Numerous women have come forward with horrific stories of sexual misconduct and assault by director Brett Ratner. Today, Ellen Page broke her silence regarding her encounter with Ratner on the set of X-Men: The Last Stand in a heartbreaking Facebook post.
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Page was just 18 when she played Kitty Pryde in the third X-Men film, which was Brett Ratner’s first in the franchise. According to Page, an openly gay woman, Ratner directed threatening and homophobic slurs at her during a cast and crew “meet and greet” event before the cameras began to roll.
“‘You should f*** her to make her realize she’s gay.’ He said this about me during a cast and crew ‘meet and greet’ before we began filming X-Men: The Last Stand,” Page wrote to begin her post. “I was eighteen years old. He looked at a woman standing next to me, ten years my senior, pointed to me and said: ‘You should f*** her to make her realize she’s gay.’ He was the film’s director, Brett Ratner.”
As she continued the post, Page described how much this interaction affected her after it occurred.
“I was a young adult who had not yet come out to myself. I knew I was gay, but did not know, so to speak. I felt violated when this happened. I looked down at my feet, didn’t say a word and watched as no one else did either. This man, who had cast me in the film, started out months of filming at a work event with this horrific, unchallenged plea. He ‘outed’ me with no regard to my well-being, an act we all recognize as homophobic. I proceeded to watch him on set say degrading things to women. I remember a woman walking by the monitor as he made a comment about her ‘flappy p*****.’”
Page uses the rest of the post to talk about the sexual assault epidemic plaguing Hollywood, and how most of the women affected don’t have a platform to speak up. She ended the column by thanking those who have spoken out recently, saying, “You are breaking the silence. You are the revolution.”
You can read Page’s entire post here on her Facebook page.
