Actress Julianna Margulies said in an interview Friday that in two separate instances, disgraced movie mogul Harvey Weinstein and actor Steven Seagal attempted to lure her to their hotel rooms early in her acting career.
The Good Wife star said the alleged Seagal encounter began with a female casting director asking her to go to Seagal’s hotel room at 10:00 pm to rehearse a scene with another actress.
“When I was 23, a casting director, a woman, said, ‘Steven Seagal wants to go over the scene with you in his hotel room at 10 o’clock at night.’ I got to the hotel at 10:40, and she wasn’t there. And he was. Alone,” Margulies said on Jenny Hutt’s Sirius XM show Just Jenny. “And he made sure that I saw his gun, which I had never seen a gun in real life. And I got out of there unscathed … I never was raped. And I never was harmed. And I don’t know how I got out of that hotel room … I sorta screamed my way out.”
Years later, while she was in her third season of the hit NBC medical drama ER, Margulies said she was asked to meet Harvey Weinstein in his hotel room ostensibly to discuss business. Margulies, still shaken by the alleged Seagal encounter, insisted that Weinstein’s female assistant accompany her to Weinstein’s room.
“She knocked on the door, and she was standing behind me,’ Margulies recalled. “And he opened the door in 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 he looked at me, furious,” she said of Weinstein, “And he slammed the door. And, of course, I didn’t get the part.”
“These women were leading me to the lion’s den,” Margulies said of the women involved in both alleged incidents.
Weinstein has been accused of sexually harassing or assaulting more than 50 women during his decades-long career in Hollywood, and has also been accused of raping at least ten women. The disgraced movie mogul has denied all allegations of nonconsensual sex.
Follow Jerome Hudson on Twitter @jeromeehudson