Brit Marling Says Harvey Weinstein Suggested They Shower Together

Brit Marling is opening up about her own experience with Harvey Weinstein, in which she was asked to take a shower with him in his hotel room.

The actress, who created and starred in the Netflix series The OA, opened up about her 2014 experience with Weinstein in an essay for The Atlantic.

“I, too, went to the meeting thinking that perhaps my entire life was about to change for the better,” she wrote in the piece. “I, too, was asked to meet him in a hotel bar. I, too, met a young, female assistant there who said the meeting had been moved upstairs to his suite because he was a very busy man. I, too, felt my guard go up but was calmed by the presence of another woman my age beside me. I, too, felt terror in the pit of my stomach when that young woman left the room and I was suddenly alone with him. I, too, was asked if I wanted a massage, champagne, strawberries. I, too, sat in that chair paralyzed by mounting fear when he suggested we shower together. What could I do? How not to offend this man, this gatekeeper, who could anoint or destroy me?”

“It was clear that there was only one direction he wanted this encounter to go in, and that was sex or some version of an erotic exchange,” she added. “I was able to gather myself together – a bundle of firing nerves, hands trembling, voice lost in my throat – and leave the room. I later sat in my hotel room alone and wept. I wept because I had gone up the elevator when I knew better. I wept because I had let him touch my shoulders. I wept because at other times in my life, under other circumstances, I had not been able to leave.”

Brit says that because she had already written other projects, she felt the freedom to leave the room without worrying about Weinstein trying to ruin her career.

“Consent is a function of power. You have to have a modicum of power to give it,” she wrote. “I think for me, I was able to leave Weinstein‘s hotel room that day because I had entered as an actor but also as a writer/creator. Of those dual personas in me – actor and writer – it was the writer who stood up and walked out. Because the writer knew that even if this very powerful man never gave her a job in any of his films, even if he blacklisted her from other films, she could make her own work on her own terms and thus keep a roof over her head.”