Before success found her, Thandie Newton, who has starred in films like Crash and Mission: Impossible II, experienced an episode of horrific sexual abuse in Hollywood.
The actress detailed the experience to W magazine, saying at the beginning of her career, “a director, on a callback, had a camera shooting up my skirt and asked me to touch my (breasts) and think about the guy making love to me in the scene.”
Newton said she was uncomfortable, but there seemed to be safeguards in place. “I thought, ‘Ok, this is a little weird,’ but there was a female casting director in the room and I’d done weird stuff before so I did it,” she said, choosing not to disclose the filmmaker.
But it didn’t end there. At a film festival years later, a drunken producer referenced that very footage. “’Oh, Thandie, I’ve seen you recently!’ And he lurched away looking really shocked that he’d said that,” she says.
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