Actress Kate Beckinsale: Harvey Weinstein Offered Me Alcohol in His Room When I Was 17

Actress Kate Beckinsale: Harvey Weinstein Offered Me Alcohol in His Room When I Was 17
British actress Kate Beckinsale in London, on Jan. 22, 2017. (Niklas Halle'n/AFP/Getty Images)
Holly Kellum
10/13/2017
Updated:
10/13/2017

Actress Kate Beckinsale is the latest woman to come forward saying she was one of Miramax co-founder Harvey Weinstein’s victims.

In an Instagram post on Thursday, Oct. 13, Beckinsale said that she was just 17 when her first encounter with Weinstein took place.

She thought she was going to meet him in a conference room him at the Savoy Hotel in London, but the receptionist told her to go up to his room.

Weinstein, she said, answered the door in his bathrobe, and offered her alcohol.

“I was incredibly naive and young and it did not cross my mind that this older, unattractive man would expect me to have any sexual interest in him,” she wrote.

She said she declined the alcohol and left his room “uneasy but unscathed.”

“A few years later he asked me if he had tried anything with me in that first meeting. I realized he couldn’t remember if he had assaulted me or not,” she wrote.

Film producer Harvey Weinstein in Antibes, France, on May 23, 2017. (Yann Coatsaliou/AFP/Getty Images)
Film producer Harvey Weinstein in Antibes, France, on May 23, 2017. (Yann Coatsaliou/AFP/Getty Images)

Over the years, she said “No” to him many times, which made him upset, she said.  According to her account, he screamed at her and called her names, and would “laughingly tell people ‘ Oh, Kate lives to say no to me.’”

She said she had boundaries that allowed her “to feel uncompromised in myself,” but that it came at the expense of advancing her career.

“It speaks to the status quo in this business,” she wrote. “[It] was never something I felt supported by anyone other than my family.”

She tells of a time a male friend of hers warned an actress who was going to dinner with Weinstein about what he might try to do. The actress apparently didn’t heed his warning and slept with Weinstein, and the next day, her friend got a call saying she would never work on another Miramax film.

“I would like to applaud the women who have come forward, and to pledge that we can from this create a new paradigm where producers, managers, executives, and assistants and everyone who has in the past shrugged and said, ‘Well, that’s just Harvey /Mr X/insert name here,’” Beckinsale wrote.

“Let’s stop allowing our young women to be sexual cannon fodder, and let’s remember that Harvey is an emblem of a system that is sick, and that we have work to do.”

Actress Rose McGowan also took to social media on Thursday to accuse Amazon Studios chief Roy Price of turning a blind eye when she told him she had been assaulted by Weinstein.

Price was put on a leave of absence Thursday, the studio said, following McGowan’s allegations and allegations that he harassed a producer.

Both women’s accusations come after The New Yorker reported on Tuesday, Oct. 10, that 13 women have claimed Weinstein sexually harassed or assaulted them, including three who told the magazine they had been raped.

Weinstein’s spokeswoman Sallie Hofmeister was quoted in the article saying, “Any allegations of non-consensual sex are unequivocally denied by Mr. Weinstein.”