Salma’s ‘deadly’ Harvey horror
HER PERVY ORDEAL
SALMA HAYEK’s dream movie became a nightmare — because of Harvey Weinstein’s relentless sexual harassment and emotional abuse.
The actress wrote in a searing column published in The New York Times on Wednesday that she, too, was tormented and threatened by the sick movie mogul as she pursued a film about the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo.
“I don’t think he hated anything more than the word ‘no,’ ” Hayek, 51, 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.”
When she refused, Weinstein would become enraged, she said.
“I will kill you, don’t think I can’t,” he allegedly said to her.
She wrote that she felt a “responsibility” to join more than 80 other women — including her friend Ashley Judd — who have shared stories about Weinstein’s alleged sexual harassment, abuse and rape.
“Knowing what I know now, I wonder if it wasn’t my friendship with . . . Quentin Tarantino and George Clooney — that saved me from being raped,” Hayek said.
A Weinstein spokeswoman said the mogul regards Hayek as “a first-class actress” and disputed much of her account.
“All of the sexual allegations as portrayed by Salma are not accurate,” the rep said.Hayek’s claims mirrored those of other women who detailed Weinstein’s tactics for keeping actresses in his debt.
“I’d heard whispers for years. I’m so sorry they were true,” actress Rose McGowan tweeted about Hayek’s story. McGowan said she was “blacklisted” in Hollywood after being raped by Weinstein.
As the head of Miramax, he was a gatekeeper of artistic integrity, success and risk-taking in Hollywood.
He would shower actresses with praise — and then lock them into contracts that required they continue working for him.
Hayek was subjected to Weinstein’s sick power plays as she made “Frida,” which was released in 2002.
“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,” Hayek said.
But Hayek’s refusal to submit to Weinstein’s sexual demands led to him threatening to pull “Frida,” which she called her “greatest ambition.”
“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 recalled.
“He offered me one option to continue. He would let me finish the film if I agreed to do a sex scene with another woman. And he demanded full-frontal nudity.”
Faced with the choice of doing the degrading scene or seeing the film that was five weeks into shooting being canceled, she gave into Weinstein.
The day she was to shoot the sex scene, she suffered a nervous breakdown, crying and vomiting uncontrollably.
“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.”
Despite Weinstein’s repeated attempts at sabotage, “Frida” received six Academy Award nominations, including Hayek for Best Actress.
“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,” Hayek wrote.