Harvey Weinstein responds to Salma Hayek saying he forced her into lesbian sex scene
Hollywood actor details multiple allegations of sexual harassment by disgraced movie mogul
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Your support makes all the difference.Harvey Weinstein has denied forcing Hollywood actor Salma Hayek into a lesbian sex scene and pestering her for sexual favours.
Hayek made the allegations against the disgraced movie mogul in a column for the New York Times, in which she also accused him of threatening to kill her.
She said she had repeatedly refused his advances over a number of years, at “hotel after hotel, location after location, where he would show up unexpectedly”.
"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," she wrote.
She claimed every refusal was met with his “Machiavellian rage”, and in one “attack of fury” he allegedly said: "I will kill you, don't think I can't.”
"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," Hayek added.
Holly Baird, spokesperson for Weinstein, told USA Today: “All of the sexual allegations as portrayed by Salma are not accurate and others who witnessed the events have a different account of what transpired.”
Hayek also alleged Weinstein set her a series of “impossible tasks with a tight deadline” in order to get a movie biopic about Mexican artist Frida Kahlo made. When she met the tasks, filming began and the sexual harassment stopped, she said, but his demands continued.
"He would let me finish the film if I agreed to do a sex scene with another woman," she wrote. "And he demanded full-frontal nudity."
Hayek said she agreed to the scene, but on the day of filming her “body began to shake uncontrollably” and she could not stop crying.
“It was not because I would be naked with another woman. It was because I would be naked with her for Harvey Weinstein... I had to take a tranquilizer, which eventually stopped the crying but made the vomiting worse."
Weinstein’s statement said he "did not recall pressuring Salma to do a gratuitous sex scene with a female co-star and he was not there for the filming".
It continued: “However, that was part of the story, as Frida Kahlo was bisexual and the more significant sex scene in the movie was choreographed by Ms Hayek with Geoffrey Rush.”
Hayek’s claims of sexual harassment are just one of more than 40 accusations made by women against the film producer.
Weinstein has said that all sexual acts were consensual, while his legal team have branded many allegations “false”.