“Game of Thrones” star Lena Headey added her voice to the growing number of women who have come forward with stories of Harvey Weinstein involving sexual harassment.
Headey said she felt “completely powerless” after an instance that took place at the Venice Film Festival.
“At one point Harvey asked me to take a walk down to the water, I walked down with him and he stopped and made some suggestive comment, a gesture, I just laughed it off, I was genuinely shocked,” she recalled on Twitter. “I remember thinking, it’s got to be a joke, I said something like.. ‘Oh come on mate?!?? It’d be like kissing my dad!! Let’s go get a drink, get back to the others.’ I was never in any other Miramax film.”
Another encounter with Weinstein took place years later in Los Angeles. The two met for what Headey thought would be a meeting to discuss potential work, she said, adding “I had always carried the thought that he’d never try anything with me again, not after I’d laughed and said never in a million years. I believed that he respected my boundary.”
“He asked me a few questions about the state of my love life,” she said. “I shifted the conversation back to something less personal. Then he went to the loo. He came back and said, ‘Let’s go up to the room, I want to give you a script.’ We walked to the lift and the energy shifted, my whole body went into high alert, the lift was going up and I said to Harvey, ‘I’m not interested in anything other than work, please don’t think I got in here with you for any other reason, nothing is going to happen.’ I don’t know what possessed me to speak out at that moment, only that I had such a strong sense of don’t come near me.”
After, she said Weinstein furiously marched her out of the hotel and told her not to tell anyone about their exchange. “I felt completely powerless,” she wrote, concluding, “I got into my car and I cried.”
Read Headey’s full statement below:
