Hollywood sex scandal

FORMER ER actor Julianna Margulies claims Steven Seagal and Harvey Weinstein tried to lure her to hotel rooms.

“When I was 23, a casting director, a woman, said, ‘Steven Seagal wants to go over the scene with you in his hotel room at 10 o’clock at night’. I got to the hotel at 10.40, and she wasn’t there. And he was. Alone. And he made sure that I saw his gun, which I had never seen a gun in real life. And I got out of there unscathed.

“I never was raped and I never was harmed, and I don’t know how I got out of that hotel room … I sort of screamed my way out,” she told Jenny Hutt’s SiriusXM show Just Jenny.

The New York Post reports that she added: “It always starts with, ‘I’m a healer, I want to massage you’.”

Katherine Heigl has previously talked about Seagal’s sleazy behaviour when she starred alongside him as a 16year-old in Under Siege 2: Dark Territory. Even though she says he did not make a move on her she does share a story of a conversation they had on set: “My favourite was at the last day of shooting, and again, I had just turned 16 on this movie. And he said, ‘You know Katie, I got girlfriends your age.’ And I said, ‘Isn’t that illegal?’ And he said, ‘They don’t seem to mind.’ And I said, ‘Mum!’ I’m not making that up,” she told Jimmy Kimmel. Because of her experience with Seagal, Margulies later refused to meet Weinstein in his hotel room unless the female assistant came up with her.

It was 1996 and Margulies was in her third season of ER.

The movie was being touted as Oscar bait and was likely to get her a Screen Actor’s Guild card, she said, and she was told that it was just down to her and another female actor.

“He opened the door, in a bathrobe. I could see that there were candles lit in the room, and there was a dinner for two. And I saw him stare at her, daggers,” she said.

“And so, I turned to see what she had done to deserve that, and I caught her in a shrug – like, ‘What could I do?’ And he looked at me, furious, and he took the door and he said, ‘Just wanted to say good audition.’ And he slammed the door … I didn’t get the part.”

Margulies is helping Erin Merryn pass Erin’s Law to protect children from sex abuse. Steven Seagal was contacted for comment. New York Post