Actress Ashley Judd has revealed she was sexually harassed by a top Hollywood studio executive.
The 47-year-old “Divergent” star said she was repeatedly summoned to hotel rooms while filming “Kiss the Girls” in the late 90s by the unnamed head of a rival studio and asked to watch him shower, reported Daily Mirror.
“He was very stealth and expert about it. He groomed me, which is a technical term – ‘Oh, come meet at the hotel for something to eat.’ It went on in these stages. It was so disgusting.
“He physically lured me by saying, ‘Oh, help me pick out what I’m going to wear.’ There was a lot that happened between the point of entry and the bargaining. When I kept saying no to everything, there was a huge asymmetry of power and control in that room.”
Judd said years later she found out that a number of other actresses had also experienced the same thing.
“Only when we were sitting around talking about it did we realise our experiences were identical. There was a mutual strengthening and fortification of our resolve.
“The ultimate thing when I was weaseling out of everything else was, ‘Will you watch me take a shower?’ And all the other women, sitting around this table with me, said, ‘Oh my god – that’s what he said to me too.’”
The actress, who has never been offered a movie by the executive’s studio, went on to say she beat herself up for a while following the incident, before realising there was something “incredibly wrong and illegal about it”.
