Megan Fox is clarifying past remarks she’s made about Michael Bay. Fox took to social media to clarify remarks she’d made to Jimmy Kimmel and in other interviews about the director sexualizing her at age 15.
Fox told Jimmy Kimmel in 2009: “They were shooting this club scene, and they brought me in, and I was wearing a stars-and-stripes bikini and a red cowboy hat and, like, six-inch heels. And they took me to Mike and he approved it,” she 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 hand.’ So his solution to that problem was to then have me dancing underneath a waterfall, getting soaking wet, at 15. I was in 10th grade. That’s sort of a microcosm of how Bay’s mind works.”
She also told Wonderland magazine around the same time that the Transformers director would tell her to “be hot,” or “just be sexy,” when she asked him what to do on-set.
Kimmel’s response to Fox’s admission is also coming under fire.
He said in 2009: “Well, that’s really a microcosm of how all our minds work. Some of us have the decency to repress those thoughts and pretend that they don’t exist.”
Fox’s statement reads: “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 it’s currently being projected.”
She continued: “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.”
She also clarified that she was “never assaulted or prayed upon” by the director.
“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,” she wrote. “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.”
