Olivia Munn has revealed she was once offered more than $1 million to keep quiet about a ‘traumatic’ incident on a movie set.
Appearing on the inaugural episode of Monica Lewinsky’s new podcast, called Reclaiming, the 44-year-old actress opened up about the experience.
After divulging that she was treated poorly on the set of a film she did not name, she added, ‘There were other things that happened on this movie set, personally, to me, that [were] really not OK. And it was so traumatic that I had to file complaints with the studio.’
The mother-of-two also noted that she saw ‘a lot of other little’ red flags while shooting the project, although she didn’t explicitly name them.
‘But it got to this place where I was offered a lot of money,’ Munn told Lewinsky. ‘A lot of money — seven figures to accept, I guess [what was] their apology and them taking acknowledgement of it.’
The star, who shares two children with husband John Mulaney, said the hush money offer ‘came along with an NDA.’
Olivia Munn has revealed she was once offered more than $1 million to keep quiet about a ‘traumatic’ incident on a movie set
Appearing on the inaugural episode of Monica Lewinsky ’s new podcast, called Reclaiming, the 44-year-old actress opened up about the experience
She noted, ‘…Not that I would ever have talked about it [anyway], truly — because I just wanted to move past it all.’
Munn also said in the interview that she was a victim of bullying as a child, subsequently shaping her into a ‘really feisty’ person who valued ‘justice.’
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‘So things were really black and white for me and I would make decisions without thinking them through enough,’ the Hollywood siren recalled of her childhood.
‘I just was like, “This is wrong, this is right,” and I would never really be able to see the gray,’ she reflected.
Connecting it to the on-set incident, she noted, ‘That’s why I don’t want to talk about the specific things that happened in that situation. But I said, “I’m not signing an NDA,” and they said, “You have to,” and I just felt that it was so wrong.’
Olivia also told Monica that the ordeal was ‘specifically’ distressing because it ‘was at the beginning of the #MeToo-Time’s Up’ movement, in which a wave of women in the film industry came forward with incidents of Sєxual harᴀssment.
She went on, ‘This was, like, the reckoning, the Harvey Weinstein reckoning that began it all.
‘This was that time period, and this was when people were targeting anyone who signed an NDA saying, “Oh, you only did it for the money,” so I was afraid that my voice and speaking up would reverse any kind of validity to my voice.’
In a meeting that involved her and the other side’s attorneys, ‘I turned to my lawyer and I said, “I’m not taking it,”‘ she remembered.
She emphasized, ‘I told my lawyer, “I’m just not gonna do it. I want to say no now.” And he was like, “Let’s think about it.” And I said, “I want to say no now!”‘
After divulging that she was treated poorly on the set of a film she did not name, she added, ‘It got to this place where I was offered a lot of money,’ Munn told Lewinsky. ‘A lot of money -seven figures to accept, I guess [what was] their apology and them taking acknowledgement of it’
Olivia pictured with husband John Mulaney on February 15
Munn and Mulaney share two children – son Malcolm, three, and daughter Méi, five months
Tying it back to her prior ‘feisty,’ ‘black-white’ mindset, she mused, ‘That comes into the feistiness of not thinking things through and being so upset and frustrated that this would be offered to me that I did not think about negotiating, I did not think about anything besides how disrespectful that was.’
Continuing the story and how she communicated with her lawyer, she recounted, ‘I said to him, “I know this is a lot of money to you but it is not a lot of money to me to lose my voice.”
‘And we walked out of there and I remember feeling so proud when I walked out — so proud of myself.’
Ultimately, Olivia is satisfied with her decision. ‘Look, was it the right thing to do and do the people in my life think that I did the right thing and are proud of me for that? Yes,’ she ᴀsserted.
These days, the actress is soaking up family time with her husband and two kids. She and Mulaney share son Malcolm, three, and daughter Méi, five months.