More than a decade before the #MeToo movement began, Scarlett Johansson was groped on live television by fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi on the red carpet before the 2006 Golden Globes.
During E! Network’s coverage of the red carpet, Mizrahi was one of the fashion correspondents. He asked a litany of questions actresses considered way out of bounds, before he crossed another line by grabbing Johansson’s breast.
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“I just wanna feel it,” Mizrahi, then 44, told Johansson. “Oh, that’s totally working.”
Johansson, then 21, tried to laugh it off, asking the camera, “What is going on?”
Later on, Mizrahi cheered, “I touched Scarlett’s boobs!”
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Mizrahi asked the actress if she was wearing a bra. “It’s all built in,” she replied. “That’s the Valentino way.”
Nearly two months after the incident, Johansson finally spoke out, calling it “definitely in poor taste.”
“I’d been prepping for two hours with hair and makeup and getting dressed. And the first interview I do, someone who I have never met before fondles me for his own satisfaction,” Johansson told The Los Angeles Times. “Mostly, I was thinking, ‘Oh, my God. This is happening on live TV.’ I don’t think he got a huge thrill out it. He was making some shocking show or whatever for his channel and wanted to be different and racy and all of those things.”
The actress, who was there that night to celebrate her nomination for Match Point, told the Times, “When it happened, I think I actually said, ‘What the heck is going on?’ At the same time, people made a huge deal out of something that, in the moment, was not as exciting as it seemed afterward.”
Mizrahi, who also asked Teri Hatcher, Jessica Alba, Sandra Oh, Kiera Knightley and Queen Latifah if they were wearing underwear that night, initially refused to apologize. The openly gay fashion designer said he was just trying to find out how her dress was made, an excuse Johansson was not buying.
“I’m sure he was very fascinated by that, like he doesn’t know how a dress works,” she told the Times.
In a 2013 interview with George Stroumboulopoulos Tonight, Mizrahi once again said it was something he did to find out more about her dress, but later realized it was not appropriate.
“That was as natural for me as shaking someone’s hand… and it wasn’t. In retrospect I looked at it and went, ‘Ew, that’s true.’ And when it happened I was so scared and I didn’t go, ‘Hey, wait a minute. I was just shaking her hand.’ I didn’t say anything. I was like, ‘OK, I’m not going to say anything. Maybe it’ll go away,’” Mizrahi said. “I don’t know. I thought it was a weird, strange confluence of mistakes.”
Today, Johansson, 34, is one of the strongest voices in the #MeToo movement. During the 2018 Women’s March in January 2018, she opened up about being taken advantage of during her early career.
“Suddenly I was 19 again and I began to remember all the men who had taken advantage of the fact that I was a young woman who didn’t yet have the tools to say no, or understand the value of my own self-worth,” the actress said. “I had many relationships both personal and professional where the power dynamic was so off that I had to create a narrative that I was the cool girl who could hang in and hang out, and that sometimes meant compromising what felt right for me.”
She continued, “No more pandering. No more feeling guilty about hurting someone’s feelings when something doesn’t feel right for me. I have made a promise to myself to be responsible to my self, that in order to trust my instincts I must first respect them.”
The 2018 Golden Globes air Sunday on NBC at 8 p.m. ET.
Photo credit: Stefanie Keenan/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images
