Mira Sorvino refused Harvey Weinstein’s advances and alleges he sabotaged her career because of it.
“People say there are lists out there, that Harvey had a blacklist not only of people he was allegedly investigating but also of people who weren’t supposed to be hired sent to casting people and agencies,” Sorvino, 50, wrote in The Hollywood Reporter in a piece released Friday. “I know women with whom I’ve talked since who felt that their careers were derailed. I’ve heard stories about calls being made to their agencies saying that they were drug addicts when they didn’t touch drugs.”
In October, Sorvino told The New Yorker that Weinstein, 65, tried to give her a massage and “chased her around” a hotel room in 1995, then invited himself to her apartment a few weeks later, bypassing her doorman and refusing to leave until a friend she’d invited to pose as her boyfriend arrived.
Sorvino, who starred in “Mighty Aphrodite” under Weinstein’s Miramax production company, believes her relationship with director Quentin Tarantino helped shield her from both Weinstein’s advances and his wrath, but that once she and Tarantino split, her work dried up.
“I can’t say for certain if [my career] was impacted — there are other variables, like the fact that I had four children in eight years. That’s my choice; I wanted to have a big family,” she admitted. “But I won an Oscar with Miramax. To not continue and star in their movies much past that doesn’t make sense. I felt if I had accepted Harvey’s advances, I would have continued to make movies with them, and they were the people winning the Oscars for that decade. I was not offered any movie roles past 1996 … once Quentin and I broke up, that was it. Radio silence.”
That radio silence extended throughout Hollywood, Sorvino claimed, because many actors didn’t know about Weinstein’s alleged serial sexual misconduct.
“There’s a lot of people who think, ‘You all knew, you kept silent and you could have prevented so many people from being hurt.’ But I only knew of myself for a while and then was told only by one other young woman about her experience,” Sorvino explained. “I’ve known Ashley Judd for years — we did ‘Norma Jean and Marilyn’ together, apparently after our Harvey incidents. We never exchanged notes on this. No one could imagine the serial level of predation that has since become open. I don’t think the actors knew. Maybe the people who run actors’ careers whom we confide in and say, ‘I have a problem, what do I do?’ — maybe they knew,” she wrote. “Maybe those people knew the tally much more.”