Julianna Margulies never thought she’d be able to publicly talk about sexual harassment in Hollywood.
“They were stories I told to my friends,” the “Dietland” actress said during a panel at Vulture Festival on Saturday. “We all talked about it, but they weren’t stories I ever thought I could say publicly.”
In November, the 51-year-old actress revealed that both Steven Seagal and Harvey Weinstein tried to lure her to their hotel rooms when she was a young actress.
“I think there’s a lot of scared people who abused their positions and it wasn’t just Harvey and Steven Seagal,” she said, explaining that she was once told to put on sexy clothes and go to movie producer Joel Silver’s home for a meeting. “I was like, ‘Well why do I have to go to his house on a Saturday by myself?’ I remember they said to dress sexy and these are agents telling me that … I remember always feeling slightly uncomfortable.”
She continued, “I think now every agent, manager and actor knows there is never a need to be alone in a room with a producer. There’s just never a need. The dialogue is spreading to a point where even young actresses who are desperate, a screen actor who needs to get the job to pay the rent, which is what we were all doing back then … Now they’re actually like, ‘No, I’ll meet you at a restaurant.’ … it wasn’t something you talked about publicly. You wouldn’t have a job. You’d be blacklisted.”
During the panel, Margulies also opened up about the #MeToo movement and her worry that people think it’s a male/female issue.
“It’s a person in power issue,” she told the audience. “There are plenty of horrible women out there … I think whats important is understanding that this is a movement that encompasses all the people in power, not men against women. There’s so many men behind the movement … I think it’s a slippery slope. The only men I know who get nervous talking about it is when I go, ‘Well, why? What did you do? Do you have something to hide?’ … If you’re raised right and love everyone as they should be loved, you don’t do s–t like that.”