Susan Sarandon has announced that she’s glad Hillary Clinton lost the election because she’s ‘very dangerous’ and America would be ‘at war.’
The outspoken actress faced a furious backlash from the left who accused her of allowing Donald Trump to win because she’d refused to vote for Clinton in the US election.
She had instead chosen to back independent Jill Stein, after Bernie Sanders lost in the Democratic primary.
But the 71-year-old says she has no regrets.
Susan Sarandon has announced that she’s glad Hillary Clinton lost the election because she’s ‘very dangerous’ and America would be ‘at war’
The outspoken actress faced fierce criticism from the left after the US election, as many liberals furiously accused her of allowing Donald Trump (right) to win because she’d refused to vote for Hillary Clinton (left)
‘I did think she was very, very dangerous,’ Sarandon told the Guardian of Clinton. ‘We would still be fracking, we would be at war [if she was president]. It wouldn’t be much smoother. Look what happened under Obama that we didn’t notice.’
She said that while former president Barack Obama had ‘really hard about healthcare’ and ‘it was very important to have a black family in the White House’, she says he deported even more people than Trump – he just did it ‘sneakily.’
Sarandon hasn’t always been such a staunch Clinton opponent. In 2001, she even backed her for the Senate and posed with the former First Lady during her run.
But that all changed when Clinton voted for the war in Iraq.
Since then Sarandon has refused to support the former Secretary of State – even if that meant alienating herself from her fellow liberals.
She’d been attacked by Clinton supporters online, including Will and Grace star Debra Messing who tweeted: ‘Susan Sarandon muses tht Trump prezcy wud b better 4 the country thn Hillary.Wonder if she’d say that if she were poor,gay,Muslim or immgrnt to [sic].’
Sarandon hasn’t always been such a staunch Clinton opponent. In 2001, she even backed her for the Senate and posed with the former First Lady during her run. Pictured: Sarandon greets Clinton, during a rally in 2006, on Capitol Hill
The pair got into a mudslinging match on Twitter, with Sarandon accusing her rival of ‘RT-ing personal attacks’ against her before finally finishing the exchange by tweeting: ‘Alright @DebraMessing report me to the homeroom teacher and let’s STOP.’
Their feud was revisited this year when Andy Cohen asked socialist Sarandon about the incident during an appearance on his talk show in May.
‘You know, I think she’s not very well informed, so sometimes she gets in areas that she really hasn’t thought through,’ she said. ‘She’s Trumpian a little bit like that, so I don’t have anything against her personally. I just sometimes I have to say, ‘But you don’t have the information.”
The Thelma and Louise star said she’s even had to change her phone number since the election after receiving a slew of violent, threatening messages.
‘I got from Hillary people ‘I hope your crotch is grabbed’, ‘I hope you’re raped’. Misogynistic attacks.’
‘I would much rather talk about how to keep my country unified,’ said Messing, who started a Twitter feud with Sarandon last year because the 70-year-old wouldn’t support Hillary Clinton
Outspoken: The Will & Grace star didn’t hold back when slamming Oscar winner Susan
She said that when she recently took a stand on Dreamers, a program to allow children who entered the US illegally to gain citizenship, after Trump threatened to revoke it. But when she showed her support, she had another wave of abuse from the left blaming her for not voting for Clinton.
‘How dare you! You who are responsible for this!’ she said the messages read.
However, Sarandon appears to take it all in her stride.
She says it’s ‘flattering’ that some assume her voice held so much sway over the population but she didn’t find the attacks upsetting. And her friends have stood by her through it all.
‘It’s upsetting to me more from the point of view of thinking they haven’t learned. I don’t need to be vindicated.’
The actress insists her vote for Stein wasn’t a ‘protest vote’ but she’d told people at the time, ‘Get your information, I’m going to vote for change, because I was hoping that Stein was going to get whatever percentage she needed – but I knew she wasn’t going to make the difference in the election.’
The Rocky Horror Show has said previously she voted ‘by issues: I don’t vote with my vagina.’
When asked about Harvey Weinstein (pictured) and the broader Hollywood sex scandal, she said that not every woman seduced by men ‘smoother at seducing than James Toback and Harvey Weinstein’ felt like a victim
‘I’m sure… a lot of women felt very flattered to be sleeping with (men other than James Toback, pictured, and Weinstein), even if they didn’t get the job.
Sarandon may have starred in one of the most acclaimed feminist films of all time, Thelma and Louise, but she has only just started referring to herself as a feminist.
And when asked about Harvey Weinstein and the broader Hollywood sex scandal, she said that not every woman seduced by men ‘smoother at seducing than James Toback and Harvey Weinstein’ felt like a victim.
‘I’m sure… a lot of women felt very flattered to be sleeping with (men other than Toback and Weinstein), even if they didn’t get the job.
‘There’s just a culture, starting in the 60s and 70s, where there was a certain amount of liberation that made it possible for those things to happen without even seeing yourself as a victim.’
But she concedes there are lots who said no, and when they tried to report it they were dealt with a shrug.
‘I think the big question here is that if Harvey Weinstein exposed himself to you when you were on a yacht in Cannes and you told everybody – this is Angie Everhart’s story – and everyone said: ‘Well, that’s just Harvey’ and it wasn’t a big deal – those are the people who are perpetuating it, too.’
‘A lot of that has changed. And a lot of women are assessing how they feel; were they victimized or did they feel that it was their own choice?’
She says it’s ‘flattering’ that some assume her voice held so much sway over the population but she didn’t find the attacks upsetting. And her friends have stood by her through it all. Sarandon is pictured at the Emmy Awards on September 17, in LA
Thankfully, Sarandon says she was never put in a situation where ‘no’ wasn’t enough.
She said that she had never been cornered, battered or forced against her will.
‘It was an invitation: ‘Yeah, why don’t you spend the night now that you’re here in the middle of nowhere on location?’ And I said: ‘No, I gotta get back to my room.’ But I didn’t feel super offended, because it wasn’t a thing that became super difficult.’
But she has found herself rejected for roles or told she wasn’t ‘sexual enough’ after they realized she was married.
Today, she believed that imbalance of power between the sexes is being corrected, thanks to the female directors and producers breaking through to make their own movies. But it’s slow going.