Lena Headey, the British actress who stars as Cersei on Game of Thrones, has come forward with a shocking account of how Harvey Weinstein attempted to lure her up to his hotel bedroom with the promise of a script.
However Headey, who had experienced an attempted pick-up from Weinstein years before, was able to escape after the key to his room malfunctioned and he was unable to gain entry.
At the end of the episode, she alleges that Weinstein packed her into a car and cautioned her not to tell anyone what had happened.
In a series of four posts to her Twitter, Headey wrote an extraordinary, heart-stopping account of how she slipped out of Weinstein’s clutches, joining the ranks of some forty women who now claim to have been sexually harassed, assaulted, intimidated or raped by Weinstein.
In the posts, Headey wrote: “The first time I met Harvey Weinstein was at The Venice Film Festival. The Brothers Grimm was showing there, (during shooting I was subjected to endless bullying by the director Terry Gilliam).”
“At one point Harvey asked me to take a walk down to the water, I walked down with him and he stopped and made some suggestive comment, a gesture, I just laughed it off, I was genuinely shocked.”
Headey says that she recalled thinking, “It’s got to be a joke,” adding that she said something like, ‘Oh come on mate ?!?? It’d be like kissing my dad !! Let’s go get a drink, get back to the others.’”
However, Headey wrote that after she rebuffed him, “I was never in any other Miramax film.”
- “Years later,” Headey added, in Los Angeles, Weinstein tried again—much to Headey’s surprise.
“I had always carried the thought that he’d never try anything with me again, not after I’d laughed and said never in a million years. I believed that he respected my boundary and maybe he wanted to talk about potential work,” she recalled.
“He asked me to meet for breakfast. We ate breakfast, we talked about films, film making. He asked me a few questions about the state of my love life. I shifted the conversation back to something less personal. Then he went to the loo.”
When Weinstein came back he suggested to Headey they go up to his room where, he said, he wanted to give her a script.
“We walked to the lift and the energy shifted, my whole body went into high alert,” Headey wrote.
As the lift was going up, she remembered saying to Weinstein, “I’m not interested in anything other than work,” and told him, “Nothing is going to happen”
Headey continued: “I don’t know what possessed me to speak out at that moment, only that I had such a strong sense of don’t come near me. He was silent after I spoke, furious. We got out of the lift and walked to his room. His hand was on my back, he was marching me forward, not a word. I felt completely powerless, he tried his key card and it didn’t work, then he got really angry. He walked me back to the lift, through the hotel to the valet, by grabbing and holding tightly to the back of my arm.”
He paid for her car, Headey wrote, and then whispered in her ear, “Don’t tell anyone about this, not your manager, not your agent.”
Headey concluded the post by writing, “I got into my car and I cried.”