I used to get Brit Marling confused with like five other actresses. Like, three years ago, I thought Brit Marling and Brie Larson were the same person. I know that’s wrong! At least I know Brit Marling is someone completely different now. Anyway, Brit is young and beautiful and she’s been a rising star for several years. So obviously Harvey Weinstein did whatever he could to get her in a hotel room alone. This is what Marling wrote:

Brit Marling is the latest woman to come forward with sexual harassment allegations against Harvey Weinstein. “The OA” actress recounted an experience to the Atlantic where Weinstein requested a meeting with her in 2014. Like many Weinstein accusers, Marling said her meeting with the producer was relocated to his hotel suite.

“I, too, went to the meeting thinking that perhaps my entire life was about to change for the better,” she wrote. “I, too, was asked to meet him in a hotel bar. I, too, met a young, female assistant there who said the meeting had been moved upstairs to his suite because he was a very busy man. I, too, felt my guard go up but was calmed by the presence of another woman my age beside me. I, too, felt terror in the pit of my stomach when that young woman left the room and I was suddenly alone with him. I, too, was asked if I wanted a massage, champagne, strawberries. I, too, sat in that chair paralyzed by mounting fear when he suggested we shower together. What could I do? How not to offend this man, this gatekeeper, who could anoint or destroy me?”

It was clear Weinstein was looking for “sex or some version of an erotic exchange,” Marling recalled. “I was able to gather myself together — a bundle of firing nerves, hands trembling, voice lost in my throat — and leave the room.” After leaving his hotel room, she cried. “I wept because I had gone up the elevator when I knew better,” she said. “I wept because I had let him touch my shoulders. I wept because at other times in my life, under other circumstances, I had not been able to leave.”

Marling then explained why Weinstein was able to get away with this behavior for so many years.

“Weinstein was a gatekeeper who could give actresses a career that would sustain their lives and the livelihood of their families,” she said. “He could also give them fame, which is one of few ways for women to gain some semblance of power and voice inside a patriarchal world. They knew it. He knew it. Weinstein could also ensure that these women would never work again if they humiliated him. That’s not just artistic or emotional exile — that’s also economic exile.”

[From Page Six]

If there’s one good thing to come of this, I hope it’s that victims of sexual harassment and abuse realize that they’re not alone, and that what happened was not their fault whatsoever. The repetition of all of these similar stories shows that, over and over again, all of these actresses feel guilty about even being manipulated into being alone with Weinstein. To those women I say: look at the sheer volume of women who were manipulated in the exact same way. You have nothing to feel guilty about. The guy was and is a manipulative sexual predator.

Meanwhile, this probably won’t get as much attention because there’s not a big name attached to it, but one of Weinstein’s ex-assistants has come forward to tell her story, and she’s breaking the non-disclosure agreement she signed when she complained about Weinstein’s sexual harassment. She says that she and another assistant were harassed by Weinstein in 1998, and the other assistant was actually assaulted by Weinstein too. Weinstein paid out to both women for $250K combined, and they were both forced into signing Draconian NDAs. Go here to read more.

Here’s something else to keep your eye on: Ashley Judd will be giving her first post-Weinstein scandal interview to Diane Sawyer. Judd was one of the first women to go public as a named source and talk about Weinstein’s depravity.

Photos courtesy of WENN.