Uma Thurman has accused Harvey Weinstein of a sexual “attack” in a London hotel encounter sometime after the release of Quentin Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction,” the Weinstein-backed hit that made her a star.
“He pushed me down. He tried to shove himself on me. He tried to expose himself. He did all kinds of unpleasant things,” she told the New York Times’ Maureen Dowd in a story published Saturday about an encounter in the mogul’s room at London’s Savoy Hotel.
“But he didn’t actually put his back into it and force me. You’re like an animal wriggling away, like a lizard,” she said.
Thurman said that she confronted Weinstein the following day, telling him, “If you do what you did to me to other people you will lose your career, your reputation and your family, I promise you.”
Weinstein then threatened to derail her career, according to Ilona Herman, a makeup artist and friend of Thurman’s who waited in the lobby for the actress during the meeting.
“I knew him pretty well before he attacked me,” she told the Times. “He used to spend hours talking to me about material and complimenting my mind and validating me. It possibly made me overlook warning signs. … He had a chokehold on the type of films and directors that were right for me.”
Thurman, who has hinted at her anger toward Weinstein since the first wave of public accusations dismantled his company and his career last fall, decided to come forward partly out of a sense of guilt.
“The complicated feeling I have about Harvey is how bad I feel about all the women that were attacked after I was,” she told Dowd. “I stand as both a person who was subjected to it and a person who was then also part of the cloud cover, so that’s a super weird split to have.”
The actress also dropped her longtime agency, CAA, last November and told the Times it was due to its connections to Weinstein’s predatory behavior. In December, the agency issued an apology “to any person the agency let down for not meeting the high expectations we place on ourselves, as individuals and as a company.”
“I am one of the reasons that a young girl would walk into his room alone, the way I did. Quentin used Harvey as the executive producer of ‘Kill Bill,’ a movie that symbolizes female empowerment,” she said. “And all these lambs walked into slaughter because they were convinced nobody rises to such a position who would do something illegal to you, but they do.”
“Mr. Weinstein acknowledges making a pass at Ms. Thurman in England after misreading her signals,” a rep for Weinstein told the Times. “He immediately apologized.”
Weinstein’s attorney Ben Brafman issued a follow-up statement on Saturday saying, “Harvey is stunned and saddened by what he claims to be false accusations by Uma Thurman, someone he has worked closely with for more than two decades.”
“Why Ms Thurman would wait 25 years to publicly discuss this incident and why according to Weinstein, she would embellish what really happened to include false accusations of attempted physical assault is a mystery to Weinstein and his attorneys,” the statement continued. “Ms Thurman’s statements to the Times are being carefully examined and investigated before deciding whether any legal action against her would be appropriate.”
Thurman, who is currently starring in Beau Willimon’s Broadway play “A Parisian Woman,” also said she was sexually assaulted at age 16 by an unnamed actor nearly 20 years older.
“I was ultimately compliant,” she said of that earlier encounter. “I tried to say no, I cried, I did everything I could do. He told me the door was locked but I never ran over and tried the knob.”