Molly Ringwald is “lucky” to have never been subjected to Harvey Weinstein’s sleazy sexual advances – but said she’s encountered “plenty of Harveys of my own” during her years as Hollywood’s leading eighties icon.
The “Sixteen Candles” star detailed a handful of times she was was sexually harassed or demeaned by male colleagues in a personal essay published Tuesday by the New Yorker.
“When I was thirteen, a fifty-year-old crew member told me that he would teach me to dance, and then proceeded to push against me with an erection,” Ringwald wrote. “At fourteen, a married film director stuck his tongue in my mouth on set.”
She added, “At a time when I was trying to figure out what it meant to become a sexually viable young woman, at every turn some older guy tried to help speed up the process.”
The former “Brat Pack” member said her “very protective parents” tried their best to “shield” her.
“I shudder to think of what would have happened had I not had them,” Ringwald wrote.
Ringwald also recalled a time in her twenties when she was “blindsided” during an audition when she was forced to wear a dog collar put on by a male co-star.
“The actor was a friend of mine, and I looked in his eyes with panic. He looked back at me with an ‘I’m really sorry’ expression on his face as his hands reached out toward my neck,” she said. “I don’t even know if the collar ever made it on me, because that’s the closest I’ve had to an out-of-body experience.”
After sobbing in the parking lot, Ringwald told her male agent what had happened – who laughed and replied, “Well, I guess that’s one for the memoirs.”
She said she fired him.
Some years later, Ringwald said she was horrified when a quote about her by “someone who claims himself to be horrified by the Harvey allegations” wound up in a 1995 article.
“I wouldn’t know [Molly Ringwald] if she sat on my face,” former Walt Disney Studios chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg told the magazine “Movieline.”
“I was twenty-four at the time,” Ringwald wrote in the New Yorker piece. “Maybe he was misquoted. If he ever sent a note of apology, it must have gotten lost in the mail.”
Ringwald, now 49, said she’s purposely never spoken before about her experiences of sexual harassment in the industry.
“I never talked about these things publicly because, as a woman, it has always felt like I may as well have been talking about the weather,” she explained. “Stories like these have never been taken seriously. Women are shamed, told they are uptight, nasty, bitter, can’t take a joke, are too sensitive. And the men? Well, if they’re lucky, they might get elected President.”
Ringwald starred in one of Weinstein’s first productions, 1990’s “Strike It Rich” – but never worked with him again after suing him in a pay dispute.