Hollywood star Salma Hayek has opened up further about her personal experience with disgraced producer Harvey Weinstein, revealing that the convicted sex offender used her ‘way of screaming’ to try and ‘repress’ her further.
The actor had previously gone public in 2017 with her accusations of his sexual harassment and threatening behaviour towards her while she was making the 2002 film Frida.
Touching on that shooting experience again, Hayek said: ‘Some people got raped. It makes you wonder if you had said something [back then], would it have been different?
‘How come I didn’t have the courage? But I dealt with it to the best of my ability at the time.’
The Oscar nominee explained that she was determined to get the movie made, in which she depicted Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, despite Weinstein’s harassment and interference.
Talking to InStyle, she continued: ‘For me Frida was a political statement, a social statement, a feminist statement.
‘It was my way of screaming. And Harvey used my way of screaming to repress me even more. So I could not let him win.’
Hayek’s claims against Weinstein from the project included attempts to coerce her into a sex scene with a woman, ask her to accept oral sex and take a shower with him – all of which she refused – and threatening ‘to kill her’.
Weinstein refuted her allegations when she made them in 2017, arguing he ‘did not recall’ them or else labelling them ‘inaccurate’.
Hayek was one of more than 80 women, including Ashley Judd, Rose McGowan, Asia Argento and Gwyneth Paltrow, who levelled accusations of sexual assault, harassment and rape at Weinstein, who is now serving 23 years behind bars.
The star has previously discussed how ‘painful’ it was to recover from her experience with Weinstein, crediting the involvement of so many other women in his downfall as ‘really healing’.
Elsewhere in the InStyle interview, Hayek credited her looks and physique to meditation, despite ‘how much mileage’ she has put on her body.
She clarified: ‘I don’t think I am some hot tamale, but I know that for my age, for the lifestyle that I lived, I’m not doing too badly. And I attribute all of this to meditation.’
The performer also revealed that she’s put pen to paper for a screenplay, despite having English as her second language and being ‘highly dyslexic’.
‘But this was too personal and too complicated for me to find a writer to do it, so I had to write it myself.’
Although keeping schtum on details for now, the film has been a passion project of Hayek’s for 17 years.
‘It’s a completely original script, and I emphasize ‘original.’ The problem is, it’s not a cheap movie,’ she admitted.
Read the full interview in InStyle magazine, on sale June 11.
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