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Drawing from his experiences 60 years ago and failing to understand the imbalance of power, McKellen said that actresses traded sex for jobs.Â
Add beloved cultural icon and out actor Ian McKellen to the list of men (Matt Damon is the most recent) who've made problematic statements about sexual harassment in the wake of the #MeToo era. Speaking at the Oxford Union in England, the Lord of the Rings star made several offensive and contradictory statements about the deluge of sexual harassment allegations and the serial predators who have been called out since The New York Times published its expose on Harvey Weinstein's decades of abuse of women in early October, according to The Daily Mail.
At first, McKellen appeared to be on a solid track of allyship, lauding survivors of sexual abuse for coming forward. "It's sometimes very difficult for victims to do that," McKellen said. "'I hope we're going through a period that will help to eradicate it altogether."
Then McKellen, drawing from what he witnessed as an actor 60 years ago at one theater, accused victims of being complicit in their abuse, as if there were no imbalance of power between men and women back in the day.
"From my own experience, when I was starting acting in the early '60s, the director of the theater I was working at showed me some photographs he got from women who were wanting jobs ... some of them had at the bottom of their photograph 'DRR' -- directors' rights respected. In other words, if you give me a job, you can have sex with me."
He then went on to essentially say that survivors of sexual abuse asked for it. 'That was commonplace from people who proposed that they should be a victim," McKellen said. "Madness. People have taken advantage of that and encouraged it and it absolutely will not do."
If all of that weren't enough, the actor who's worked repeatedly on the X-Men franchise with Bryan Singer -- who has been sued by an underage actor over alleged sexual assault -- said that while the move to expose sexual abusers is good, there will be collateral damage.
"I assume nothing but good will come out of these revelations, even though some people get wrongly accused -- there's that side of it as well," McKellen said.
