Olivia Munn sidestepped talking directly about the rape storyline on “The Newsroom” Sunday during an appeared on “Watch What Happens Live” Thursday night. Instead, she talked about the former writer of the show, Alena Smith, who voiced her opposition to the storyline on Twitter.
“My takeaway was that if the writer had something to say that was intelligent, that was going to be very supportive, she should have said that,” Munn told Andy Cohen. “All she did was talk about her experience on ‘The Newsroom.’ And so, if you’re going to open your mouth, you might as well say something actually intelligent.”
Smith tweeted about her experience in the writers’ room after the episode aired. “When I tried to argue, in the writers’ room, that we maybe skip the storyline where a rape victim gets interrogated by a random man, I ended up getting kicked out of the room and screamed at just like Hallie would have for a ‘bad tweet,’” she wrote in a series of tweets. “I found the experience quite boring. I wanted to fight with Aaron about the NSA, not gender. I didn’t like getting cast in his outdated role.”
In the episode, a news producer is tasked with interviewing an alleged rape victim who’d set up a website at her college for victims to anonymously share their stories of sexual assault. The producer’s criticism of the site was that it could easily lead to libelous statements about innocent men.
The series finale of “The Newsroom” airs Sunday at 9 p.m. ET on HBO. “Watch What Happens Live” airs Sunday through Thursday at 11 p.m. ET on Bravo.