Winona Ryder is breaking her silence. The Stranger Things star recently spoke out about the sexual harassment she endured as a rising star in her 20s and 30s. The actress called some of her colleagues in the industry “extremely scary.”
“I’ve had some difficult experiences with people who have blatantly sexually harassed me,” she told the magazine. Esquire. “And it happened again in my thirties. It wasn’t assault. But it was incredibly inappropriate. It was savage.”
“Extremely creepy”
Previously relatively private on the subject, Ryder expressed her “understanding” for victims of sexual assault and said her early fame had probably protected her from the worst acts of some predators in the industry. “I was lucky because I was famous, so it didn’t happen as much as it would if I had been a struggling actress,” she said. “But I remember that feeling in your mind: You’re negotiating, you’re thinking about what’s going to happen if you say something. You’re working on it while this person is extremely scary.”
The actress, who is set to unveil the sequel to the first Beetlejuice (1988), in which she was only 17 at the time, recalled her delicate reflexes when someone behaved inappropriately. “If someone was being inappropriate or hitting on me while drunk, I was like, ‘Ha ha!’ That’s kind of what you do. ‘Ha ha!’ Inappropriate? I was okay with that. But touching me? That felt very invasive,” she said.
“Is this my life?”
Conversely, when it comes to dating, fame hasn’t made her life any easier. Recalling an ill-fated date at a bar, the actress admitted to having wondered if she would ever meet someone sincere. “I went to the bathroom and when I came back, he was talking to someone, and I heard him say that he was going to, like, have sex with Winona Ryder,” she said.
“I was devastated. Not only because I thought we had a real connection, but also because I was like, ‘Is this my life? Am I never going to meet someone who’s going to know me based on our conversation?’”
