Salma Hayek: Harvey Weinstein 'Was My Monster'

HOLLYWOOD, CA — After years of battling monsters in private, actress Salma Hayek on Wednesday publicly identified her tormenter: Harvey Weinstein. “For years, he was my monster,” she wrote in a confessional New York Times op-ed that revealed the trauma she allegedly experienced, even though she was one of the biggest stars in film.

In adding her voice to the cacophony of Weinstein accusers, Hayek was nuanced. Her monster was her hero. He was a champion of artistic vision. A family man. A loyal friend. A man of wit and charm.

He just hated to hear the word "No."

Hayek had stayed silent while dozens of women came forward to tell their tales of rape, sexual assault and harassment at the hands of a Hollywood titan. She wrote that she was unable to explain to those closest to her why she had remained cordial with a man whose demeaning demands reduced her to tears and vomiting during the filming of the 2002 film “Frida,” her Academy Award-winning passion project about surrealist Mexican painter Frida Kahlo. But in telling her story, she shows how a powerful woman can be made to feel powerless in an industry that systematically devalues women.

“I think it is because we, as women, have been devalued artistically to an indecent state, to the point where the film industry stopped making an effort to find out what female audiences wanted to see and what stories we wanted to tell,” she wrote.

Eager to be taken seriously as a Latina actress and producer, Hayek fought to work with Weinstein on “Frida," in which she starred. In the film industry, she thought, Weinstein and Miramax were the pinnacle of artistic integrity.

She had no idea what was in store for her.

“I did not care about the money; I was so excited to work with him and that company. In my naïveté, I thought my dream had come true. [Weinstein] had validated the last 14 years of my life. He had taken a chance on me — a nobody. He had said yes. Little did I know it would become my turn to say no,” she wrote.

“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.

No, no, no, no, no …”

Hayek noted that she continued to say "no" to Weinstein while also trying to prove to him her talent as an artist. But on the set of “Frida,” he raged that the costume wasted her only asset: her sex-appeal. He threatened to shut down the movie unless she filmed a lesbian sex scene with full frontal nudity.

To save her dream, she did it.

“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: not only as a capable actress but also as somebody who could identify a compelling story and had the vision to tell it in an original way,” Hayek wrote.

On the morning she filmed the scene, Hayek broke down. “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,” she wrote. “Since those around me had no knowledge of my history of Harvey, they were very surprised by my struggle that morning. It was not because I would be naked with another woman. It was because I would be naked with her for Harvey Weinstein. But I could not tell them then. 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.”

Weinstein had turned the film for which she fought so hard into a vehicle for demeaning and harassing her. Hayek said she never let Weinstein see how much he hurt her. She had gone to war for her artistic vision and won.

“But why do so many of us, as female artists, have to go to war to tell our stories when we have so much to offer?” she asked. “Why do we have to fight tooth and nail to maintain our dignity?”

In an industry where only four percent of directors were female, women are devalued and preyed upon, she wrote.

“Until there is equality in our industry, with men and women having the same value in every aspect of it, our community will continue to be a fertile ground for predators.”

Also See: Harvey Weinstein Under Several Different Investigations

Photo: In this Nov. 15, 2017 file photo, actress Salma Hayek attends the HFPA and InStyle Celebrate the 2018 Golden Globe Awards Season in West Hollywood, Calif. In an op-ed, Hayek says that her refusals of Harvey Weinstein’s advances led to a nightmare experience making the 2002 Frida Kahlo biopic “Frida.” The New York Times on Wednesday, Dec. 13, published Hayek’s account in which she wrote that Weinstein was for years “my monster.” She said that Weinstein would turn up at her door “at all hours of the night, hotel after hotel, location after location.” (Photo by Richard Shotwell/Invision/AP, File)