‘I was like, I can’t do this’: Heather Graham details the horrible moment Harvey Weinstein tried to SA her

It feels like every up-and-coming actress in the 1990s has their own disgusting story about Harvey Weinstein. The disgraced movie mogul is currently being retried for rape and sexual assault in a New York court, with women testifying how he’d manipulate them with promises of movie roles, then lure them into hotel rooms and apartments where he’d attack them.

In an interview with The Guardian, Heather Graham, who has just made her directing debut with romcom Chosen Family, has detailed her own encounter with Weinstein. She says Weinstein invited her to his office and showed her a pile of scripts, saying she could pick whichever film she liked to star in.

But, as we now know all too well, the offer came with disgusting strings attached. Graham says that Weinstein “said something like: ‘My wife and I have an arrangement, and when I’m out of town, I can do whatever I want.’” After making this ominous statement, he approached her for an awkward hug.

Knowing everything we now know about him, this would be the moment for a woman to run away as fast as she can. But put yourself in the shoes of an actress trying to build her career, knowing that Weinstein is arguably the most powerful producer in Hollywood. And so Graham endured his unwanted advance: “In that moment, I wasn’t like: ‘F**k off.’ I just felt like, oh my God, I don’t know how to handle this situation. How do I get out of this without completely alienating him?”

Weinstein then attempted what’s now known as his signature move. He invited Graham to dinner. Now all too aware of his inclinations, Graham asked another actor friend to come along for security. They canceled at the last minute, so Weinstein called Graham and asked her to come to his hotel room instead, insisting that her friend was already there.

Graham sensed danger. She knew her friend had canceled, so also knew Weinstein was lying about her friend already being in the hotel room. Immediately Graham realized what would happen if she walked into that room and the door locked closed behind her: “I was like, I can’t do this. And then he never worked with me again.”

It’s perhaps notable that Graham’s star power subsequently declined in the 2000s, possibly because Weinstein ‘punished’ her for repelling his advances by not putting her forward for any other movie roles at his company.

Graham has had the last laugh. Weinstein has now spent years behind bars, a situation which she sees as justice being served: “It felt so exciting to see this powerful guy not get away with it. Because, from my whole career, people would be like: ‘Just don’t put yourself in that situation, otherwise it’s your fault.’ There was victim shaming, like: ‘You shouldn’t have gone to his hotel room.’”

Now, with her directorial debut garnering respectable reviews, she clearly feels like she made the right decision by not going into Weinstein’s hotel room all those years ago. As she concludes in the interview: “Before, I was more: ‘What do other people think?’ Now I’m just like, f**k it.”