Megan Fox responds to outrage over 'sexualised' auditions for Michael Bay
Megan Fox has responded to disquiet over reports of an audition she had with Michael Bay as a teenager, saying: “I was never assaulted or preyed upon.”
Fox posted a lengthy statement on social media after footage re-emerged of her talking on Jimmy Kimmel Live in 2009 about an incident from her early career. Fox said that when she was 15 she was filmed by Bay wearing a bikini and dancing under a waterfall as a test for a scene in which Fox appears as an extra in a club scene in the 2003 film Bad Boys II.
Much criticism has been directed at Bay for his apparent sexualisation of Fox, including her brief appearance in Bad Boys II, led by the original footage poster “liz w” commenting: “Teen girls being preyed on by older men has never been taken seriously and still isn’t.” A report in the Observer in 2009 that Fox was asked to wash Bay’s car as part of her audition for Transformers also sparked further outrage over her treatment by Bay.
Fox wrote however: “While I greatly appreciate the outpouring of support, I do feel I need to clarify some of the details.”
She refuted suggestions that her Transformers audition was exploitative, saying she was “19 or 20” and that she was “at no point undressed or anything similar”. She added: “I was not underaged at the time and I was not made to ‘wash’ or work on someone’s [car] in a way that was extraneous to the script.”
“When it comes to my direct experiences with Michael [Bay], and Steven [Spielberg] for that matter, I was never assaulted or preyed upon in what I felt was a sexual manner.”
Fox was replaced in the Transformers franchise after completing the first two films when she criticised Bay in a magazine interview, saying “he’s a nightmare to work for” and “he wants to be like Hitler on his sets”. Bay claimed that the series’ executive producer Spielberg insisted she should be dismissed. Their relationship appeared to be repaired, however, when Bay cast her in the 2014 remake of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
Fox added: “These specific instances were inconsequential in a long and arduous journey along which I have endured some genuinely harrowing experiences in a ruthlessly misogynistic industry. There are many names that deserve to be going viral in cancel culture right now but they are safely stored in the fragmented recesses of my heart.”