Working with Harvey Weinstein on the Oscar-winning film Frida was a living hell for Salma Hayek, the actress said in a candid and revealing letter published by The New York Times. “Harvey Weinstein was a passionate cinephile, a risk taker, a patron of talent in film, a loving father and a monster. For years, he was my monster,” she started the piece. She revealed that she didn’t step forward with her sexual harassment claims about Weinstein when the bevy of other famous women came out against him because she had been traumatized, and felt that her story would be “nothing but a drop in an ocean of sorrow and confusion.” But now, she felt she must tell the world what she reportedly experienced.
Salma describes utter terror and degradation when she started working with Harvey, who allegedly used sexual harassment and anger to hinder her career. It started when she approached him with her passion project, a biopic about the legendary Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. “The deal we made initially was that Harvey would pay for the rights of work I had already developed,” Salma wrote. “As an actress, I would be paid the minimum Screen Actors Guild scale plus 10 percent. As a producer, I would receive a credit that would not yet be defined, but no payment, which was not that rare for a female producer in the ’90s. He also demanded a signed deal for me to do several other films with Miramax, which I thought would cement my status as a leading lady.
“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 … And with every refusal came Harvey’s Machiavellian rage.”
She noted that his alleged behavior could have escalated to assault had it not been for some of her powerful friends, including Quentin Tarantino, George Clooney, and Robert Rodriguez, with whom she had done the film From Dusk Til Dawn. “I knew him a little bit through my relationship with the director Robert Rodriguez and the producer Elizabeth Avellan, who was then his wife, with whom I had done several films and who had taken me under their wing,” Salma wrote. All I knew of Harvey at the time was that he had a remarkable intellect, he was a loyal friend and a family man. Knowing what I know now, I wonder if it wasn’t my friendship with them — and Quentin Tarantino and George Clooney — that saved me from being raped.”
The road to getting Salma’s movie, Frida, made was apparently torturous. She wrote that Harvey had a horrible temper, to the point that she feared him — and allegedly so did others around her. She claimed that Harvey “physically dragged” her out of the Venice Film Festival to go to a private party with him and some models. She alleges that she later found out the were allegedly prostitutes.
“The range of his persuasion tactics went from sweet-talking me to that one time when, in an attack of fury, he said the terrifying words, ‘I will kill you, don’t think I can’t’…In his eyes, I was not an artist. I wasn’t even a person. I was a thing: not a nobody, but a body.” Harvey allegedly, continuously tried to shut down production of Frida, a devastating blow to Salma. He allegedly insulted her talents as an actress and allegedly continued to harass her throughout the making of the film.
“Halfway through shooting, Harvey turned up on set and complained about Frida’s ‘unibrow.’ He insisted that I eliminate the limp and berated my performance. Then he asked everyone in the room to step out except for me,” she wrote. “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. So he told me he was going to shut down the film because no one would want to see me in that role.
“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…But this time, it was clear to me he would never let me finish this movie without him having his fantasy one way or another. There was no room for negotiation.” She said that while shooting the sex scene, she had a nervous breakdown and cried so hard that she vomited and had to take tranquilizers to calm down.
In the time since Frida, she’s maintained a cordial, but distant relationship with the producer. “I never showed Harvey how terrified I was of him. When I saw him socially, I’d smile and try to remember the good things about him, telling myself that I went to war and I won.”
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