Blake Lively Says Hollywood Producers Took Cleaning Up Dog S**t More Seriously Than Sexual Harassment
Did you know Harvey Weinstein got his eye poked out when he was ten years old? It took him six months to recover and he’s attributed becoming a movie producer to this incident, as he read books instead of watching TV during the six months it took him to recover. If only his parents had bought young Harvey a book called “Rape is Bad,” we might be saying the worst thing Weinstein had done was producing Air Bud.
But the sexual harassment problem doesn’t start or end with Harvey Weinstein, and in a story diving into the issue of sexual harassment in Hollywood, the L.A. Times revealed a story from Blake Lively that encapsulates the issue better than almost anything I can think of.
In an exclusive interview with The Times days after the Weinstein scandal broke, actress Blake Lively recounted being regularly harassed by a makeup artist with whom she was working. “He was saying things inappropriately, insisting on putting my lipstick on with his finger,” she said. “I was sleeping one night on location and I woke up and he was filming me. I was clothed, but it was a very voyeuristic, terrifying thing to do.”
Lively reported the issue to the project’s producers but she said nothing was done. “Finally,” she said, “after three months of complaining, they called me into my trailer and said, ‘We need to talk to you.’ I thought, ‘Well finally, they’re going to do something about this man who I had to have touching me all day.’ And they said, ‘Your dog left a poop behind the toilet in your dressing room and our janitor had to pick it up. And this is very serious and we can’t have this happen again.’ ”
Finally, Lively took the harassment issue to her lawyer. An investigation was conducted, and the makeup artist was removed from the project. Still, Lively said, “Our unit production manager wrote him a letter of recommendation because nobody wanted there to be bad blood.”
This guy is just a makeup artist, not a studio head or an executive or a director… a makeup artist. Makeup and costuming are important, but this is not a particularly powerful position. Seriously, think of the name of your favorite makeup artist. Yeah, I’ll bet every single one of you thought of the same name, and that name was “Uhhh… the guy who…”
A janitor having to clean up after an actress’s dog is a serious issue, but a makeup artist filming a sleeping actress and harassing her for three months is no big deal. This is why the Harvey Weinstein story took so long to break, Hollywood literally treats women with less respect than dog s**t.
