"We don’t want to be looked at as weak for not being able to handle ourselves in a business run by men," Graham writes in a guest post for Variety.
Heather Graham is the latest Hollywood actress to come forward with her own experience dealing with Harvey Weinstein’s history of alleged s-xual harassment. The actress has written a guest column for Variety in which she details a meeting between Weinstein and herself where the former studio chief implied she would have to have s-x with him if she wanted to land the part in his production. Graham says the encounter occurred in the early 2000s and started when she visited Weinstein at his office.
“There was a pile of scripts sitting on his desk,” she writes. “‘I want to put you in one of my movies,’ he said and offered to let me choose which one I liked best. Later in the conversation, he mentioned that he had an agreement with his wife. He could sleep with whomever he wanted when he was out of town…There was no explicit mention that to star in one of those films I had to sleep with him, but the subtext was there.”
Graham was invited back a few weeks later for a follow-up interview with Weinstein at a hotel, and she tried to get a friend to accompany her given her “discomfort” over her initial meeting with Weinstein. When the friend couldn’t join her, Graham made up an excuse and ditched the meeting. Weinstein made up a lie and told Graham he was already at the hotel with her friend, but she “politely and apologetically reiterated that [she] could no longer come by.”
Unsurprisingly, Graham was never hired on the film or on any future Weinstein-produced feature. “It wasn’t until Ashley Judd heroically shared her story a few days ago that I felt ashamed,” Graham writes about the incident. “If I had spoken up a decade ago, would I have saved countless women from the same experience I had or worse?”
“My hope is that this moment starts a dialogue on redefining s-xual harassment in the workplace and empowers women to speak out when they feel uncomfortable in a situation,” Graham concludes. “While I still do feel guilty for not speaking up all those years ago, I’m glad for this moment of reckoning. To the countless other women who have experienced the gray areas: I believe you.”
