Matt Damon and George Clooney opened up about the sexual misconduct allegations against Harvey Weinstein while promoting their upcoming film Suburbicon on Good Morning America on Monday, October 23. During the interview, Damon admitted that he and Ben Affleck knew Gwyneth Paltrow was allegedly sexually harassed by the film producer.
“I knew the story about Gwyneth from Ben because he was with her after [her relationship with] Brad [Pitt],” the Oscar winner, 47, told GMA contributor Michael Strahan. “I never talked to Gwyneth about it. Ben told me. But I knew that they had come to whatever agreement or understanding that they had come to. She had handled it, and she was the first lady of Miramax. And he treated her incredibly respectfully, always.”
As previously reported, Paltrow, 45, told The New York Times earlier this month that Weinstein, 65, invited her to his hotel suite in 1996 for a work meeting that allegedly ended with him asking for a massage. “I was a kid … I was petrified,” she told the newspaper. The actress told then-boyfriend Pitt about the alleged encounter, and he later confronted the former executive “very clearly and strongly and unequivocally” at a movie premiere, a source confirmed to Us Weekly.
Still, Damon and Clooney, 56, insist they had no idea about the multiple misconduct allegations. “When people say, ‘Everybody knew,’ like yeah, I knew he was an a–hole. He was proud of that. That’s how he carried himself,” the Good Will Hunting actor explained. “I knew he was a womanizer. You know, I wouldn’t want to be married to the guy. But that’s not my business really. This level of criminal sexual predation was not something I ever thought was going on.”
The ER alum, meanwhile, claimed that Weinstein had told him that he had extramarital affairs with “some actresses who were friends of mine,” but Clooney did not believe him at the time. “The fact that the story is coming out now and the more it comes out, I want to know all of it,” he said on GMA.
Clooney then applauded the many women who have spoken out against the studio head, who has denied “any allegations of non-consensual sex.” Clooney even spoke to his wife, human rights attorney Amal Clooney, about her own experiences with sexual harassment in her field.
“She could find in her line of work … there have been plenty of instances where some guy has tried to make their move,” the Ocean’s Eleven actor explained. “Many, if not most, women have at some point in their life faced this kind of behavior. I think that’s a little bit of a surprise to some of us. That it’s this big. Maybe that’s something else that’s good that comes out of this, is that … we’re going to have these discussions. We’re going to have this conversation. And again we’re going to make it harder for it to happen.”
