Natalie Portman Recalls Horrifying First Fan Letter at Age 13

Natalie Portman told the crowd at the Los Angeles Women’s March that a fan letter she received when she was 13 years old was a “rape fantasy.”

Portman, who spoke at the march last year, recalled how she turned 12 while on the set of Luc Besson’s Leon: The Professional, her first film. In the movie, she played a young girl who befriends a hitman played by Jean Reno after her family is murdered. A year later, she got her first fan letter.

At first, she was excited to open the letter, but was horrified by what was inside.

“I excitedly opened my first fan mail to read a rape fantasy that a man had written me,” the 36-year-old Portman recalled.

She also realized she was being objectified, even though she was only a child.

“A countdown was started on my local radio show to my eighteenth birthday, euphemistically the date that I would be legal to sleep with,” Portman recalled. “Movie reviewers talked about my budding breasts in their reviews. I understood very quickly, even as a 13-year-old, that if I were to express myself sexually that I would feel unsafe. And that men would feel entitled to discuss and objectify my body to my great discomfort.”

After that, Portman started rejecting roles that included a kissing scene and started building a “reputation for basically being prudish, conservative, nerdy, serious. In an attempt to feel that my body was safe and that my voice would be listened to.”

“At 13 years old, the message from our culture was clear to me,” she concluded. “I felt the need to cover my body and to inhibit my expression and my work in order to send my own message to the world that I’m someone worthy of safety and respect. The response to my expression, from small comments about my body to more threatening deliberate statements, served to control my behavior through an environment of sexual terrorism.”

Portman and other celebrities joined women across the country on the one-year anniversary of President Donald Trump’s inauguration to protest his policies. The day after Trump’s inauguration last year, millions of women did the same thing.

Portman made her film debut in Leon: The Professional, which was released in 1994. She became an international star thanks to the Star Wars prequels and won an Oscar for 2010’s Black Swan. Her next film, Annihilation, opens on Feb. 23. Portman has also been a vocal supporter of the “Time’s Up” initiative. She had a viral moment at the Golden Globes when she pointed out that all the Best Director nominees were men.