Lupita Nyong’o was still in school when she first met Harvey Weinstein. In a lengthy op-ed for The New York Times, the Oscar-winning actress adds her voice to a growing chorus of women in Hollywood and details years of uncomfortable encounters with the now-disgraced producer. Tellingly, as Nyong’o’s fame grew, Weinstein’s attitude toward her changed dramatically.

Nyong’o’s various interactions with Weinstein will sound familiar to anyone who has been following this story for the past few weeks; meetings in hotel rooms, requests for massages, Weinstein’s female accomplices/assistants, and the promise of career advancement as quid pro quo. When she first met the mogul in 2011, Nyong’o was still a student at the Yale School of Drama. Not knowing much about Weinstein, she asked a female producer (who goes unnamed in the article) what to do when the studio head was introduced to her. “Keep Harvey in your corner,” was the advice as well as the warning: “He is a good man to know in the business, but just be careful around him. He can be a bully.”

Nyong’o explains all the ways she tried to adopt a cautious attitude, such as using the formal “Mr. Weinstein” and refusing to drink alcohol, despite his repeated insistence, during their second meeting. Weinstein invited Nyong’o to his house in Westport, Connecticut, to watch a film in his private screening room with his family and to talk to her about a potential role. However, after she met his staff and his children, Nyong’o describes being pressured to leave the movie, alone, with Weinstein. Not wanting to make a scene “in front of his kids,” Nyong’o says she complied. What follows in her account is right out of the Weinstein playbook. She writes:

Harvey led me into a bedroom — his bedroom — and announced that he wanted to give me a massage. I thought he was joking at first. He was not. For the first time since I met him, I felt unsafe. I panicked a little and thought quickly to offer to give him one instead: It would allow me to be in control physically, to know exactly where his hands were at all times.

Part of our drama school curriculum at Yale included body work, using massage techniques on one another to understand the connection between body, mind and emotion, and so I felt I could rationalize giving him one and keep a semblance of professionalism in spite of the bizarre circumstance. He agreed to this and lay on the bed.

Nyong’o says that as she tried to figure out how to get out of the situation, Weinstein tried to take off his pants. “If we’re not going to watch the film, I really should head back to school,” she remembers saying and recalls, in chilling detail, how “the members of his household, the potential witnesses”—including his children—“were all (strategically, it seems to me now) in a soundproof room.” The role Weinstein allegedly wanted to talk to her about was on the HBO series he produced, The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. He had gone so far as to send his staff to pick up a box set to show her. Nyong’o later found out that show had been off the air since 2009.

Nyong’o met Weinstein a couple more times before appearing in her first film, 2013’s 12 Years a Slave. In one instance, she was careful to bring along two male friends as protection against his advances. Mollified by his behavior on that occasion, Nyong’o met Weinstein again a few months later at his favorite stomping grounds—a hotel. Nyong’o recounts the same scenario that a number of Weinstein accusers have laid out—a female assistant is on hand at first but then quickly disappears, followed by the proposition:

“Let’s cut to the chase. I have a private room upstairs where we can have the rest of our meal.” I was stunned. I told him I preferred to eat in the restaurant. He told me not to be so naïve. If I wanted to be an actress, then I had to be willing to do this sort of thing. He said he had dated Famous Actress X and Y and look where that had gotten them.

I was silent for a while before I mustered up the courage to politely decline his offer. “You have no idea what you are passing up,” he said. “With all due respect, I would not be able to sleep at night if I did what you are asking, so I must pass,” I replied.

Weinstein stuck Nyong’o in a cab and when the aspiring actress, afraid her name would be mud in Hollywood after turning him down, asked if they were good, she remembers him responding: “I don’t know about your career, but you’ll be fine.”

At the Toronto Film Festival two years later, Nyong’o and the rest of her 12 Years a Slave co-stars were the toast of the town. Weinstein approached her again there. “He said he couldn’t believe how fast I had gotten to where I was, and that he had treated me so badly in the past. He was ashamed of his actions and he promised to respect me moving forward.”

This abrupt change in demeanor, due to Nyong’o’s rising power in Hollywood, echoes an observation from Jennifer Lawrence—another Oscar-winning actress who experienced a meteoric rise to stardom. “What’s the difference between the treatment I received then and the treatment I receive now?” Lawrence said, reflecting on some of the humiliating experiences of her early career during a recent speech at Elle’s Women in Hollywood event. “I became a ’movie star.’” As a “movie star” and, soon, Oscar winner, Nyong’o received very different treatment from Weinstein, but, keeping a promise she had already made to herself, refused to work with him despite repeated offers.

Nyong’o concludes her op-ed by explaining, as many women have done in recent weeks, why she is only speaking out now about Weinstein and his behavior towards her:

I did not know that there was a world in which anybody would care about my experience with him. You see, I was entering into a community that Harvey Weinstein had been in, and even shaped, long before I got there. He was one of the first people I met in the industry, and he told me, “This is the way it is.” And wherever I looked, everyone seemed to be bracing themselves and dealing with him, unchallenged. I did not know that things could change. I did not know that anybody wanted things to change.

Nyong’o, like many women who have come forward, then expresses hope that the volume of response to the Weinstein scandal will lead to permanent change in Hollywood and that a generation of new actresses coming up behind her will not feel the need to stay silent in the face of abusive power.