Mira Sorvino claims casting director gagged her with a condom during an audition when she was 16

Mira Sorvino, one of the first women to accuse Harvey Weinstein of sexual assault, continues to speak out about the expectations in the film industry.

The 50-year-old actress opened up about her decades-long career in Hollywood, and how early her introduction began.

“In looking back over at my career, I realized that one of my very first auditions when I was 16, I was completely treated inappropriately by the casting director,” Sorvino said on the Hollywood Foreign Press Association podcast.

“In order to scare me for this horror movie scene, he tied me to a chair, he bruised my arm and, I was 16 years old, and then he gagged me, and I was all game because I’m trying to be scared for the scene. And at the end he takes the gag out of my mouth and he said, ‘Sorry for the prophylactic.’ So he had gagged me with a condom. I was too young, thank God, to know what a condom tasted like. It was so inappropriate. And what the heck was a casting director doing with a condom in his pocket?”

Sorvino said that Hollywood is built on people taking advantage of others, but insisted she set her boundaries early.

Once, she said, an Oscar-winning director known for his “social justice profile” passed on her for a role after telling her that his mind couldn’t “help but traveling from the artistic possibilities to the sexual.”

“In my mind, the thing going on in my head, was ‘Oh. I thought this was a legitimate meeting.’ I thought this was an actual, you had me here, because you thought I was talented or that I brought something that would be good for this role,” she said, without naming the director.

“Not that you were were here fishing to see if I was going to have an affair with you. I know for a fact that’s why I didn’t get that part.”

Sorvino previously accused Weinstein of making an unwanted sexual advance on her in a Toronto hotel room in 1995. She also claims he torched her candidacy for a role in “Lord of the Rings.” Peter Jackson confirmed that Miramax, Weinstein’s company, told him that Sorvino and Ashley Judd, who also accused the disgraced mogul of sexual abuse, were “a nightmare to work with.”

Weinstein, who is currently facing criminal charges in New York involving three women, has denied all non-consensual sex.

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