Source: Michael Ochs Archives / Getty
Rae Dawn Chong is claiming that disgraced Hollywood predator Harvey Weinstein “is only the tip of an ugly iceberg” regarding the industry’s treatment of women.
In an interview with industry blogger and Chong’s longtime friend, Jordan Elgrably, the actress says her agency at the time, CAA, once sent her to actor Steven Seagal’s hotel room in the 1980s for an evening meeting.
“9:30 p.m. at the Bel Air hotel — I was shocked at the time,” she said, but the agency excused the late hour and location, and when Chong arrived at the front desk she was told to go to his room.
“I knew then that I was being pimped by the agency,” she told Elgrably for his guest blog in The Wrap.
Although she refused to enter Seagal’s hotel room, she knocked on the door to confirm that she had made the appointment, only to have Seagal answer in his bathrobe.
“I stood outside the open door mortified that I was told to go to this meeting,” she said. “My heart broke because my agency had obviously pimped me out to this creep.”
Seagal opened the door, she said, and the actor “walked across his room and sat in a chair and manspread so I could see his junk. But he casually covered back up as if it was a mistake.”
After she declined his invitation to enter the room, Chong said, “then he asked if my blouse was silk and could he feel it. I said, ‘You know what silk feels like’ and I left.”
“I never let him touch me,” she said. “And to be honest…I would have f—ing killed him.”
She said that she went home and cried “because I realized the agency did not care about me. I left them, hurt and betrayed. Of course I struggled for work after that, and I was angry at them for lying and betraying my trust.”
What’s worse is that it didn’t end there, Chong said. “For years Steven Seagal would leave sex messages on my message machine. I had never met him before that night and never spoke to him again but for some reason he decided he could do this,” she said. “What burned me most was the agents. They got away with this and I was burned by them. I could not tell on them — who would I tell?”
Chong is now the third woman to accuse Seagal of misconduct after actresses Lisa Guerrero and Jenny McCarthytold their stories to the L.A. Times earlier this month.
SOURCE: EURweb.com
Article Courtesy of EURweb
Picture Courtesy of Michael Ochs Archives and Getty Images
Rae Dawn Chong Reveals She Was Sexually Harassed by Steven Seagal was originally published on wzakcleveland.com
