Olivia Munn recently appeared on Monica Lewinsky’s “Reclaiming” podcast and revealed she once turned down an offer worth millions of dollars from a studio to sign an NDA after she endured a “traumatic” incident on a movie set. Munn did not name the movie or go into detail about the incident.
“I had to file complaints with the studio, and there’s a lot of other little things that go along with it, but it got to this place where I was offered a lot of money,” Munn said (via E! Online). “Seven figures to accept, I guess, their apology and them taking acknowledgement of it, but it came along with an NDA. Not that I ever would talk about it truly, because I wanted to move past it all. But I said I’m not signing an NDA, and they said I have to.”
“I just felt it was so wrong,” she continued. “And at this time specifically, this was in the beginning of #MeToo and Times Up. 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.”
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Munn said she was also hesitant to sign an NDA because she was afraid the studio behind the movie “would leak it out” in “an effort to diminish my voice.” After meeting with lawyers, she walked out of the studio meeting without signing the document.
“I remember feeling so proud when I walked out — so proud of myself,” Munn said, noting that her feistiness and anger over the NDA offer drove her decision. “I did not think about negotiating. I did not think about anything besides how disrespectful that was. … 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. It’s not that I wouldn’t have ended up with the same decision, it’s that I made that decision based on anger, and that is something I had to learn how to do rein in and use for my benefit.”
Munn has been outspoken throughout her career regarding injustices on set. She accused director Brett Ratner of sexual harassment in 2017, alleging to The Los Angeles Times that he masturbated in front of her in his trailer when she visited set of his movie “After the Sunset” in 2004. A year after coming forward, Munn went public again to reveal that she reported to 20th Century Fox during the making of 2018’s “Predators” that director Shane Black hired his friend and registered sex offender Steven Wilder Striegel to appear in a small role opposite her. Black ultimately apologized.
Watch Munn’s full appearance on the “Reclaiming” podcast in the video below.