Salma Hayek describes Harvey Weinstein’s horrific abuse

Salma Hayek has vividly described Harvey Weinstein’s relentless abuse, including threatening to kill her when she rejected him.

In one of the most vivid accounts yet of Harvey Weinstein’s alleged abuse and harassment, Hollywood star Salma Hayek has claimed the disgraced movie mogul pursued her relentlessly and threatened to kill her when she turned down his advances.

“For years, he was my monster,” Hayek wrote in an op-ed for The New York Times. “I don’t think he hated anything more than the word ‘no’.”

Hayek wrote that friends, including Ashley Judd, had urged her to speak publicly about the abuse but she had “brainwashed myself into thinking that it was over and that I had survived.”

In the powerful article, she described how Weinstein turned the production of her Frida Kahlo biopic Frida into a nightmare, even forcing her to add a lesbian scene to the script after she had turned down his demand that she “get naked with another woman.”

It was during the filming of Frida that Hayek realised just how much of a sexual predator Weinstein was.

“I was so excited to work with him and that company,” she writes. “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.

“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.

No, no, no, no, no …”

Hayek, who regularly starred in films released by Weinstein’s Miramax in the 1990s, credited Weinstein with helping her start her career. But she said that the movie mogul would turn up at her door “at all hours of the night, hotel after hotel, location after location.”

When Hayek brought “Frida,” which she was producing, to Miramax to distribute, Weinstein made outrageous demands as payback, she writes. Hayek said he insisted on rewrites, more financing and, a nude sex scene with another woman. He even threaten to kill her, she said.

“I will kill you, don’t think I can’t,” he claims he told her.

In order to finish what was a labour of love for Hayek, she agreed. But she said she had a nervous breakdown while shooting the scene. “My body wouldn’t stop crying and convulsing,” wrote Hayek.

“It was not because I would be naked with another woman,” she wrote. “It was because I would be naked with her for Harvey Weinstein.”

Throughout the film production, Weinstein belittled her talent both in public and in private.

“He told me that the only thing I had going for me was my sex appeal and that there was none of that in this movie,” she writes. “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. But . the only thing he noticed was that I was not sexy in the movie. He made me doubt if I was any good as an actress.”

Even after acquiescing to his demands throughout the film’s production, Hayek was shattered when Weinstein refused to give the movie a theatrical release. He eventually relented after pressure from director Julie Taymor and Hayek. It went on to gross $56.3 million worldwide and land six Oscar nominations, winning two.

Dozens of women have accused Weinstein of sexual harassment, and numerous women have said he raped them. Weinstein, who is currently under investigation for sexual assault in four cities, has denied all allegations of nonconsensual sex.

“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? Why do we have to fight tooth and nail to maintain our dignity?” Hayak wrote. “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.”

With AP