Meryl Streep Wants Ivanka and Melania Trump to Speak Up
In a joint interview with Tom Hanks published in The New York Times Wednesday, Academy Award-winning actress Meryl Streep got candid and shared her thoughts on sexual misconduct in Hollywood, Harvey Weinstein, and the silence of Melania and Ivanka Trump amid the #MeToo movement.
The interview revolved around Streep and Hank’s new movie The Post, though Times reporter Cara Buckley shifted the conversation to the backlash Streep faced last year for not speaking out against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein more quickly, after many actresses came forward and accused him of sexual misconduct. Although Streep released a statement about Weinstein three days after the allegations surfaced, many criticized her for initially remaining quiet.
In response to Buckley’s questions about her silence, Streep said, “I don’t want to hear about the silence of me. I want to hear about the silence of Melania Trump. I want to hear from her. She has so much that’s valuable to say. And so does Ivanka. I want her to speak now.”
Streep explained that after first hearing about the Weinstein scandal, she “went home deep into my own life.” Then she heard the public was waiting for her to respond.
“I don’t have a Twitter thing or – handle, whatever. And I don’t have Facebook. I really had to think. Because it really underlined my own sense of cluelessness, and also how evil, deeply evil, and duplicitous, a person he was, yet such a champion of really great work,” she said.
Streep has publicly criticized Donald Trump before, notably during a Golden Globes speech last year in which she called the president out for mocking a disabled reporter. Her comments about Melania and Ivanka reflect wider criticism that the First Lady and First Daughter haven’t said enough about sexual harassment. Ivanka’s few comments on the topic came during a speech Tokyo, in which she said that “all too often, our workplace culture fails to treat women with appropriate respect” and that harassment should “never be tolerated.” Neither of them has addressed allegations of harassment that Trump faces.
Buckley also asked Hanks what he thought of the #MeToo movement, and he admitted that he too had participated in crude language worthy of a baseball locker room while at work. Streep piped up that there “shouldn’t be the idea of a locker room.”
“The payload is unloaded on women, because that’s the last group it’s kind of OK to demean, degrade,” she said.
Read the rest of the interview here.
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