Olivia Munn claimed she was offered over $1 million to stay quiet about a “traumatic” incident on a movie set.
During an appearance on Monica Lewinsky’s “Reclaiming” podcast Tuesday, the “Predator” actress discussed how her “tumultuous upbringing” affected her values as an adult — and trickled into her career.
Munn revealed she was relentlessly bullied as a child, which caused her to “become really feisty” and value “justice” above all else.
“So things were really black and white for me and I would make decisions without thinking them through enough,” she explained. “I just was like, ‘This is wrong, this is right,’ and I would never really be able to see the gray.”
Munn said a “really great example of how it affected [her] adult life” was when she experienced poor treatment while working on an unnamed project.
“There were other things that happened on this movie set personally to me that was really not OK and it was so traumatic that I had to file complaints with the studio,” she told Lewinsky.
The actress noted that there were “a lot of other little” red flags on set but didn’t reveal exactly what went down.
“But it got to this place where I was offered a lot of money,” Munn said. “A lot of money — seven figures to accept I guess their apology and them taking acknowledgement of it.”
However, the payout “came along with an NDA.”
“Not that I would ever have talked about it, truly, because I just wanted to move past it all,” she said.
“That’s why I don’t want to talk about the specific things that happened in that situation but I said, ‘I’m not signing an NDA,’ and they said, ‘You have to,’ and I just felt that it was so wrong.”
Munn said the situation was “specifically” upsetting because it “was at the beginning of the #MeToo-Time’s Up” movement.
“This was, like, the reckoning, the Harvey Weinstein reckoning that began it all,” she continued. “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.”
Munn was “concerned” that the movie studio “would leak out that [she] had signed an NDA for money” in “an effort to diminish [her] voice.”
While the “X-Men: Apocalypse” star agreed to take a meeting with the lawyers, she ultimately turned them down.
“I turned to my lawyer and I said, ‘I’m not taking it,’” she recalled. “I told my lawyer, ‘I’m just not gonna do it. I want to say no now.’ And he was like, ‘Let’s think about it.’ And I said, ‘I want to say no now!’”
“That comes into the feistiness of not thinking things through and being so upset and frustrated that this would be offered to me that I did not think about negotiating, I did not think about anything besides how disrespectful that was.”
Although the studio’s lawyers thought she was “crazy” not to take the deal, Munn walked out with her head held high.
“I said to him, ‘I know this is a lot of money to you but it is not a lot of money to me to lose my voice,’” she reflected. “And we walked out of there and I remember feeling so proud when I walked out — so proud of myself.”
While Munn would make the same decision again today, the situation was a big learning experience.
“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,” she mused.
“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.”
Although Munn stayed mum on the situation until now, she is no stranger when it comes to addressing injustices on set.
In her 2010 collection of essays, “Suck It, Wonder Woman!: The Misadventures of a Hollywood Geek,” Munn alleged that Brett Ratner masturbated in front of her on a film set in 2004.
While she didn’t originally name the director, she later identified him as more women came forward with accusations of sexual misconduct.
Then, in 2018, the actress spoke out about the casting of a sex offender in “Predator.”
Munn got her scene with Steven Wilder Striegel, a close friend of director Shane Black, cut from the film after learning he previously pleaded guilty to two felonies.
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