This past weekend, a clip from 2009 went viral featuring actress Megan Fox when was on Jimmy Kimmel Live! to talk about Transformers: Rise of the Fallen.
In it, she talks about being sexualized by director Michael Bay on another movie, 2004’s Bad Boys II, back when she was 15.
At the time her story was treated as a joke. But in 2020, the response has been, well, quite a bit different.

“I was wearing a stars and stripes bikini and a red cowboy hat and six-inch heels, and he approved it,” Megan recalled. “They said, you know, Michael, she’s 15, so you can’t sit her at the bar and she can’t have a drink in her hands. So his solution to that problem was to then have me dancing underneath the waterfall, getting soaking wet.”
READ MORE: Check Out the Latest Megan Fox News
At this point the audience didn’t gasp in horror; they laughed and applauded. Fox then clarified what they found amusing. “I’m 15, I was in 10th grade,” she reiterated. “That’s sort of a microcosm of how Bay’s mind works.”

And then Jimmy Kimmel joked, “Yeah, well, that’s really a microcosm of how all our minds work — but some of us have the decency to repress those thoughts and pretend that they don’t exist.”
Yikes. I’m guessing Jimmy is happy that he’s taking the summer off.
Yesterday (June 22, 2020), Fox took to Instagram on June 22, the day after the clip started to go viral, saying, “May we all continue waking up.”
While Fox has experienced misogyny in Hollywood, she said she didn’t feel that way while working with Michael Bay or Steven Spielberg. She also wasn’t ready to call anyone out by name.

Below is Megan Fox’s full statement:
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.
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 events and cast a sinister shadow that doesn’t really, in my opinion, belong. At least not where its currently being projected…
I was around 15 or 16 years old when I was an extra in Bad Boys II. There are multiple interviews where I shared the anecdote of being chosen for the scene and the conversations that took place surrounding it. It’s important to note however that when I auditioned for Transformers I was 19 or 20.

I did ‘work’ (me pretending to know how to hold a wrench) on one of Michael’s Ferrari’s 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.
So as far as this particular audition story 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.
Please hear me when I thank you for your support. But 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.

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.
But when it comes to my direct experiences with Michael, and Steven for that matter, I was never assaulted or preyed upon in what I felt was a sexual manner.
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.
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