It’s been a few months now since all the awful stories about Harvey Weinstein started pouring in …
And what a super depressing time it’s been.
Actress after actress has come forward to accuse Weinstein of everything from sexual harassment to sexual assault to rape, and though these stories have been coming out for so long now, we’ve yet to hear the end of it all.
We know that because today, Uma Thurman finally felt comfortable to reveal what Weinstein did to her.
A little bit of background: Uma has known Weinstein for years and years, ever since she starred in Pulp Fiction.
Back in November, she was asked about all the stories that had been coming out about him, and she explained to the reporter that she didn’t have a “tidy soundbite” prepared.
“I am not a child,” she said then, “and I have learned that when I’ve spoken in anger, I usually regret the way I express myself.”
“So I’ve been waiting to feel less angry. And when I’m ready, I’ll say what I have to say.”
She definitely seemed angry then, and she seemed even angrier a few weeks later when she shared a message about Thanksgiving with her followers on Instagram.
After talking about being “grateful,” she wrote that “I feel it’s important to take your time, be fair, be exact, so… Happy Thanksgiving Everyone!”
“Except you Harvey, and all your wicked conspirators,” she added in parentheses. “I’m glad it’s going slowly — you don’t deserve a bullet.”
She advised everyone to “stay tuned,” and we have … and now in a new interview with the New York Times, she’s telling her story at long last.
To start, Uma explains that she began getting close to Harvey and his first wife after filming Pulp Fiction.
“I knew him pretty well before he attacked me,” she says. “He used to spend hours talking to me about material and complimenting my mind and validating me.”
“It possibly made me overlook warning signs.”
“This was my champion,” she continues. “I was never any kind of studio darling. He had a chokehold on the type of films and directors that were right for me.”
Later, she says that she had a meeting with him in a hotel room — unfortunately, you can probably tell where the story is going at this point.
As they were discussing a script, Harvey changed into a bathrobe, but Uma says that she “didn’t feel threatened,” that she “thought he was being super idiosyncratic, like this was your kooky, eccentric uncle.”
After that, he told her to follow him as he went to a different room, and he ended up leading her to a steam room.
“And I was standing there in my full black leather outfit — boots, pants, jacket. And it was so hot and I said, ‘This is ridiculous, what are you doing?"”
“And he was getting very flustered and mad and he jumped up and ran out,” she says.
Not too long after that, Uma says that she was meeting with Harvey in another hotel when he attacked her.
“It was such a bat to the head,” she recalls. “He pushed me down. He tried to shove himself on me. He tried to expose himself. He did all kinds of unpleasant things.”
“But he didn’t actually put his back into it and force me.”
She compares the experience to being “like an animal wriggling away, like a lizard.”
“I was doing anything I could to get the train back on the track. My track. Not his track.”
The next day, he sent her roses with a card that just read “You have great instincts.”
How horrifying is that?
She went back to the hotel to confront him about what happened, but she says that his assistants tried to pressure her to let it go and to focus on the upcoming film projects she was working on with Harvey.
After finally agreeing to meet with him one more time, she told him “If you do what you did to me to other people you will lose your career, your reputation and your family, I promise you.”
She says that that was the last thing she remembered of that night, but a friend of hers who’d gone with her to the hotel for support says that Uma stayed upstairs in Harvey’s room for a long time, and when she came back down “she was very disheveled and so upset and had this blank look.”
Harvey has already denied everything, beyond admitting that he did make an unsuccessful pass at Uma during that first hotel incident.
What a terrible story that just keeps getting worse, huh?