Actress and Harvey Weinstein accuser Lysette Anthony (pictured last year), 54, said women were facing a ‘huge backlash’
Harvey Weinstein’s victims are being shamed in a ‘huge backlash’, one of his British accusers has said, amid a row over a sexual assault claim against a leader of the Me Too movement.
Lysette Anthony, 54, who last year became the first Brit to accuse the disgraced Hollywood mogul of rape, said she had contemplated suicide over the ‘shame’ and that her son had been bullied at school as a result.
Saying that women were being victimised for speaking out about abuse, the Hollyoaks star said ‘people have been sitting around dinner tables looking to find us complicit’, according to The Sunday Times.
It comes after Asia Argento, a #MeToo campaigner who has said that Weinstein raped her, was embroiled in a row after she herself was accused of sexual assault.
Model-turned-actress Anthony told police last year that she had been attacked by the movie mogul in London in the late 1980s. Weinstein denies all the allegations of non-consensual sex against him.
She said: ‘The shame over years of degradation was enough to make me contemplate suicide at one point. A friend had to talk me down.
‘Please ask yourselves, what is the cost of owning up to being part of his bloody harem? Quite a lot.’
After making the accusation she said she had been ‘interviewed at length by detectives, district attorneys and more police than I can shake a stick at.’
Speaking about Argento, she said the Italian actress was being ‘hurled under a bus’ and ‘punished and vilified’ after she herself came under fire.
Harvey Weinstein was accused of rape by Lysette Anthony and Italian actress Asia Argento, who has since been accused of sexual assault. Argento and Weinstein are pictured in 2004
Text messages which emerged this week allegedly revealed the actress had sex with her former co-star Jimmy Bennett, when she was 37 and the boy just 17.
Earlier this month the New York Times reported she paid Bennett $380,000 in hush money after having sex with him in 2013. Argento denies the claims which she says are part of ‘a long-standing persecution’.
Argento pulled out of an appearance at Le Guess Who music festival in the Netherlands this weekend.
Weinstein, who has been accused of sexual assault by over 20 women, was arraigned on three charges in June and three more were added last month. He denies them.