Minnie Driver criticises Matt Damon's abuse comments: 'Let women do the speaking up right now'
Minnie Driver has lambasted her ex and former co-star Matt Damon after the actor made inflammatory comments about Hollywood's sexual abuse scandal last week.
Driver dismissed Damon's statement that there are differing levels of abuse, and said that men were not in a position to opine on how women and victims of assault should deal with their experiences, as they "simply cannot understand what abuse is like on a daily level".
Her comments come after Driver posted on Twitter that Damon had, along with other men, "reveal[ed] [himself] to be utterly tone deaf and as a result, systemically part of the problem."
Damon made headlines last week during an interview with ABC, in which he claimed there was a difference between the sexual misconduct levelled at Harvey Weinstein, Louis CK and other powerful men in the industry.
He said: "There’s a difference between, you know, patting someone on the butt and rape or child molestation, right? Both of those behaviours need to be confronted and eradicated without question, but they shouldn’t be conflated, right?"
Despite admitted that he "didn't know the details" of the CK case – in which the comedian coerced five women into watching or listening to him masturbate – but said that "I imagine the price that he’s paid at this point is so beyond anything that he – I just think that we have to kind of start delineating between what these behaviours are."
Driver was among the thousands of people who reacted to Damon's statements at the time they were published last week, and posted her disbelief on Twitter. She and Damon dated for just over a year in 1997, after the pair made Oscar-winning and -nominated performances opposite one another in Good Will Hunting.
Actress Alyssa Milano was also upset by Damon's comments, and shared her thoughts on social media, writing: "There are different stages of cancer. Some more treatable than others. But it’s still cancer."
On Saturday, she then expressed herself further in an interview with The Guardian, saying: "If good men like Matt Damon are thinking like that then we’re in a lot of f------ trouble. We need good intelligent men to say this is all bad across the board, condemn it all and start again."
Driver continued: "I felt I desperately needed to say something. I’ve realised that most men, good men, the men that I love, there is a cut-off in their ability to understand. They simply cannot understand what abuse is like on a daily level.
"I honestly think that until we get on the same page, you can’t tell a woman about their abuse. A man cannot do that. No one can. It is so individual and so personal, it’s galling when a powerful man steps up and starts dictating the terms, whether he intends it or not."
She said: "There is no hierarchy of abuse – that if a woman is raped [it] is much worse than if 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.
"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."
The revelations of alleged misconduct and rape by Harvey Weinstein of young women in Hollywood, printed by the New York Times in October, continue to shake the industry.