I was abused as teen on director’s casting couch, says Thandie Newton

London: Thandie Newton, who helped lead London’s “One Billion Rising” protest - an international campaign to end violence against women - on Friday, has revealed that she was abused as a teenage actress on a casting couch.

The 40-year-old actress said that she was still scarred by the “horrific” incident involving a male director, whom she refused to name, when she was 18 and was looking for her “big break.” Newton, who is married to the film producer Oliver Parker, said that she later found out that the director involved had shown a video of her ordeal to others in show business, the Daily Mail reported. The mother of two said that at the time she didn’t know how to react as it was conducted in what she describes as a “professional environment.” Referring to the incident that happened when she was 18, she said that it was a screen test and there were two other people in the room – the director and the casting director, who was a woman. She asserted that the director asked her to sit with her legs apart – the camera was positioned where it could see up her skirt – and to put her leg over the arm of the chair. Newton added that before she started her dialogue, she was told to think about the character she was supposed to be having the dialogue with and how it felt to be made love to by this person. She added that three years later, she discovered that the video was being shown by the director to other people in the show business. ANI