Uma Thurman Has Broken Her Silence On Her Harvey Weinstein Attack

Actress Uma Thurman has broken her silence about Harvey Weinstein, revealing that she had a close working relationship with the disgraced movie mogul in the 1990s, before he assaulted her in a hotel room in London.

In a lengthy New York Times piece, Thurman said that the two became close after Pulp Fiction, which was the first film to be full financed by Weinstein’s Miramax production company. She said of their interactions:

“I knew him pretty well before he attacked me. 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. I was never any kind of studio darling. He had a chokehold on the type of films and directors that were right for me.”

She said that things began to go wrong during a meeting in a Paris hotel room, when they had been arguing about scripts, and he took his bathrobe off and asked her to follow him down a hallway. She said of the encounter:

“I didn’t feel threatened. I thought he was being super idiosyncratic, like this was your kooky, eccentric uncle. Then I followed him through a door and it was 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.”

The first assault, she says, came soon after, in Weinstein’s suite at the Savoy Hotel in London:

“It was such a bat to the head. 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. You’re 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, Thurman says, the producer sent a bunch of roses to the house where she was staying, but when she later confronted him and told him that he would lose his career, reputation and family if his behaviour continued, he instead threatened to derail her career.

In the same article, Uma Thurman spoke about her working relationship with Quentin Tarantino, saying that at one point during the Cannes Film Festival in 2001, he confronted Weinstein about his behaviour, leading the producer to offer a “half-assed apology.”

Her bond with Tarantino was shattered, however, during the filming of Kill Bill, when she says that the director bullied her into performing a dangerous stunt involving an old, reconfigured convertible, which he insisted that she drive herself, ignoring her requests for a stunt person to do it.

She suffers ongoing injuries as a result of the crash, and says that it took Tarantino 15 years before he would finally release footage of the incident to her. “Not that it matters now, with my permanently damaged neck and my screwed-up knees,” she told the Times.

You can read the full Uma Thurman interview here.

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