Actor calls former co-star’s remarks about ‘spectrum of behaviour’ in sexual misconduct ‘Orwellian’ and questions defence of disgraced comedian Louis CK 
 
 The actor Minnie Driver has told the Guardian that men “simply cannot understand what abuse is like on a daily level” and should not therefore attempt to differentiate or explain sexual misconduct against women. 
 
 
 
 Clarence Thomas accuser Anita Hill to spearhead fight against harassment in Hollywood Read more 
 
 Driver was discussing comments by Matt Damon, whom she once dated and with whom she starred in the Oscar-winning 1997 film Good Will Hunting. In an interview with ABC News this week, Damon said alleged sexual misconduct by powerful men involved “a spectrum of behaviour”. 
 
 Damon said there was “a difference between patting someone on the butt and rape or child molestation. Both of those behaviours need to be confronted and eradicated without question, but they shouldn’t be conflated.” 
 
 
 
 He added that society was in a “watershed moment” and said it was “wonderful that women are feeling empowered to tell their stories and it’s totally necessary”. But he said: “We live in this culture of outrage and injury, that we’re going to have to correct enough to kind of go, ‘Wait a minute. None of us came here perfect.’” 
 
 In her first response to Damon, Driver wrote on Twitter: “God God, seriously? 
 
 
 
 “Gosh it’s so interesting (profoundly unsurprising) how men with all these opinions about women’s differentiation between sexual misconduct, assault and rape reveal themselves to be utterly tone deaf and as a result, systemically part of the problem.” 
 
 Driver’s response to Damon was shared widely on social media, alongside that of the actor Alyssa Milano, who said: “There are different stages of cancer. Some more treatable than others. But it’s still cancer.” 
 
 On Saturday, Driver told the Guardian: “I felt I desperately needed to say something. I’ve realised that most men, good men, the men that I love, there is a cut-off in their ability to understand. They simply cannot understand what abuse is like on a daily level. 
 
 “I honestly think that until we get on the same page, you can’t tell a woman about their abuse. A man cannot do that. No one can. It is so individual and so personal, it’s galling when a powerful man steps up and starts dictating the terms, whether he intends it or not.” 
 
 Driver’s comments come more than two months into a radical national reappraisal of gender relations begun by accusations against Harvey Weinstein, an executive producer of Good Will Hunting who denies allegations including sexual assault and rape. 
 
 Speaking to ABC, Damon compared allegations against Weinstein, Al Franken, Kevin Spacey and the comedian Louis CK, whom he commended for his remorseful response. 
 
 “That’s the sign of somebody who – well, we can work with that,” Damon said, adding: “I don’t know Louis CK. I’ve never met him. I’m a fan of his, but I don’t imagine he’s going to do those things again. You know what I mean? I imagine the price that he’s paid at this point is so beyond anything ... ” 
 
 Driver said that as accusations, suspensions and firings first swept through Hollywood, she initially refrained from comment. She was now moved to expand her initial response to Damon. 
 
 “I don’t understand why Matt would defend Louis CK,” she said. “It seems to me that he thinks that because he didn’t rape somebody – so far as we know – that what he did do wasn’t as bad.” 
 
 The comedian was accused of misconduct including masturbating in front of a number of women. In response, he said “these stories are true” but did not specifically apologise. 
 
 Facebook Twitter Pinterest Matt Damon attends a screening in New York. Photograph: Evan Agostini/Invision/AP 
 
 “That’s a problem,” Driver continued. “If good men like Matt Damon are thinking like that then we’re in a lot of fucking trouble. We need good intelligent men to say this is all bad across the board, condemn it all and start again.” 
 
 Driver argued that men should not be granted the power to interpret abuse inflicted on women without the risk of redoubling an injustice they can scarcely understand. 
 
 “I felt that what Matt Damon was saying was an Orwellian idea, we are all equal except that some us are more equal than others,” she said. “Put abuse in there … that all abuse is equal but some is worse.” 
 
 She added: “There is no hierarchy of abuse – that if a woman is raped [it] is much worse than if woman has a penis exposed to her that she didn’t want or ask for … you cannot tell those women that one is supposed to feel worse than the other. 
 
 “And it certainly can’t be prescribed by a man. The idea of tone deafness is the idea there [is] no equivalency. 
 
 Peter Jackson: I blacklisted Ashley Judd and Mira Sorvino under pressure from Weinstein Read more 
 
 “How about: it’s all fucking wrong and it’s all bad, and until you start seeing it under one umbrella it’s not your job to compartmentalise or judge what is worse and what is not. Let women do the speaking up right now. The time right now is for men just to listen and not have an opinion about it for once.” 
 
 Since the first publication of allegations against Weinstein, a number of women have come forward to detail abuse they have suffered. This week, the actor Salma Hayek wrote a long essay for the New York Times about her treatment by Weinstein. 
 
 “There is not a woman I know,” Driver said, “myself included, who has not experienced verbal abuse and sexual epithets their whole fucking life, right up to being manhandled and having my career threatened several times by men I wouldn’t sleep with.” 
 
 Driver did not elaborate on the persons or circumstances involved. But she expressed optimism that as the culture of harassment and abuse that has existed is exposed, men will find a way to support women. 
 
 “In the same stereotypical way that we see women being supportive of men in their endeavors,” she said, “I feel that’s what women need of men in this moment. They need men to lean on and not question. 
 
 “Men can rally and they can support, but I don’t think its appropriate, per se, for men to have an opinion about how women should be metabolising abuse. Ever.” ||||| Actors Alyssa Milano and Matt Damon (Photo: Getty Images, WireImage) 
 
 Alyssa Milano is not here for Matt Damon's comments on sexual harassment. 
 
 The actress, who has been a vocal part of the #MeToo movement, took to Twitter on Saturday to call the actor out for his controversial statements made during an interview with ABC News Thursday about the sex scandals wracking Hollywood. 
 
 In the interview, Damon says there is a "spectrum" to behavior, and that we live in a "culture of outrage." 
 
 "All of that behavior needs to be confronted, but there is a continuum. On this end of the continuum where you have rape and child molestation or whatever, you know, that’s prison," he said. "That’s criminal behavior and it needs to be dealt with that way. The other stuff is just kind of shameful and gross... I just think that we have to start delineating between what these behaviors are." 
 
 Milano spoke up about Damon's comments in a series of tweets addressed to the actor. 
 
 Dear Matt Damon, 
 
 
 
 It’s the micro that makes the macro. 
 
 
 
 (Thread) — Alyssa Milano (@Alyssa_Milano) December 16, 2017 
 
 "We are in a 'culture of outrage' because the magnitude of rage is, in fact, overtly outrageous. And it is righteous," she wrote. 
 
 We are not outraged because someone grabbed our asses in a picture. We are outraged because we were made to feel this was normal. We are outraged because we have been gaslighted. We are outraged because we were silenced for so long. — Alyssa Milano (@Alyssa_Milano) December 16, 2017 
 
 "We are not outraged because someone grabbed our asses in a picture. We are outraged because we were made to feel this was normal," she continued. "We are outraged because we have been gaslighted. We are outraged because we were silenced for so long." 
 
 She ended the tweets, which referred to sexual misconduct and violence as a "systemic disease," with the hashtag #MeToo. 
 
 Milano wasn't alone in calling Damon out for his comments — his Good Will Hunting co-star Minnie Driver called him "tone deaf" on Twitter on Friday. 
 
 Gosh it’s so *interesting how men with all these opinions about women’s differentiation between sexual misconduct, assault and rape reveal themselves to be utterly tone deaf and as a result, systemically part of the problem( *profoundly unsurprising) — Minnie Driver (@driverminnie) December 15, 2017 
 
 "Gosh it’s so *interesting how men with all these opinions about women’s differentiation between sexual misconduct, assault and rape reveal themselves to be utterly tone deaf and as a result, systemically part of the problem( *profoundly unsurprising)," she wrote. 
 
 Read or Share this story: https://usat.ly/2Bwhqz3 ||||| Matt Damon. Kevin Winter/Getty 
 
 Matt Damon thinks the men in Hollywood who aren't sexual predators should be talked about more. 
 
 The flood of sexual-misconduct allegations since The New York Times and The New Yorker published bombshell reports in October detailing those against the producer Harvey Weinstein have included some of the biggest names in entertainment, media, and politics. 
 
 But Damon says not all the men in Hollywood are despicable. 
 
 "We're in this watershed moment, and it's great, but I think one thing that's not being talked about is there are a whole s---load of guys — the preponderance of men I've worked with — who don't do this kind of thing and whose lives aren't going to be affected," Damon told Business Insider while promoting his new movie, "Downsizing," opening in theaters Friday. 
 
 "If I have to sign a sexual-harassment thing, I don't care, I'll sign it," he said. "I would have signed it before. I don't do that, and most of the people I know don't do that." 
 
 Damon has recently been under fire for comments he made about sexual misconduct in Hollywood. Late last week, in an interview for ABC News' "Popcorn with Peter Travers," Damon told the Rolling Stone critic that there was a "spectrum of behavior" to consider. 
 
 "There's a difference between, you know, patting someone on the butt and rape or child molestation, right?" Damon said. "Both of those behaviors need to be confronted and eradicated, without question, but they shouldn't be conflated, right?" 
 
 Damon said the allegations against Al Franken, the Minnesota senator who recently announced his resignation after eight women accused him of groping or forcibly kissing them, weren't in the "same category" as those against Weinstein, which range from harassment to rape. 
 
 Damon's comments drew criticism, including from Minnie Driver, his "Good Will Hunting" costar and ex-girlfriend, and Alyssa Milano, who helped bring awareness to Tarana Burke's #MeToo social-media movement encouraging women to come forward with their stories of sexual misconduct. 
 
 Business Insider also asked Damon whether the current climate in Hollywood had made him more conscious of the people he'd work with on future projects. Would he back out of a movie if an actor, director, or producer had been accused of sexual misconduct? 
 
 "That always went into my thinking," Damon said. "I mean, I wouldn't want to work with somebody who — life's too short for that. But the question of if somebody had allegations against them, you know, it would be a case-by-case basis. You go, 'What's the story here?'" ||||| "I did something inexcusable," Dunham writes in her guest editor letter for The Hollywood Reporter's Women in Entertainment issue of defending 'Girls' writer Murray Miller after he'd been accused of sexually assaulting an actress. 
 
 This year has been incredible for women in Hollywood. 
 
 There has been unprecedented dialogue about issues like wage equality and systemic bias and, most notably, sexual assault and harassment. We have spoken and we have spoken loudly, and our voices, once muffled under layers of crinoline and repressed rage, have been heard. 
 
 Heroines have emerged. We are cracking open windows and beating down doors. The air is circulating and the light is pouring in. There are magazine covers and TV specials and parties and instas celebrating the very real, very important and long overdue progress that has been made. 
 
 But with that progress, there have been mistakes, there has been pain. There has been a deep and gut-wrenching reckoning. And not just for men. 
 
 This year has been incredible for women in Hollywood. But I know I'm not alone when I say that this year has also been hell. 
 
 *** 
 
 The day that Harvey Weinstein was revealed to be a sexual predator — a secret that wasn't really a secret to women who make movies, a story we kept whispering to one another between passed appetizers — was thrilling. It felt like things were really changing. 
 
 That morning in October 2017 I cheered. I clapped. I wrote an op-ed. I was painfully unaware of how much the content of the news in the coming days would activate and disarm me, and even less aware that my plight wasn't at all unusual. I was not special because of my trauma, but I didn't know that I was part of an army. 
 
 So many of us have spent such a long time hiding our trauma. At least I know I had — even as a chronic oversharer, I tended to leave huge swaths of experience out of my story — and I walked around feeling like such a victim. Like so many women (so many people), I disguised my pain with medication and stuff and chronic overwork, with social media and mindless dating and the random day-to-day drama we generate to stay out of our own experience. I never stopped, much less stopped to consider that I might be capable of traumatizing somebody, too (the exact complaint I've always had about old white man artists). 
 
 And so I made a terrible mistake. When someone I knew, someone I had loved as a brother, was accused, I did something inexcusable: I publicly spoke up in his defense. There are few acts I could ever regret more in this life. I didn't have the "insider information" I claimed but rather blind faith in a story that kept slipping and changing and revealed itself to mean nothing at all. I wanted to feel my workplace and my world were safe, untouched by the outside world (a privilege in and of itself, the privilege of ignoring what hasn't hurt you) and I claimed that safety at cost to someone else, someone very special. 
 
 To Aurora: You have been on my mind and in my heart every day this year. I love you. I will always love you. I will always work to right that wrong. In that way, you have made me a better woman and a better feminist. You shouldn't have been given that job in addition to your other burdens, but here we are, and here I am asking: How do we move forward? Not just you and I but all of us, living in the gray space between admission and vindication. 
 
 It's painful to realize that, while I thought I was self-aware, I had actually internalized the dominant male agenda that asks us to defend it no matter what, protect it no matter what, baby it no matter what. Something in me still feels compelled to do that job: to please, to tidy up, to shopkeep. My job now is to excavate that part of myself and to create a new cavern inside me where a candle stays lit, always safely lit, and illuminates the wall behind it where these words are written: I see you, Aurora. I hear you, Aurora. I believe you, Aurora. 
 
 This space is yours to do with as you please, when you please. I will keep holding this space — it will always be here. 
 
 *** 
 
 People often come up to me and say, "You're so open and vulnerable. You have no shame." But I have spent the past decade hiding — my own pain, but also men's mistakes. I didn't want to tell anyone about the 70-year-old Hollywood luminary who was so angry that I rebuffed his kiss that he made me do 30 takes of the word "hello," or about the Oscar nominee who drove me to the place he lost his virginity while I asked again and again when I could be dropped home. I didn't want anyone to know about the pseudo boyfriend who tied me up with my special-occasion stockings and forced himself inside me anally, or about my father's friend who asked me to lunch but that I not tell my father we were meeting. I shared the story of my college date rape publicly and found the response to be hostile and re-traumatizing. I didn't want people to know which male writers and stars had raged at me. And I thought that was my job, to absorb their misery and smile like I wanted more. I gave up on the idea that I could protect myself because, as my best friend Scotty says, "When the particular brand of validation you've received is abuse, you'll take it and like it and thank them for it a thousand times." 
 
 What I didn't know as I grappled with what made me so particularly vulnerable to violation is that I actually wasn't particularly vulnerable. In many respects, I was lucky — privileged and powerful — and that luck had shaded my experience. It took the chorus of voices of women much braver — more open and honest than I've ever been — to expose the fact that these are not isolated incidents. I went from thinking I was the only person in the room to stepping back and taking in the majesty of all these female voices, speaking despite all odds. It comforted me, but it may have also saved me. And if we really stay determined to listen, they can save us. 
 
 I won't lie: It's a hard year to make a list of reasons I love working in Hollywood. You can feel grateful while also feeling weary, and you can step back while also cheering, and there's all manner of contradiction in my relationship to this business. But the reason I arrived at 22, my hair badly blown out and my miniskirt on backwards, is that I love stories. Telling them. Hearing them. Living them. We are living in an age of pain, but it's also an age of heroism. And I love stories about heroes. Especially lady heroes. 
 
 Aurora — your bravery, openness, forgiveness, dignity and grace in the face of legal proceedings and endless questioning and in the face of my statement has been astounding. You've been a model of stoicism, all the while reminding other women that their assault experiences are theirs to process as they wish (with noise, with silence, with rage — it's all OK). You have generously allowed me to speak about your many virtues here and tell these readers that you are moving on as a woman and as an artist. You have inspired me to do the same, and I know I'm not alone. 
 
 Aurora's mother, Brittany, is fierce, powerful, a born leader, a patient mother, the kind of woman I hope to be. Getting to know her has been the unexpected gift that came from being humbled and reassessing so much over the past year: about women and power. 
 
 There are some who will think I am writing this to curry public favor (that's OK, though, I stopped thinking that was an option for me somewhere around 2014, and that's some kind of freedom). I have the only women I want or need in my life. And this is the Women in Entertainment issue, and women in entertainment need healing. Sometimes healing starts with the words: I'm sorry. 
 
 I'm sorry. 
 
 Moving forward from trauma is never easy, but there are brave women doing it for us. All we have to do is listen. 
 
 Love and more of that, 
 
 Lena 
 
 This story first appeared in the 2018 Women in Entertainment Power 100 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine.
– Matt Damon opined this week that the wave of sex harassment and assault claims sweeping Hollywood and society at large include "a spectrum of behavior" and that "none of us came here perfect," and the woman he once dumped on Oprah wasted no time in shutting him down. "Gosh it’s so interesting (profoundly unsurprising) how men with all these opinions about women’s differentiation between sexual misconduct, assault and rape reveal themselves to be utterly tone deaf and as a result, systemically part of the problem," Minnie Driver tweeted. She further unloaded to the Guardian: "I’ve realized that most men, good men, the men that I love, there is a cut-off. They simply cannot understand what abuse is like on a daily level. I honestly think that until we get on the same page, you can’t tell a woman about their abuse. ... It is so individual and so personal, it’s galling when a powerful man steps up and starts dictating the terms, whether he intends it or not.” Damon was also getting zero sympathy from Alyssa Milano, reports USA Today, who tweeted that, "as a victim of each component of the sexual assault spectrum of which you speak," "they all hurt." "We are not outraged because someone grabbed our a---s in a picture. We are outraged because we were made to feel this was normal. We are outraged because we have been gaslighted. We are outraged because we were silenced for so long." (Damon has said he had no idea that Harvey Weinstein routinely sexually harassed and assaulted women; his full interview this week with ABC News is here.)