of that world, to produce the Frida Kahlo movie, and if it wasn’t for Quentin Tarantino and George Clooney, she could have been raped.
Hayek took on Harvey and rejected him every time he would try to approach her, she said no to visiting her late at night at her hotel room, to taking a shower to him, to a massage, to letting him give her oral sex and with every refusal he became more aggressive and even threatened to take the movie away from her.
“When he was finally convinced that I was not going to earn the movie the way he had expected, he told me he had offered my role and my script with my years of research to another actress. In his eyes, I was not an artist. I wasn’t even a person. I was a thing: not a nobody, but a body.”
At that point she had to resort to using lawyers and even though she didn’t pursue a sexual harassment case, once they started filming, the sexual harassment stopped, but the rage escalated from Harvey.
“We paid the price for standing up to him nearly every day of shooting. Once, in an interview, he said Julie and I were the biggest ball busters he had ever encountered, which we took as a compliment.”
“Halfway through shooting, Harvey turned up on set and complained about Frida’s ‘unibrow.’ He insisted that I eliminate the limp and berated my performance. Then he asked everyone in the room to step out except for me. He told me that the only thing I had going for me was my sex appeal and that there was none of that in this movie. So he told me he was going to shut down the film because no one would want to see me in that role.”
Read the entire article here.