Thandie Newton was sexually abused on a movie set when she was 16-years-old.
The Westworld actress opened up about being ‘groomed’ on the set of Flirting.
Speaking to the Sunday Times, she explained: ‘It happened the night my father flew home. I was 16, and a virgin. I’d been psychologically groomed over weeks.
‘I didn’t fight him off, I was almost paralysed with fear. It was sexual abuse.’
The 47-year-old revealed another horrific incident happened to her during a movie audition.
A director had asked her to sit ‘with her legs apart’.
‘I’d been called back for a second audition,’ she began. ‘The director asked me to sit with my legs apart; the camera was positioned where it could see up my skirt.
‘He asked me to put my leg over the arm of the chair and think about the character I was supposed to be having the dialogue with and how it felt to be made love to by this person.
‘He was a director. I was still very young and thought it must be normal.’
Her story comes after disgraced movie mogul Harvey Weinstein was jailed for 23 years for third-degree rape and a first-degree criminal sexual act.
The jury of seven men and five women at Weinstein’s landmark #MeToo trial had found the producer guilty of two out of five charges, all of which he pleaded not guilty to.
Despite the relief, Thandie felt there are many others to blame for what happens in Hollywood.
She said: ‘He is just one person. This business preys on young people. I saw it everywhere. What I’m crying about now, it’s not about the sexual abuse I endured, it’s about the people who didn’t have the courage to protect me, who didn’t listen to me.
‘They are the people who need to be held to account. All those people around Weinstein … it’s the rape culture, the climate of silencing, that is what once destroyed me and what now fires me up.’
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