Actress and country singer Jana Kramer has joined the chorus of women sharing their experiences with sexual harassment.
The “One Tree Hill” actress described having a manager make inappropriate advances on her early in her career in an interview with Yahoo Style on Friday.
“I had a man helping me in the very beginning when I was 19, and he was like, ‘OK, I’ve done this for you. What are you going to do for me?’” she said. “And I remember in that moment being like, ‘Oh, my God! I am going to have to sleep with this man in order to fulfill my dreams.’ I ended up just bawling, crying, and having a panic attack, and he left.”
She said the incident was almost enough for her to give up her career and move home, but a phone call with her mother convinced her to stay. “I’ll never forget that,” she said, “how easy it is for something like that to happen and for me to think ‘I can’t do this,’ and then they win.”
Kramer joins the women who have spoken out about harassment and assault as part of Alyssa Milano’s #MeToo campaign in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal, to “give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem.”
“With a big name like Harvey, women feel silenced and they are afraid to come out because they don’t want their careers affected,” she said. “Also you kind of just feel gross about it and ashamed about it, and you are like, ‘Was it me? Did I do something?’”