Winona Ryder has opened up about how she faced sexual harassment throughout her career.
“I had a couple of difficult experiences with a couple of people who were just blatantly sexually harassing me,” the actress, 52, said of the unwanted advances she received in her late 20s, in an interview with Esquire published on Thursday, August 29. “And then it happened again in my 30s. It wasn’t an assault. But it was incredibly inappropriate. It was wild.”
Ryder shared that her personal experience made her “really understand” what other victims went through. However, she acknowledged that she was fortunate not to have it be a constant occurrence.
“I was lucky because I was known, so it didn’t happen as much as maybe it would if I had been a struggling actor,” she reflected. “But I remember this feeling in your mind: You’re negotiating, you’re thinking about what’s going to happen if you say something. You’re working it out while this person is being extremely creepy.”
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The Beetlejuice star confessed that she got used to having to constantly brush off the attention, but she drew the line when someone encroached on her personal boundaries.
“If someone was being inappropriate or drunkenly hitting on me it was like, ‘Ha ha!’ You kind of do that. ‘Ha ha!’” she explained to the outlet. “Inappropriate? I dealt with that. But touching me? It felt very invasive.”
In addition to experiencing sexual harassment, Ryder also opened up about how difficult she found dating to be when she was younger, especially after reaching success in Hollywood.
“I went to the bathroom and when I came back he was talking to someone, and I overheard him saying how he was going to, like, score with Winona Ryder,” she said of connecting with a guy at a local bar. “I was so crushed. Not only because I thought that we had this genuine connection but also like, ‘Is this my life? Am I never going to get to meet someone and they’re going to know me based on our conversation [rather than my celebrity]?’”
Ryder admitted that she didn’t realize the extent of what she went through at a young age until she was chatting with her Beetlejuice Beetlejuice costar Jenna Ortega about it.
“And as I was saying it, I was like, ‘Jesus Christ, that’s really f–ked up,’” she admitted.
While Ryder did not reveal the identities of the men who harassed her, she confessed that the experience “soured” her when it came to pursuing more acting jobs. One thing that also prevented her from booking movie roles was when she was allegedly blacklisted by Harvey Weinstein’s former company, Miramax. (The now-disgraced film producer ran Miramax with his brother until 2005.)
“The one time I was supposed to have a meeting with [Weinstein], I went to the Miramax office and I extended my hand and he shook my hand and I sat on the couch and we had a conversation and I left,” she said to the outlet. “And [afterward] I got, like, screamed at [by an agent]. ‘What the f–k did you do?’ I was like, ‘What?’ Apparently, I offended him because I extended my hand?”
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Ryder is unsure what she could have done to offend Weinstein, now 72, at the time, but she was under the impression he “did not like” her after that.
“I think I knew a little bit too much,” she said.
In 2020, Weinstein was convicted of rape and sexual assault in New York and was sentenced to prison. In 2022, he was also convicted of rape, forced oral copulation and third-degree sexual misconduct in California. In April, Weinstein’s New York convictions were overturned and he will face retrial in the fall.
