Matt Damon admits that he actually had been aware of at least one of Harvey Weinstein’s sexual harassment claims. Earlier this month, the actor said it’s “not true” that everyone knew about the accusations. Now Damon said he just didn’t know Weinstein went to such levels to satisfy himself.
“When people say everybody knew, yeah, I knew he was an a–hole. He was proud of that. That’s how he carried himself,” Damon says on Good Morning America with George Clooney Monday, Oct. 23. “And I knew he was a womanizer. I wouldn’t want to be married to the guy, but, like, that’s not my business, really. But this level of criminal sexual predation is not something that I ever thought was going on. Absolutely not.
“I knew the story about Gwyneth from Ben [Affleck] because he was with her after Brad [Pitt] and so I knew that story. But I was working with Gwyneth, with Harvey on [“The Talented Mr. Ripley,]” he says. ” I never talked to Gwyneth about it. Ben told me, but I knew that they had come to whatever agreement or understanding they had come to. She had handled it. And she was the First Lady of Miramax, and he treated her incredibly respectfully. Always.”
Damon also said that he never saw Weinstein do anything with any woman at an awards ceremony like the Golden Globes. The remark echoed his earlier comments to Deadline when he said, “I never saw this.”
“I think a lot of actors have come out and said, everybody’s saying we all knew,” he said during a Tuesday, Oct. 10 interview. “That’s not true. This type of predation happens behind closed doors, and out of public view. If there was ever an event that I was at and Harvey was doing this kind of thing and I didn’t see it, then I am so deeply sorry, because I would have stopped it.”
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The actor, who rose to fame in the 1990s working with Weinstein’s Miramax on his breakout, Oscar-winning hit “Good Will Hunting,” also said, “as the father of four daughters, this is the kind of sexual predation that keeps me up at night.”
Such a statement has drawn criticism from Twitter users.
Dear Men, Please remove the phrase "as a husband and/or a father of daughters" from your vocabulary. Women exist outside your bubble.
— Abigail Shirley (@abzdafab) October 10, 2017
for heaven's sake retire "as a father of daughters" rhetoric
— karen han (@karenyhan) October 10, 2017
https://twitter.com/samlansky/status/917864722178772992
Additionally, this is not the first time that Damon has been on the questionable side of things. In December 2016, the star dismissed whitewashing criticism of “The Great Wall,” which tells a tale about the Chinese fixture’s origins. A year earlier, he also explained diversity to a Black filmmaker, cutting her off in the process.
