Reese Witherspoon has revealed that she was sexually assaulted by a director, when she was just 16 years old. The now 41-year-old Oscar winner shared the story while giving a speech at the Elle Women Hollywood event on Monday.
Reese said, "I didn't sleep at all last night. This is gonna be a real emotional rollercoaster. I just want to say that this has just been a really hard week for women in Hollywood, for women all over the world, for men and a lot of situations and a lot of industries that are forced to remember and relive a lot of ugly truths.
"I have my own experiences that have come back to me very vividly and I found it really hard to sleep, hard to think, hard to communicate a lot of the feelings I've been having, the anxiety about being honest, the guilt for not speaking up earlier, for taking action."
She said, "I feel true disgust at the director who assaulted me when I was 16-years-old and anger at the agents and the producers who made me feel that silence was a condition of my employment. I wish I could tell you that that was an isolated incident in my career, but sadly, it wasn't."
Reese did not name the director.
She also said that she's had "multiple experiences of harassment and sexual assault" over the years, and she doesn't speak about them often.
She said, "We're kind of told to sweep it under the rug and not talk about. It's made me want to speak up and speak up loudly because I felt less alone this week than I have ever felt in my entire career."
Source: US Weekly