French actress Léa Seydoux said she was forced to defend herself from Harvey Weinstein when the disgraced producer lunged at her on a sofa and tried to kiss her inside his hotel room.
“We were talking on the sofa when he suddenly jumped on me and tried to kiss me,” she wrote in a first-person piece for the Guardian. “I had to defend myself. He’s big and fat, so I had to be forceful to resist him. I left his room, thoroughly disgusted.”
Seydoux said she met Weinstein for the first time at a fashion show, where he insisted she join him for drinks that night.
They met in the lobby of his hotel with his female assistant — but it quickly became clear he wasn’t actually interested in discussing a potential film role, the actress said.
“All throughout the evening, he flirted and stared at me as if I was a piece of meat,” she explained. “He acted as if he were considering me for a role. But I knew that was bulls–t.”
Eventually he asked her to have a drink in his hotel room, and Seydoux felt pressure to accept given his influence, she said.
“It was hard to say no because he’s so powerful. All the girls are scared of him,” Seydoux said. “Soon, his assistant left and it was just the two of us. That’s the moment where he started losing control.”
After the alleged assault, the “Blue is the Warmest Color” actress said she repeatedly witnessed Weinstein make sexual advances towards other young women.
But he’s hardly the only man in the film industry abusing his power, she said.
“The first time a director made an inappropriate comment to me, I was in my mid 20s. He was a director I really liked and respected. We were alone and he said to me: ‘I wish I could have sex with you, I wish I could f–k you,'” Seydoux wrote.
“Another director I worked with would film very long sex scenes that lasted days. He kept watching us, replaying the scenes over and over again in a kind of stupor. It was very gross.
“Yet another director tried to kiss me. Like Weinstein, I had to physically push him away, too,” she added.