Reese Witherspoon has alleged she was assaulted by a director as a 16-year-old.
The Oscar-winning actress said she has been harassed and sexually assaulted throughout her career as she became the latest star to speak out in the wake of allegations against Harvey Weinstein.
Speaking as she introduced her Big Little Lies co-star Laura Dern at ELLE’s Women in Los Angeles event on Monday night, Witherspoon said: “This has been a really hard week for women in Hollywood, for women all over the world, for men in a lot of situations and a lot of industries that are forced to remember and relive a lot of ugly truths.”
Reese Witherspoon with Ava Phillippe at the ELLE Women in Hollywood Awards (Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP)
She said she felt “true disgust” at the director who assaulted her when she was 16 as well as anger at the agents and producers “who made me feel that silence was a condition of my employment”.
“And I wish I could tell you that that was an isolated incident in my career, but sadly it wasn’t,” she added.
“I’ve had multiple experiences of harassment and sexual assault, and I don’t speak about them very often, but after hearing all the stories these past few days and hearing these brave women speak up tonight, the things that we’re kind of told to sweep under the rug and not talk about, it’s made me want to speak up and speak up loudly, because I felt less alone this week than I’ve ever felt in my entire career.”
She called on people in Hollywood to ask questions such as “who are your top female executives?” when negotiating with companies.
“Asking questions like that, I found, it seems so obvious, but people don’t ask those questions.
“If we can raise consciousness and really help create change, that’s what’s going to change this industry and change society. So I’m so sad that I have to talk about these issues, but it would be, I would be, remiss not to.”
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereLast Updated:
Report this comment Cancel