George Clooney revealed that his wife Amal Clooney has been sexually harassed in the past.
“My wife is a very smart, very together, very accomplished human rights lawyer and she said, ‘There have been times in my life, in the law community, [that] I had to tell someone to knock it off,’ so it happens everywhere,” Clooney told ExtraTV. (RELATED: George Clooney Took Weinstein Rumors ‘With A Grain Of Salt’)
Actor and director George Clooney and his wife Amal pose during a red carpet event for the movie “Suburbicon” at the 74th Venice Film Festival in Venice, Italy September 2, 2017. REUTERS/Alessandro Bianchi
Responding to the numerous claims against movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, Clooney said he hopes that in the future, women who experience harassment will feel like they can speak up.
“This wasn’t just guys hitting on girls, this is assault. … If we don’t address this and really go after Harvey [Weinstein], it will come back,” he explained.
“There has to be some good that comes out of all of this and the good is going to have to be that women feel safe to speak up, that they are believed and hopefully be enough that it scares any man who would behave like that from doing it,” he added. “Let’s stop having meetings in hotel rooms, you can have it in the restaurant downstairs.”
Clooney, who has worked with the movie mogul for 20 years, admitted after the allegations surfaced that he had heard “rumors” about actresses sleeping with Weinstein, but that he took them “with a grain of salt.”
“I’ve heard rumors, and the rumors in general started back in the nineties, and they were that certain actresses had slept with Harvey to get a role,” Clooney shared. “It seemed like a way to smear the actresses and demean them by saying that they didn’t get the jobs based on their talent, so I took those rumors with a grain of salt.”