Heather Graham Reveals Why She Spoke out Against Harvey Weinstein

After The New York Times published an Oct. 5 exposé detailing years’ worth of sexual harassment allegations against film producer Harvey Weinstein, followed by another piece on Oct. 10 and a report from The New Yorker, dozens of actresses have spoken out against Weinstein, some of whom were featured in the articles and others who shared their experiences in writing.

Actress Heather Graham added her name to the list in a recent op-ed for Variety, writing that Weinstein had implied she needed to have sex with him if she wanted to secure a movie role.

Graham wrote that in the early 2000s, Weinstein called her into his office.

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“There was a pile of scripts sitting on his desk. ‘I want to put you in one of my movies,’ he said and offered to let me choose which one I liked best,” Graham wrote. “Later in the conversation, he mentioned that he had an agreement with his wife. He could sleep with whomever he wanted when he was out of town. I walked out of the meeting feeling uneasy. There was no explicit mention that to star in one of those films I had to sleep with him, but the subtext was there.”

On Monday, Graham appeared on the Today show to explain why she finally felt safe enough to share her story, revealing that the women in the Times exposé, including actress Ashley Judd, inspired her to come forward.

“I think seeing her doing it was inspiring — (and) other women in that article — and I just thought if we don’t speak out, we enable this man to keep doing this for decades,” she said. “And he shouldn’t be doing it.”

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“I think, hopefully for women everywhere, we feel braver to come forward with our stories and we feel we can stand up for ourselves,” she added. “We see a predator is getting some kind of justice.”

In her op-ed, Graham also wrote about why she didn’t speak out at the time.

“We don’t want to be attacked for reading into something that may or may not have been there,” she wrote. “We don’t want to be looked at as weak for not being able to handle ourselves in a business run by men. We don’t want to lose work by being defined as a Difficult Woman. We don’t want to be the first or only voice in the room.”

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