Julianna Margulies recalls horrific hotel room meeting with Steven Seagal
The 'Good Wife' actress Julianna Margulies recalled a horrific hotel room meeting with Steven Seagal during a visit to Sirius XM's Just Jenny.
She revealed how she narrowly escaped a hotel room meeting with Seagal who has been accused of sexual harassment by multiple women.
Margulies was 23-years-old at the time of the incident and shared that she was persuaded by a female casting director to go and meet Seagal late night who insisted that he wanted to go over a scene.
Julianna spoke to host Jenny Hutt and shared the details of her close call.
"I lived in Brooklyn, and I said, 'Oh, I don't do that. I don't travel. I don't have money for a cab.' And I didn't," to which the casting director replied saying, And she says, "Don't worry, we'll reimburse you." According to Margulies, Seagal was armed with a gun when she arrived.
"I got to the hotel around 10:40, and she [the casting director] wasn't there. And he was alone and he made sure that I saw his gun, which I had never seen a gun in real life. I got out of there unscathed. … I never was raped, and I never was harmed. I don't know how I got out of that hotel room," she continued.
Margulies shared with Hutt that she felt as though she had been "set up" by the casting director and learned first hand that she should never go into a private meeting alone.
"Because of my experience with Steven Seagal in that room, which was horrific, I refused to meet Harvey Weinstein in his hotel room when another woman brought me, saying, 'You will absolutely get [a] screen test,'" she shared.
On a different occasion, Margulies claimed that the disgraced film mogul attempted to lure her to his suite at the Peninsula Beverly Hills via a female assistant to discuss a film role that Margulies had auditioned for.
"She said, 'I'm going to drop you off at the Peninsula,' and I said, 'I'm not going up there alone.' I saw how she started to sweat. She was like, 'Don't be silly, I'm just going to drop you off. It's going to be fine.' And I said, 'Nope, then I'm going home," the actress recalled.
The assistant eventually reluctantly agreed to go with Margulies up to Harvey Weinstein's room. Weinstein opened the door dressed in just a bathrobe.
"I could see that there were candles lit in the room, and there was a dinner for two. And I saw him stare at her, daggers. And I turned to see what she had done to deserve that, and I caught her in a shrug, like, 'What could I do? He looked at me, furious, and he took the door and he said, 'Just wanted to say, "great audition."' And he slammed the door. Of course, I didn't get the part," she continued.
Julianna admitted that if she had not experienced the initial meeting with Seagal and her career had not been well-established, "I would've gone in, absolutely," she added.
The actress slammed any idea of victim-shaming and said, "It's not to be shrugged off." She also turned the focus to women who tend to enable men to misuse their power and said, "It's not always the men that are awful. … We have to start holding these people accountable."