Megan Fox Responds to the Outrage Over Her Viral Story About Director Michael Bay
Megan Fox is speaking out about a renewed conversation online about her working relationship with director Michael Bay on films like Bad Boys II and Transformers.
In case you missed it, here's what's going on. A 2009 interview Fox did with Jimmy Kimmel started circulating again on Twitter. In it, she describes being an extra during a club scene in Bad Boys II, in which she wore a “stars and stripes bikini” and “six-inch heels." She was only 15 at the time, so she couldn't be seated at the bar or holding a drink. Instead, she was shot dancing under a waterfall and getting “soaking wet.”
“That's sort of a microcosm of how Bay's mind works,” she says in the clip, to which Kimmel glibly jokes that it's a “microcosm of how all our minds work.”
Another item being discussed is something a Guardian film critic named Jason Solomons says Fox told him in 2009. “She told me she went to director Michael Bay's house to audition and he made her wash his Ferrari while he filmed her,” he wrote. “She said she didn't know what had happened to that footage. When I put it to Bay himself, he looked suitably abashed.”
After the clip and comments went viral again, Fox felt the need to address the situation directly with an Instagram post.
“I know that a discussion has erupted online surrounding some of my experiences in Hollywood and the subsequent mishandling of this information by the media and society in general,” she wrote. “While I greatly appreciate the outpouring of support, I do feel I need to clarify some of the details as they have been lost in the retelling of the event and cast a sinister shadow that doesn't really, in my opinion, belong. At least, not where it's currently being projected…."
She goes on to note that while she was 15 or 16 during Bad Boys II, she was 19 or 20 when she auditioned for Transformers, and that audition did not take place at Bay's home. "I did ‘work' (me pretending to know how to hold a wrench) on one of Michael's Ferraris during one of the audition scenes. It was at the Platinum Dunes studio parking lot, there were several other crew members and employees present, and I was at no point undressed or anything similar," she said. "I was not underaged at the time and I was not made to ‘wash' or work on someone's cars in a way that was extraneous from the material in the actual script. I hope that whatever opinions are formed around these episodes will at least be seeded in the facts of the events."
Fox thanked fans their support and acknowledged that her Hollywood career has certainly involved sexist behavior. "These specific instances were inconsequential in a long and arduous journey along which I have endured some genuinely harrowing experiences in a ruthlessly misogynistic industry,” she said. "There are many names that deserve to be going viral in cancel culture right now, but they are safely stored in the fragmented recesses of my heart."
She clarifies she “was never assaulted or preyed upon” in what she felt was a “sexual manner” in her direct work with Bay or Steven Spielberg (an executive producer on Transformers). "I'm thankful to all of you who are brave enough to speak out and I'm grateful to all of you who are taking it upon yourselves to support, uplift, and bring comfort to those who have been harmed by a violent and toxic societal paradigm," Fox wrote.
E! reports that Bay and Spielberg have not commented on Fox's statement.
Read Fox's complete post, below:
Originally Appeared on Glamour
