British actress Claire Forlani revealed Thursday that she “escaped” Harvey Weinstein‘s clutches on five separate occasions as a young woman — “ducking and diving” to avoid his slobbery sexual propositions.
“Nothing happened to me with Harvey — by that I mean, I escaped 5 times,” the former “NCIS: Los Angeles” star tweeted. “I had two Peninsula Hotel meetings in the evening with Harvey and all I remember was I ducked, dived and ultimately got out of there without getting slobbered over, well just a bit. Yes, massage was suggested.”
“I remember him telling me all the actresses who had slept with him and what he had done for them. I wasn’t drinking the cool aid [sic], I knew Harvey was a master manipulator,” she added. “He also announced to me at the last dinner I had with him at Dominic’s that his pilot knew to be on standby because he could never get me to sleep with him.”
Forlani, the daughter of a music manager who started acting and modeling as a kid, says she just tried to laugh off the pervy producer’s advances — because she’d been dealing with creeps like him her whole life.
“For me it started at age 14, my parents had two male friends who I trusted and adored and they were deeply inappropriate. It happened all the time when I modeled and it happened all through my twenties in the film business. For us it was something you weren’t supposed to make a big deal out of; it was sadly our normal,” she confessed.
Forlani said reporter Ronan Farrow had approached her for his recent New Yorker expose on Weinstein — where 13 women accused Weinstein of harassment or assault — but she declined after “some close men” advised her not to.
“Today I sit here feeling some shame, like I’m not a woman supporting other women. I just read Mira Sorvino’s article in Time and she writes of how scared she was to speak out and participate. I take little solace in that,” she wrote.