Pamela Anderson said it was ‘common knowledge’ Harvey Weinstein was dangerous and told how she avoided being stuck alone with him in an interview on Thursday morning.
The Playboy veteran laughed as she said she was not surprised the onslaught of sexaul assault allegations against the movie mogul and described how he once phoned her to bully her about a film she was in.
Appearing on Megyn Kelly Today, Anderson, 50, said: ‘I think it was common knowledge. That certain people or certain producers in Hollywood are people to avoid privately.
‘You know what you’re getting in to if you go to a hotel room, alone.’
In what appeared to be a jibe at his victims, she said it was ‘no excuse’ to presume the meetings were safe just because they were set up by agents, a claim which has been made by actresses including Gwyneth Paltrow as they detailed their run-ins with Weinstein.
Pamela Anderson said it was ‘common knowledge’ Harvey Weinstein posed a threat to women during an interview on Thursday
‘I just think there’s easy ways to remedy that. That’s not a good excuse,’ Anderson said.
Earlier, she said she had long learned how to avoid being put in the very situation many of Weinstein’s accusers described.
‘I learned not to put myself in those positions. When i came to hollywood, I had a lot of offers to do private auditions and things that just made no sense, just common sense.
‘Don’t go into a hotel room alone. If someone answers the door in a bathrobe, leave.
‘Things that are common sense but I know Hollywood is very seductive and people want to be famous and sometimes you think you’re going to be safe with an adult in the room and, I don’t know where this security comes form but somehow I dodged it all.’
While she never encountered any sexual confrontation from Weinstein, she did give an anecdote of how he once bullied her over the phone as they worked on the 2008 film Superhero in which she played The Invisible Girl.
‘He’s very intimidating. I was doing a movie superheroes or something and I played the invisible girl with an invisible dog. As a PETA activist, I don’t work with animals in film because they’re treated horribly. I said, “If I have an invisible dog, I just want to make sure there’s no dog there because I can’t do the film if if there’s going to be a dog in the film. That’s it”.
While she said she never had any physical confrontation with him, Anderson described the mogul as ‘very intimidating’
Anderson recalled a phone call during which Weinstein allegedly yelled at her and told her she would never work again unless she did as he told her while they were working on the movie Superhero in 2008
‘Then he called and said “you little, you’re so lucky that I put you in a film and you’re Pamela Anderson and you don’t deserve anything and if you don’t do this thing, you’ll never work in this town again.”
‘Never in my life have I been talked to like that, and I’ve had some bad boyfriends,’ she said.
Anderson said she had been forced to fight off inappropriate advances and offers long before the Weinstein revelations emerged and that she had turned down ‘money, homes and cars’ from men who wanted to sleep with her.
‘I’ve been offered lots of things. A condo and a porsche to be someone’s number one girl. I just naively said, “Well there must be a number 2 then, so I’m not interested.”
‘Money, homes, roles in movies. And I just didn’t want to do it that way. I had no desire. I’m a romantic and it didn’t appeal to me.’ Anderson has spoken in the past of how she was sexually abused as a child.
In the second part of her interview with Kelly, she described her friendship with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and described him as ‘smart, funny and brilliant’.
Anderson has been known to visit Assange at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London where he has been seeking refuge for years.