Olivia Munn says at the height of the #MeToo movement, she had a “traumatic” experience on a movie set that prompted the studio to offer a seven-figure settlement – which she turned down because she didn’t want to sign a nondisclosure agreement.
The actress told her story on the Tuesday episode of Monica Lewinsky’s podcast “Reclaiming,” as People first reported Wednesday. Munn did not name the movie, studio, nor any individuals involved, but said she reported the alleged incident around the time 2017 reports of Harvey Weinstein’s abhorrent behavior with women were catalyzing the wider #MeToo movement.
“I had to file complaints with the studio, and there’s a lot of other little things that go along with it, but it got to this place where I was offered a lot of money,” Munn said. “Seven figures to accept, I guess, their apology and them taking acknowledgement of it. But it came along with an NDA.”
Munn didn’t like the idea of a nondisclosure agreement, but not because she was planning to ever speak publicly about the incident – rather, she didn’t like the optics of trading her right to speak for money, and was even concerned the studio might leak her agreement to discredit her.
“This was like the reckoning, the Harvey Weinstein reckoning that began it all,” she said. “This was that time period, and this was when people were targeting anyone who signed an NDA saying, ‘Oh, you only did it for the money.’ So I was afraid that my voice and speaking up would just reverse any kind of validity to my voice.”
Munn took the matter as far as a meeting with studio lawyers, but at one point she said one of them used a “disrespectful” tone to emphasize that she was being offered a lot of money. She said her anger and frustration caused her to turn down the offer on the spot.
“I did not think about negotiating,” she said. “I did not think about anything besides how disrespectful that was.”
Listen to the entire exchange on the “Reclaiming” podcast or in the video above.
