In September, Harvey Weinstein got 15 years in prison. Years before that, Salma Hayek says he made her choose: a full-frontal nude scene, or no movie.
The movie was Frida, about the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo. Hayek spent years trying to get it made, and Weinstein's Miramax owned the rights. She says she turned down his advances again and again. "I don't think he hated anything more than the word 'no.'" At one point, she wrote, he told her: "I will kill you, don't think I can't." So he set conditions. Rewrite the script. Raise $10 million in financing. Get four big-name actors for the smaller parts. She did all of it. Then came the last condition. A sex scene with another woman, with full-frontal nudity, and if she said no, production would stop. "He would never let me finish this movie without him having his fantasy one way or another," she wrote in The New York Times in 2017. "I had to say yes." She took a tranquilizer to get through it. Afterwards she was so distraught she had to distance herself during post-production. Frida made $56.3 million worldwide, earned six Oscar nominations including Best Actress for her, and won two. Weinstein's response: "All of the sexual allegations as portrayed by Salma are not accurate." His spokesperson said he didn't remember pressuring her into the scene and wasn't on set when it was filmed. Today he's 74, and he still says he never assaulted anyone. The case for Salma: she did everything he asked, and the price of her dream movie was her body on screen. The case against: she could have walked away, and she kept the Oscar nomination that came with it. Should she have walked away from Frida, or was saying yes the only way that movie ever got made?
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