Back in November, as allegations against Harvey Weinstein were mounting, Uma Thurman was asked about her experience with the producer on the red carpet. Her response, defined by its decisive control and emotional restraint, was chilling: “I don’t have a tidy sound bite for you,” she said. “Because I have learned—I am not a child, and I have learned that when I’ve spoken in anger, I usually regret the way I express myself. So I’ve been waiting to feel less angry, and when I’m ready, I’ll say what I have to say.” On Thanksgiving, two weeks later, she posted a holiday message—complete with an image of her as the bride from Kill Bill driving a convertible—that wasn’t exactly in line with usual seasonal celebrity greetings: “I said I was angry recently, and I have a few reasons, #metoo […] I feel it’s important to take your time, be fair, be exact, so… Happy Thanksgiving Everyone! (Except you Harvey, and all your wicked conspirators – I’m glad it’s going slowly – you don’t deserve a bullet) -stay tuned,” she wrote.
Now in a New York Times op-ed by Maureen Dowd, Thurman has broken her silence about her ordeal with Weinstein in interviews with Dowd. Thurman is known for her roles in Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill: both creations stemming from the filmmaking partnership of Quentin Tarantino and Weinstein. Pulp Fiction is a film that made Weinstein’s career—and, in the piece, Thurman says he introduced her to President Obama as “the reason he had his house.”
“I am one of the reasons that a young girl would walk into his room alone, the way I did,” she said. “Quentin used Harvey as the executive producer of Kill Bill, a movie that symbolizes female empowerment. And all these lambs walked into slaughter because they were convinced nobody rises to such a position who would do something illegal to you, but they do.”
Thurman also addressed the red-carpet moment: “I used the word ‘anger,’ but I was more worried about crying, to tell you the truth,” she told Dowd. “I was not a groundbreaker on a story I knew to be true. So what you really saw was a person buying time.”
In the column, Thurman references a previous rape—she was 16; he was 20 years older, she says, and adds that the ordeal made her “less compliant”—before talking about Weinstein. “I knew him pretty well before he [Weinstein] attacked me,” she said, adding that this took place after Pulp Fiction‘s massive success. “He used to spend hours talking to me about material and complimenting my mind and validating me. It possibly made me overlook warning signs. This was my champion. I was never any kind of studio darling. He had a chokehold on the type of films and directors that were right for me.”
She mentions that a hotel room meeting in Paris was the first time something was off—they were arguing about a script when he led her, in his bathrobe, to a steam room. Thurman says she was wearing a full black leather outfit and asked him what he was doing. He “ran out” of the room.
“Mr. Weinstein acknowledges making a pass at Ms. Thurman in England after misreading her signals in Paris,” a statement from Weinstein’s spokesperson says. “He immediately apologized.”
Not long after that, in Weinstein’s suite in the Savoy Hotel in London, was the first attack, she alleges: “It was such a bat to the head. He pushed me down. He tried to shove himself on me. He tried to expose himself. He did all kinds of unpleasant things. But he didn’t actually put his back into it and force me. You’re like an animal wriggling away, like a lizard. I was doing anything I could to get the train back on the track. My track. Not his track.”
The next day, Thurman says, he sent a “vulgar” bunch of roses to the friend’s house she was staying at with a note saying she had “great instincts.” Soon after, at a meeting meant to confront Weinstein about it at the Savoy bar—one she brought a friend to—she alleges that Weinstein’s assistants “pressured” her into going to his hotel room. She finally agreed to go upstairs and says she warned Weinstein that he would lose his career, reputation, and family if he assaulted others. Thurman says she doesn’t remember what happened next.
Her friend was waiting for her, anxious, until the elevator doors opened: “She was very disheveled and so upset and had this blank look,” he recalled. “Her eyes were crazy and she was totally out of control. I shoveled her into the taxi and we went home to my house. She was really shaking.” According to her friend, Weinstein had threatened to derail her career (Weinstein’s spokesperson denies he said this).
From there, Thurman says, she saw Weinstein as an enemy. However, they continued to work together—Thurman thought she had “aged out of the window of his assault range.” In 2001, she was at Cannes and about to make Kill Bill. She says Tarantino told her she was acting”skittish” around Weinstein at a dinner, and when she reminded him of the Savoy incident (which, she says, Tarantino had previously “probably dismissed”) he confronted Weinstein. Tarantino confronted Weinstein, who acted “hurt and surprised” before she “firmly reiterated” what had happened, she says. Thurman says Weinstein changed to being “ashamed” and offered up a “half-assed apology.” (Dowd adds it included “many of the sentiments he would trot out about 16 years later.”)
But then something else happened, and Thurman’s account of it is horrific. Remember the Thanksgiving Instagram pic of her as the bride? It had a deeper meaning.
According to Thurman, she was asked to do the driving in the famous scene of her in Kill Bill but was tipped off by a crewmember that the car might not be working well. Thurman says she asked for a stunt person to do it instead (producers say they don’t remember her objecting), but recounts that Tarantino came in her trailer and told her to drive it, that the car and road were fine. She says he told her, “Hit 40 miles per hour or your hair won’t blow the right way and I’ll make you do it again,” and alleges, “that was a deathbox that I was in. The seat wasn’t screwed down properly. It was a sand road and it was not a straight road.”
There was a crash, captured on footage that took her 15 years to get, she says. The car veered off the road and crashed into a palm tree. “The steering wheel was at my belly and my legs were jammed under me. I felt this searing pain and thought, ‘Oh my God, I’m never going to walk again,’” she says. “When I came back from the hospital in a neck brace with my knees damaged and a large massive egg on my head and a concussion, I wanted to see the car and I was very upset. Quentin and I had an enormous fight, and I accused him of trying to kill me. And he was very angry at that, I guess understandably, because he didn’t feel he had tried to kill me.”
She tried to get the footage of the crash but Miramax responded that they’d show it to her if they were absolved of any “consequences of my future pain and suffering,” she says, adding later that her neck and knees are permanently damaged. Her working relationship with Tarantino was also damaged. “When they turned on me after the accident,” she told Dowd, “I went from being a creative contributor and performer to being like a broken tool.”
“Personally, it has taken me 47 years to stop calling people who are mean to you ‘in love’ with you,” Thurman tells Dowd. “It took a long time because I think that as little girls we are conditioned to believe that cruelty and love somehow have a connection, and that is like the sort of era that we need to evolve out of.”
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