The latest actress to come forward with a Harvey Weinstein encounter is Lupita Nyong'o, and its rehashing leaves her feeling "sick in the pit of my stomach." In a very detailed New York Times op-ed, the actress perhaps best known for her Oscar-winning performance in 12 Years a Slave recounts first meeting Weinstein at an awards ceremony in 2011, while she was a student at the Yale School of Drama. The introduction led Weinstein to invite her to his Connecticut home for a private movie screening with his family, an invitation she accepted. During the screening, however, Weinstein led her into his bedroom and announced he would give her a massage. A panicked Nyong'o said she would instead give him a back massage (she'd been learning massage techniques in school) and proceeded to do so—until he told her he wanted to remove his pants.
Nyong'o objected and left the room as he began doing so, and Weinstein's driver brought her home. "I didn’t quite know how to process the massage incident," she writes. "I reasoned that it had been inappropriate and uncalled-for, but not overtly sexual." They remained in touch, and Nyong'o eventually accepted a dinner invitation, thinking it was a group event. It wasn't, and she quotes Weinstein as saying, "Let’s cut to the chase. I have a private room upstairs where we can have the rest of our meal." She was "stunned" and refused his offer, despite his protests that she was being naive and that this was how things were done in the industry. He put her in a cab. Until the scandal, Nyong'o didn't realize she had so many "allies in this." "Now that we are speaking, let us never shut up about this kind of thing." Read the full op-ed. (More Lupita Nyong'o stories.)
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