Olivia Munn says she once refused at least a million dollars to agree to stay silent over a traumatic incident that took place on a movie set.
The New Girl and The Newsroom actress was talking to Monica Lewinsky for this week’s episode of her podcast Reclaiming (below) where she recalled the experience. While Munn didn’t detail the incident, or name the film, she said it took place around the beginning of the #MeToo era, which got underway around 2017.
“There were things that happened on this movie set, personally to me, that were really not OK and it was so traumatic that I had to file complaints with the studio,” Munn said. “It got to this place where I was offered a lot of money, a lot of money — seven figures — to accept their apology. But it 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 continued. “And 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. It was the beginning of the #MeToo era and Times Up … when people were targeting anyone who signed an NDA and saying, ‘Oh, you only did it for the money.’ So I was afraid, right, that [by signing the NDA it would] reverse any kind of validity to [what happened] …. I was concerned that the studio, in an effort to diminish my voice, would leak that I had signed an NDA for money.”
Munn recalled that her lawyer urged her to take some time to think it over, but that she insisted that her decision was firm and that she wanted to tell the other side’s legal team herself. “One person said to me, ‘This is a lot of money, you’d be crazy not to take this,’” she recalled. “And I said to him, ‘I know this is a lot of money to you, but it is not a lot of money for me to lose my voice.’ And we walked out of there, and I remember feeling so proud when I walked out.’”
But then, she recalled with a laugh, came a twist: “Shortly after that, California made NDAs illegal” — so if she had taken the deal, it wouldn’t have been enforceable away.
While Munn wouldn’t say she regretted the decision, she noted, “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’s something I’ve had to learn to reign in and use for my benefit, and I’ve learned to think about things and take the time and talk it out.”
Munn has spoken out multiple times about on-set misbehavior. In 2017, she was one of six women who accused director Brett Ratner of sexual harassment, with Munn alleging Ratner masturbated in front of her when she was visiting the set of his 2004 film After the Sunset. And when Munn was filming the 2018 movie Predators, she went to studio 20th Century Fox about having to act opposite a registered sex offender who was a longtime friend of director Shane Black.
