Ashley Judd Opens Up About Sexual Harassment By Hollywood Studio Mogul

Ashley Judd recently penned an essay about the sexual harassment she faced from a Hollywood studio mogul when she was an ingenue in the business.

Ashley Judd Sexually Harassed

Judd, for the Variety Power of Women issue, shared her story of sexual harassment in the late 90s when she was filming Paramount’s Kiss the Girls. According to Judd, before the film was released, a bigwig from a rival studio attempted to trade sexual favors for not only work – but awards season glory.

“I was sexually harassed by one of our industry’s most famous, admired-slash-rivaled bosses,” Judd wrote. “I did not recognize at the time what was happening to me. It took years before I could evaluate that incident and realize that there was something incredibly wrong and illegal about it. And I think that’s what’s happening in Hollywood about female crew members, above-the-line and below-the-line talent, and pay disparity.”

Detailing the troubling encounter, Judd explains that though she was a self-declared feminist who’d studied women’s studies in college, it took her a considerable amount of time to recognize the net the unnamed mogul was casting for her.

“He groomed me, which is a technical term – Oh, come meet at the hotel for something to eat. Fine, I show up. Oh, he’s actually in his room. I’m like, Are you kidding me? I just worked all night. I’m just going to order cereal. It went on in these stages. It was so disgusting,” Judd revealed. “There was this whole process of bargaining — ‘Come do this, come do this, come do this.’ And I would say, ‘No, no, no.’ When I kept saying no to everything, there was a huge asymmetry of power and control in that room.”

“The ultimate thing when I was weaseling out of everything else was, ‘Will you watch me take a shower?’ Judd added. “At that moment, I told him something like, ‘When I win an Academy Award in one of your movies.’ He said, ‘No when you get nominated.’ I said, ‘No, no, when I win an Academy Award.'”

Judd does not think that her experience with sexual harassment was a one-off. Rather, she knows that other actresses have experienced the exact same thing with the exact same man, and she believes that many other women can attest to relatable encounters.

“This will be familiar to all the women to whom this has happened. I have a feeling we are a legion,” said Judd. “I was with a bunch of other actors, and it was critical that it was actors: The exact same thing had happened to them by the exact same mogul.”

Judd, who has never been employed by the studio for whom her harasser works, was hard on herself following the incident, believing she should have done more to get herself out of the situation and sooner. In retrospect, however, she realizes that the blame rests with the aggressor. And that, all things considered, “what I did was exceedingly clever and brilliant and self-preserving.”

“Healing comes in a lot of different ways,” Judd said in conclusion. “Some things require intensive, contained work. Some things could be resolved with a good run or punching bag or an interaction with the perpetrator, in which one is able to take one’s power back.”