Mira Sorvino Claims A Casting Director Gagged Her With A Condom At 16-Years-Old

When Mighty Aphrodite star Mira Sorvino was just 16-years-old, she claimed she was sexually harassed by a casting director who used a condom to gag her. In a new interview with the Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s podcast, Sorvino detailed the nearly 35-year-old experience.

“In looking back over at my career, I realized that one of my very first auditions when I was 16, I was completely treated inappropriately by the casting director,” she said. “In order to scare me for this horror movie scene, he tied me to a chair, he bruised my arm, and I was 16 years old, and then he gagged me, and I was all game because I’m trying to be scared for the scene.”

The actress said she didn’t even know what he gagged her with was a condom.

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“And at the end, he takes the gag out of my mouth and he said, ‘Sorry for the prophylactic,’ so he had gagged me with a condom. I was too young to even know, thank God, what a condom tasted like. It was so inappropriate, and what the heck was a casting director doing with a condom in his pocket in an audition?”

Sorvino also mentioned a “big director” who has won Oscars and is known for his “social justice profile” who told her, “You know, as I look at you my mind can’t help but traveling from the artistic possibilities to the sexual.”

Previously, the actress had disclosed her experience with Harvey Weinstein, claiming he sexually harassed her. Director Peter Jackson later revealed that Weinstein told him not to cast her in The Lord of the Rings because she was difficult to work with.

 

Following sexual misconduct accusations against director Woody Allen, Sorvino wrote an open letter to his daughter Dylan Farrow for the Huffington Post. The actress had won an Oscar for her performance in the movie he made, though his daughter claimed he molested her as a child.

“I cannot begin to imagine how you have felt, all these years as you watched someone you called out as having hurt you as a child, a vulnerable little girl in his care, be lauded again and again, including by me and countless others in Hollywood who praised him and ignored you,” Sorvino wrote. “As a mother and a woman, this breaks my heart for you. I am so, so sorry!”

The actress has since continued to involve herself in the #MeToo movement as well as push for legislation against sexual harassment and abuse in California.

 

“Directors pressuring you to have relationships with them, people casting you saying if you have a sexual relationship with them they’ll give you the part,” she said. “That has happened to me several times… I’ve had friends who were told, ‘You’re going to absolutely have to have sex with all kinds of people to advance your career.’ ”