“I used the word ‘anger’ but I was more worried about crying, to tell you the truth. I was not a groundbreaker on a story I knew to be true. So what you really saw was a person buying time.”
-Uma Thurman
Back in November, Uma Thurman was asked about the many breaking stories about sexual harassment. She was clearly upset, but said she would not speak until she was able to “be fair, be exact.”
Well, she’s finally told her story, and it’s as ugly as expected.
There are a few different angles to this story and it’s hard to condense into a single post, but of course, it involves Harvey Weinstien.
Thurman says she was able to overlook many warning signs as she first got to know Weinstein because “he used to spend hours talking to me about material and complimenting my mind and validating me.” It wasn’t until a meeting in Paris when her blinders started to come off.
They were arguing about a script when the bathrobe came out.
“I didn’t feel threatened,” she recalls. “I thought he was being super idiosyncratic, like this was your kooky, eccentric uncle.”
He told her to follow him down a hall — there were always, she says, “vestibules within corridors within chambers” — so they could keep talking. “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.”
Not long after, he physically attacked her at a 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, he sent her a bouquet of flowers with a note that read “you have great instincts.”
Let’s pause here to collectively shudder.
Thurman confronted Weinstein about the incident, threatening to expose him and ruin his career. But she left the meeting rattled and feeling angrier, considering him her enemy from that point forward.
When it was time to begin work on Kill Bill, Director Quentin Tarantino noticed that Thurman seemed “skitttish” around Weinstein. Thurman reminded him of what Weinstein had done to her, but she says he seemed to dismiss. Later, however, Weinstein approached Thurman and gave her a “half-assed apology.”
And here’s where the story takes a strange turn.
In the famous scene where she’s driving the blue convertible to kill Bill — the same one she put on Instagram on Thanksgiving — she was asked to do the driving herself.
Thurman objected to this, asking for her stunt double to do the driving instead. Tarantino got angry and insisted she did the driving herself, saying he couldn’t get the shot he needed with a double. He told her it was a straight road and the car was safe.
She had been told by another crew member that car was not, in fact, safe, but bowed to the pressure that Tarantino put on her.
In reality, the road was sandy and not straight, and the drivers seat was not properly bolted down. Thurman lost control of the car and wrecked, suffering injuries that still affect her to this day.
Shortly after the crash, Thurman wanted to see the car and the footage of the wreck, but Miramax said they would release it to her only if she signed a document releasing them of any consequences, which she refused to sign. It was only recently, with Weinstein’s history of abuse being reported that Thurman was able to put more pressure on Tarantino to release the footage.
(The NYT story includes the footage from the crash, which shows the road is sandy and not straight, and the drivers seat does indeed appear to have not been properly secured.)
The pressure to do the driving herself wasn’t the only act of dehumanization by Tarantino; he also spat on her for one scene and choked her in another, even though other actors were who were in the scenes with her were scripted to do so. Also, the NYT adds this paragraph parenthetically:
(Tarantino aficionados spy an echo of Thurman’s crash in his 2007 movie, “Death Proof,” produced by Weinstein and starring Thurman’s stunt double, Zoë Bell. Young women, including a blond Rose McGowan, die in myriad ways, including by slamming into a windshield.)
The thing that always strikes me about stories like this is how blatant the behavior is, and how nonchalantly it’s often handled by other men. Whether Tarantino turned on Thurman in order to continue working with Weinstein or not, the fact is that he knew what Weinstein had done and yet continued to work with him.
This happened industry-wide, and it’s not just Hollywood where this is a problem, it’s virtually every industry.
Weinstein’s rep did respond to the story and actually acknowledged and apologized for more than he has in the past, while still denying quite a bit of it. But the response also included several pictures of Thurman and Weinstein together at events after the reported incidents.
I think we’ve seen those pictures in nearly every high profile case, the obvious suggestion being that if the woman still acknowledges the man in any way she must obviously be lying. Her smile proves that she’s not uncomfortable, therefore a liar.
Will this defense of Weinstein, who has essentially zero defenders at this point, finally make people reconsider that as a defense in general? I’d really like to hope so, but can’t bring myself to believe it quite yet.