Salma Hayek has opened up about her traumatic experiences working with Harvey Weinstein on her break out English-speaking film, Frida.
The actress says she was often cajoled by friends, including Ashley Judd, to tell the world but she had “brainwashed” herself “into thinking that it was over” and that she “survived”.
“I was so excited to work with him and that company. In my naïveté, I thought my dream had come true. He had validated the last 14 years of my life. He had taken a chance on me – a nobody. He had said yes,” Hayek wrote in The New York Times opinion piece. “Little did I know it would become my turn to say no.
“No to opening the door to him at all hours of the night, hotel after hotel, location after location, where he would show up unexpectedly, including one location where I was doing a movie he wasn’t even involved with.
“No to me taking a shower with him. No to letting him watch me take a shower. No to letting him give me a massage.
“No to letting a naked friend of his give me a massage. No to letting him give me oral sex. No to my getting naked with another woman.”
Her constant rejection didn’t sit well with the mogul though, and he dragged her from the opening gala of the Venice Film Festival to honour her film to attend a party with “high-priced prostitutes”.
She also claimed he threatened her: “I will kill you, don’t think I can’t.”
“Knowing what I know now, I wonder if it wasn’t my friendship with them – and Quentin Tarantino and George Clooney – that saved me from being raped,” Hayek wrote.
Hayek also claimed the famous lesbian scene in the film was forced by Weinstein to see “his fantasy” played out.
“I arrived on the set the day we were to shoot the scene that I believed would save the movie. And for the first and last time in my career, I had a nervous breakdown: My body began to shake uncontrollably, my breath was short and I began to cry and cry, unable to stop, as if I were throwing up tears,” Hayek said.
“My mind understood that I had to do it, but my body wouldn’t stop crying and convulsing. At that point, I started throwing up while a set frozen still waited to shoot. I had to take a tranquilizer, which eventually stopped the crying but made the vomiting worse. As you can imagine, this was not sexy, but it was the only way I could get through the scene.”
“It was soul-crushing because, I confess, lost in the fog of a sort of Stockholm syndrome, I wanted him to see me as an artist,” she admitted.
However, the star’s revelation has been ridiculed by some.
Earlier this year, actress Jessica Williams claimed Hayek downplayed her experiences as a black woman in Hollywood and told her not to be “angry”.
