Minnie Driver & Alyssa Milano Call Out Matt Damon For Tone Deaf Commentary On Sexual Assault

Minnie Driver and Alyssa Milano are calling out Matt Damon on Twitter after the actor made a tone deaf comment about sexual harassment and assault.

MATT DAMON CRITICIZED FOR TONE DEAD SEXUAL ASSAULT COMMENTARY

Damon appeared on ABC News and spoke with Peter Travers about the current state of Hollywood and the cloud of sexual misconduct allegations surrounding it. He stated that the men being accused are being put into “one big bucket” and added that there is a “spectrum of behavior.”

“You know, there’s a difference between, you know, patting someone on the butt and rape or child molestation, right?” he said in the interview. “Both of those behaviors need to be confronted and eradicated without question, but they shouldn’t be conflated, right?”

Driver was upset by Damon’s comments, and took to Twitter to air her distaste. “God God, SERIOUSLY? Gosh it’s so *interesting how men with all these opinions about women’s differentiation between sexual misconduct, assault and rape reveal themselves to be utterly tone deaf and as a result, systemically part of the problem (*profoundly unsurprising),” she tweeted.

An enormous outpouring of support came to Driver following her post. In an interview with The Guardian, the actress said she felt she had to say something. “I’ve realized that most men, good men, the men that I love, there is a cut-off in their ability to understand. They simply cannot understand what abuse is like on a daily level,” she said. “I honestly think that until we get on the same page, you can’t tell a woman about their abuse. A man cannot do that. No one can. It is so individual and so personal, it’s galling when a powerful man steps up and starts dictating the terms, whether he intends it or not.”

Milano jumped to Driver’s aid with a Twitter thread of her own. In it, she made an analogy to cancer, saying there are stages of the disease, “some more treatable than others, but it’s still cancer.” She explained that women are “outraged” because of how normalized sexual harassment has become. “Sexual harassment, misconduct, assault and violence is a systemic disease,” she said. “The tumor is being cut out right now with no anesthesia. Please send flowers #MeToo.”

Damon has been wrapped up in the allegations, though none have been levied against him. He has worked a lot with Harvey Weinstein in the past, as well as childhood friend and co-star Ben Affleck, who have both been accused of misconduct. Damon also defended Louis C.K. after he admitted to masturbating in front of women without their permission. “I don’t imagine he’s going to do those things again,” Damon said. “I imagine the price that he’s paid at this point is so beyond anything that he… I just mean I think that we have to kind of start delineating between what these behaviors are. When he came out and said, ‘I did this, I did these things, these women are all telling the truth.’ I just remember thinking, well, that’s the sign of somebody who – well, we can work with that.”

“I don’t understand why Matt would defend Louis CK,” Driver said in response. “It seems to me that he thinks that because he didn’t rape somebody – so far as we know – that what he did do wasn’t as bad.”

Damon was initially speaking to Travers to promote his new film Downsizing.