Charlize Theron is standing firm on her decision not to name the Hollywood director that she accused of sexually harassing her.
Six years after coming forward about being asked to go to a director's house late at night for her first audition ever, the actress, 49, explained why she has not revealed his identity while appearing on Wednesday's episode of the Call Her Daddy podcast.
At the time, she alleged on The Howard Stern Show that the male director greeted her at his door wearing pajamas and, at one point, put his hand on her knee.
'The little voice inside me definitely said, "This isn't right," she recalled of the experience, which occurred early in her career. 'But then the other voice in me says, "Well, I don't know. Maybe it is right."'
While discussing the 1994 incident with Alex Cooper, the Oscar winner said the director personally reached out to her.
'This guy, he got a little nervous for a while there. I've never said his name because honestly, I don't want the story to be about him. It's not because I'm protecting him or anything, but he got nervous for a little bit,' she said.
When asked why the director felt uneasy with her sharing her story, Theron said: 'Because he heard me tell the story, and he knew it was about him, and he wrote me a pretend letter trying to explain his behavior and how I must have misunderstood it, which is classic, isn't it?'
She believes her interview with Stern caused the unnamed director to start 'panicking.'
'He was waiting for me,' she told listeners. 'And I just realized, like, I won't even fking say your name because you know you're the scumbag. You know it's you and if anybody ever asked me about him, I would be completely honest.'
The mother-of-two also noted that she liked seeing him 'on a hot seat' and that he 'doesn't know when it's going to come.'
'I kind of like that a little more,' she teased.
Following the incident, Theron confessed to 'being furious' with herself and mad that she let herself 'down.'
'I was like, "Who the fk are you? Why the fk would you allow that? Why?"' she remembered.
She continued: 'I still get those feelings because you know yourself so well and there's something that really kind of like breaks my heart to the core when people in this very luxurious manner talk about "Well, you know what next time you should fucking say something. Like don’t wait 20 years." This kind of like callous way of not wanting to believe. That’s really what it boils down to.'
The actress then compared victims being asked why they took so long to disclose what happened to them to getting called 'a fking pussy.'
Ultimately, she insisted she doesn't care what anyone else says because nobody could ever inflict more pain on her 'more' than she 'hurt' herself over 'what happened that day.'
'I think that we need to tell these stories so that we can understand that we're not alone,' Theron told Cooper, who recently accused her former college soccer coach of sexual harassment in her docuseries.
In 2019, Theron told NPR she 'put a lot of blame on' herself after that night.
The initial incident occurred at the director's home, which happened 'at 9pm' on a Saturday night according to Theron.
Once there, the South African-born beauty said the unnamed filmmaker 'wore silk pajamas and offered' her a drink' then 'rubbed her knee.
'I remember saying, "I'm sorry that I have to leave," because I was trying to remove myself from the room,' she said.
During the drive home, Charlize 'just kept hitting the steering wheel.'
'I put a lot of blame on myself ... that I didn't say all the right things, and that I didn't tell him to take a hike, and that I didn't do all of those things that we so want to believe we'll do in those situations.'
Eight years later, the Atomic Blonde star saw a chance to remedy the situation when the same director offered her another acting role.
She agreed to meet the man again 'because I thought I had the opportunity [to confront him], I was going to have the moment I didn't have with him'.
However instead of offering contrition, the director 'just moved on from the conversation, he just didn't want to address it.'
'At that moment, it was clear to me that it wasn't his first time and that he had been doing this before and that other women had called him out. His way of handling it was just to talk over it and about the project.
'Unfortunately, it was not the moment I so wanted,' said the Arrested Development actress.
'That is the unfortunate thing about sexual harassment. You never get that moment where you feel like the tables are reversed and now he's finally getting it.'
Theron also revealed she 'actually did disclose [the director's] name' in a previous interview but that 'the journalist made the decision to not write his name.'