Minnie Driver on Matt Damon’s Comments: ‘Let Women Do the Speaking Up Right Now’
Minnie Driver takes issue with Matt Damon‘s recent comments about the sexual misconduct epidemic in Hollywood.
In a frank interview with UK’s The Guardian, the actress called out Damon’s comments about there being a “spectrum” of sexual abuse, noting that the Oscar-winning actor was missing the point.
“That’s a problem,” Driver said. “If good men like Matt Damon are thinking like that then we’re in a lot of fucking trouble. We need good intelligent men to say this is all bad cross the board, condemn it all and start again.”
The pair costarred in the 1997 film Good Will Hunting and dated briefly in the late 1990s.
In an interview for ABC’s Popcorn with Peter Travers, Damon last week said that while he lauded the men and women who had come forward with their stories as part of the #MeToo movement, he didn’t think that all allegations should be treated equally.
“I do believe there’s a spectrum of behavior,” he said at the time. “You know, there’’ a difference between, you know, patting someone on the butt and rape or child molestation, right? Both of those behaviors need to be confronted and eradicated without question, but they shouldn’t be conflated.”
Driver criticized Damon’s way of thinking about misconduct, calling it dangerous and “Orwellian.”
“I felt that what Matt Damon was saying was an Orwellian idea, we are all equal except that some of us are more equal than others,” she said. “Put abuse in there … that all abuse is equal but some is worse. There is no hierarchy of abuse – that if a woman is raped [it] is worse than if a woman has a penis exposed to her that she didn’t want or ask for … you cannot tell those women that one is supposed to feel worse than the other. And it certainly can’t be prescribed by a man. The idea of tone deafness is the idea there [is] no equivalency.”
Last week, shortly after a preview of Damon’s interview premiered, Driver and other Hollywood actors took to Twitter to question the Downsizing star’s comments.
“Gosh it’s so interesting (profoundly unsurprising) how men with all these opinions about women’s differentiation between sexual misconduct, assault and rape reveal themselves to be utterly tone deaf and as a result, systemically part of the problem,” she wrote at the time.
In Sunday’s interview, Driver had a suggestion for how past and future allegations should be received and commented on by the public.
“How about: it’s all fucking wrong and it’s all bad, and until you start seeing it under one umbrella it’s not your job to compartmentalize or judge what is worse and what is not,” she said. “Let women do the speaking up right now. The time right now is for men just to listen and not have an opinion about it for once.”