Jennifer Lawrence has spoken about her personal experience with Harvey Weinstein, and feeling "sick in her bones" after his long history of sexual abuse was revealed.
"Just speaking for myself, I had known him since I was 20, and he had only ever been nice to me—except for the moments that he wasn't," Lawrence told Oprah Winfrey in an interview for The Hollywood Reporter. "And then I called him an asshole, and we moved on. He was paternal to me. So I needed a moment to process everything because I thought I knew this guy, and then he's being accused of rape. We all knew he was a dog, we knew that he was a... tough guy, a brute, a tough guy to negotiate with. I didn't know that he was a rapist."
Lawrence went on to describe her reaction specifically to audio published by The New Yorker. "Being able to hear when the woman [model Ambra Battilana Gutierrez] wore the microphone and Harvey was telling her to watch him shower—I felt sick in my bones for an entire day. I was just sick... That's why it's so important to talk about abuse, all of the different forms of abuse, because he didn't lay a finger on her, and I felt chilled to my bones. Imagine having a man who is that powerful telling you to do something [and] you're saying no. [He's] threatening you, saying, 'Don't embarrass me. We're at this hotel.'"
Lawrence also told THR about her desire to form a commission to combat abuse in the industry, to ensure that victims are heard and that perpetrators are held accountable. At ELLE's Women In Hollywood event in October, fellow honoree Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy called for the creation of a commission, designed to develop "new, industry-wide protections against sexual harassment and abuse."
"I've talked to women. We've talked about forming a commission," Lawrence said. "When you're starting out, there's really not a lot of options." Early in her career, Lawrence has revealed she was emotionally abused by a female producer on a film project who told her to lose weight. "On that movie, I called my agent, and I called everybody… there's not really anything anybody can do because the behavior is so normalized. And then you become more powerful, and people start fucking with you less. People at the beginning of their careers don't want to rock the boat because if you rock the boat, you'll be called difficult."
Creating a commission, Lawrence said, would put "rules in place where there are certain ways that you just cannot treat people," and thereby enable less younger and less powerful victims to come forward. "If every A-list actor decides to join this commission, we know everybody in the industry. I know every studio head in town. If I'm on this commission, and [if] I get an email about somebody being treated badly on a set, I can send an email. We have to all put our heads together and figure out how to not let this moment go, not just be like, 'Oh, well, that was crazy.' Something has to really get done."
