Matt Damon admitted that he knew of at least one incident of Harvey Weinstein harassing an actress, but insists that he didn’t know the level to which the Hollywood executive was harassing and assaulting women.
In an interview with Michael Strahan that aired on ABC on Monday, Damon and George Clooney admitted to hearing about Weinstein’s behavior with women, but never witnessing it themselves.
“When people say like, ‘Everybody knew,’ Like, yeah,” Damon began. “I knew he was an a**hole. I mean, he was proud of that.”
“I knew he was a womanizer, you know, I wouldn’t want to be married to the guy,” he added. “But, the criminal sexual predation is not something that I ever thought was going on. Absolutely not.”
“I knew the story about Gwyneth from Ben,” Damon continued, referring to Gwyneth Paltrow, who recently came forward with allegations of sexual harassment against Weinstein. “I never talked to Gwyneth about it. Ben told me, but I knew that they had come to whatever, agreement or understanding that they had come to, she had handled it and she was, you know, the first lady of Miramax. And he treated her incredibly respectfully.”
Clooney then claimed that Weinstein told him of women he “had affairs” with, but the “Ocean’s 11” actor refused to believe them and any of the rumors that he heard.
“Harvey would talk to me about women that he’d had affairs with–I didn’t necessarily believe him, quite honestly, because to believe him would be would be to believe kind of the worst of some actresses who were friends of mine,” Clooney explained. “I didn’t really think that they were going to have affairs with Harvey, quite honestly, and clearly they didn’t. But the idea that this predator, this assaulter was out there silencing women like that–it’s beyond infuriating.”
Weinstein and his spokespeople have argued against most of the allegations against him, claiming that any sexual harassment and assault that occurred was consensual. However, more women continue to speak up by the day it seems and many of their accounts reveal certain patterns in his behavior.