Actress Ellen Page released a personal statement on Facebook Friday saying she was harassed and outed by director Brett Ratner. She also detailed several other incidents of sexual misconduct from other men in the industry during her teenage years working as an actor.
Page claims that when she was 18 years old, during a cast and crew meeting for X Men: The Last Stand, Ratner told a woman 10 years Page’s senior that she should “fuck her to make her realize she’s gay.”
“You should fuck her to make her realize she’s gay.” He said this about me during a cast and crew “meet and greet”…
Posted by Ellen Page on Friday, November 10, 2017
“I was a young adult who had not yet come out to myself,” Page wrote. “I knew I was gay, but did not know, so to speak.” Page responded to Ratner’s comments by looking down at her feet and not saying a word. Page wrote that with his comments, Ratner outed her to the rest of the cast “with no regard” for her well-being — an act she believes was an anti-gay “cruel manipulation,” designed to “oppress and repress.”
Page, who came out publicly in 2014, also claims she heard the director refer to another woman’s “flappy pussy” after the woman walked by the monitor.
Page also details a confrontation she had with Ratner, when he insisted she put on a shirt that read “Team Ratner” and she refused. She said later she was reprimanded by producers in her trailer for disobeying the director.
“I was being reprimanded, yet he was not being punished nor fired for the blatantly homophobic and abusive behavior we all witnessed,” Page wrote. “I was an actor that no one knew. I was eighteen and had no tools to know how to handle the situation.”
Page goes on to detail an incident with a different unnamed director who she says fondled her leg under a table when she was 16 years old. Only a few months later, Page says she was sexually assaulted by a grip on set and propositioned by another director to sleep with an older man and tell him the details.
“It was a painful realization: my safety was not guaranteed at work,” Page wrote. “An adult authority figure for whom I worked intended to exploit me, physically.”
In another portion of her post, Page said the focus should be on the stories of queer and trans people of color who have led LGBT and women’s rights movements, while acknowledging her own position of privilege as a white lesbian cis woman.
“This is a long-awaited reckoning,” Page concludes in her statement, referring to the surge of women coming forward with incidents of sexual misconduct and harassment. “It has to be.”
“Don’t allow this behavior to be normalized. Don’t compare wrongs or criminal acts by their degrees of severity. Don’t allow yourselves to be numb to the voices of victims coming forward. Don’t stop demanding our civil rights.”
