Salma Hayek has come forward with a detailed account of several unwanted interactions with Harvey Weinstein during the making of the Oscar-winning 2002 Miramax film “Frida.” And the story includes her saying “no” nearly constantly to the fallen Hollywood mogul’s sexual advances.
Hayek penned a New York Times op-ed piece that was published on Wednesday detailing her history with the disgraced movie executive and his unseemly demands of her. Hayek wrote the piece after she was “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.”
“I don’t think he hated anything more than the word ‘no,’” Hayek wrote of working with Weinstein. She writes that those instances involved: “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 finally gave into Weinstein’s demand that she agree to do a sex scene with another woman, so she could finish the film. “It was not because I would be naked with another woman,” she wrote of being disturbed the day of performing the scene for the film — for which she earned an Academy Award nomination. “It was because I would be naked with her for Harvey Weinstein. But I could not tell them then.”
“Many times I was told, especially by Harvey, that I was nobody,” wrote the 51-year-old actress. She also said Weinstein threatened to kill her. “‘I will kill you, don’t think I can’t,’” she recounted.
Numerous actresses, colleagues and former employees have come forward with sexual harassment and assault accusations against Weinstein in recent months, whose legal team asserts, “Any allegations of non-consensual sex are unequivocally denied.” The former executive has been fired from The Weinstein Company, the Motion Picture Academy and Producers Guild have expelled him, and new stories continue to roll in.