In the late '90s Ashley Judd starred in several crime thrillers, like Kiss the Girls and Double Jeopardy, quickly becoming everyone's favorite Hollywood Badass. Today, she revealed to Variety for the first time ever that her time between those films was less empowering than represented on the screen. For the magazine's Power of Women issue, Judd opened up about an upsetting experience: While filming Kiss the Girls (a Paramount Pictures film), the actress—then in her early 30s—was sexually harassed by a studio mogul from a rival company. She said that the man (left unnamed) kept baiting her to "talk about movies," eventually bringing her back to his hotel room and asking her, "Will you watch me take a shower?" Ewwww...
Judd says that even though she kept pushing back by saying "No," she didn't press charges, instead keeping the incident to herself and internalizing the shame. She reflects, nearly two decades later:
"I beat myself up for a while. This is another part of the process. We internalize the shame. It really belongs to the person who is the aggressor. And so later, when I was able to see what happened, I thought: Oh god, that’s wrong. That’s sexual harassment. That’s illegal. I was really hard on myself because I didn’t get out of it by saying, 'OK motherfucker, I’m calling the police.'"
Before you start to question why she didn't get herself out of the situation right away: 1) you weren't there, and 2) it's difficult to take control in that kind of power dynamic. Judd is acutely aware of this:
"I have a feeling if this is online and people have the opportunity to post comments, a lot of the people will say, 'Why didn’t you leave the room?' which is victim-blaming. When I kept saying no to everything, there was a huge asymmetry of power and control in that room."
While sharing the experience with other actors, Judd says that they realized that the same man pulled the same move on all of them:
"I was with a bunch of other actors, and it was critical that it was actors: The exact same thing had happened to them by the exact same mogul. Only when we were sitting around talking about it did we realize our experiences were identical. There was a mutual strengthening and fortification of our resolve. One of the things that comes to mind for me: there was a really big feature that was done on this person in a national magazine, and there were all these allegations that they controlled the interview and had people listening in. And I thought, 'If someone had come and talked to me, I don’t care. I will absolutely share that experience.' Part of the strategy that keeps girls and women constrained in their professional experiences is retaliation and ridicule."
Ugh, ban this man. Read the rest of her statement here.
