Megan Fox Clarifies Unearthed ‘Transformers’ Audition Story

Megan Fox took to Instagram Monday night to respond to the social media firestorm caused by the resurfacing of a 2009 Jimmy Kimmel Live! interview, in which she talked about working as an extra on Michael Bay‘s Bad Boys II at age 15. Fox said she was not underage when she auditioned for Bay’s Transformers a few years later and she was “never assaulted or preyed upon” when working for Bay or Transformers producer Steven Spielberg. That said, her Bad Boys II and Transformers experiences are still part of a career in which she has “endured some genuinely harrowing experiences in a ruthlessly misogynistic industry.”

In her Instagram post, Fox thanked fans for the “outpouring of support,” but she needed to speak out on the “subsequent mishandling by the media and society in general” of her story. While she was only 15 or 16 while making Bad Boys II, she was 19 or 20 when she auditioned for Transformers. She did “work” on one of Bay’s Ferraris while auditioning for the movie and there were several employees at the scene. “I was at no point undressed or anything similar,” Fox wrote.

“I hope that whatever opinions are formed around these episodes will at lease be seeded in the facts of the events,” Fox wrote. She later noted there are “many names that deserve to be going viral in cancel culture right now, but they are stored in the fragmented recesses of my heart.” When it comes to her “direct experiences” with Bay and Spielberg, she was not assaulted or preyed upon.

“I’m thankful to all of you who are brave enough to speak out and I’m grateful to all of you who are taking it upon yourselves to support, uplift, and bring comfort to those who have been harmed by a violent and toxic societal paradigm,” Fox concluded. She also added a brief message in the caption, writing, “May we all continue waking up.”

In the Kimmel clip, Fox explained how she wore a stars and stripes bikini and a red cowboy hat when she was a 15-year-old extra on the set of Bad Boys 2. Fox said Bay approved the outfit and he had to be reminded that she could not sit near a bar because she was underage. “So his solution to that problem was to then have me dancing underneath the waterfall, getting soaking wet,” Fox told Jimmy Kimmel. “That’s sort of a microcosm of how Bay’s mind works.” Kimmel, who has also come under fire for her response to the story, chuckled and joked, “Yeah, well, that’s really a microcosm of how all our minds work — but some of us have the decency to repress those thoughts and pretend that they don’t exist.”

The video was filmed in 2009 before Fox was fired from future Transformers movies. She frequently complained about working with Bay in the media at the time. In September 2009, she told Wonderland Magazine Bay “wants to be like Hitler on his sets” and was a “nightmare to work with.” Bay responded to the comments by posting a letter signed by the Transformers crew, in which they called her a “thankless, classless, graceless, and shall we say unfriendly b—.” Eventually, Fox and Bay’s relationship cooled, as she starred as April O’Neil in the recent Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles films, which Bay produced.