Mira Sorvino on Braving Harassment: 'I Didn’t Think I Was Important Enough to Make a Big Deal Over'

Mira Sorvino made rounds on Wednesday talk shows ostensibly to promote her new show Condor. But interviews on the Today show and The View kicked off with her reaction to the arrest and arraignment of former Miramax boss Harvey Weinstein, whom Sorvino has accused of sexually harassing her in the ‘90s. She told Today’s Savannah Guthrie that the arrest “feels like a really good first step.”

“He’s raped many people I love so it’s not really a happy occasion,” she continued. “I think maybe there will be some celebration when he gets convicted and goes to jail. That’s when the process will be complete and we will see justice really being served.”

Sorvino said that at the time of the harassment, she told “everyone” she knew about what Weinstein did to her (on The View she elaborated that those she told included her publicist, her best friend, her then-boyfriend Quentin Tarantino, and someone who worked at Miramax), but she did not feel empowered to take further action.

“No one said, ‘Hey this is sexual harassment, you should go to the authorities, you have a case, you should go to the police, maybe it’s assault,’” Sorvino explained. “No one said anything like that. Everyone was just kind of comforting about it. I didn’t really understand the law and I didn’t think I was important enough to make a big deal over. So I just kind of tried to put it to the side and keep working and go on about my life. I think a lot of people felt that way and none of us compared notes. I only knew of one other person.”

That person, she explained, was actor Sophie Dix. When the screens behind Sorvino and Guthrie displayed some of the 97 women who have also accused Weinstein of rape and/or harassment, she teared up. She said she “could not believe” how many people ultimately came forward to accuse Weinstein. “If we had known about each other then…I think we would have found strength in numbers and we would have done something a lot sooner,” said Sorvino.

Director Peter Jackson publicly admitted in December that he had blacklisted Sorvino, as well as Ashley Judd, when casting his Lord of the Rings trilogy after a vague and misleading warning from Weinstein. Sorvino said on Today this revelation was “world-rocking,” as she’d previously blamed herself for her career downturn.

“I just knew that my career had kind of slumped and I thought, ‘Well maybe it’s my fault,’” Sorvino told Guthrie. “‘Maybe I’ve had too many children, I’ve been pregnant too many times.’ You know, sometimes you have bad luck and I was like, okay, maybe it wasn’t meant to be that my career was going to continue at the same level that it had been.”

Sorvino said she’s been working on promoting harassment legislation in California regarding the statute of limitations as well as training workers to identify sexual harassers.

“Rape has been with us forever,” she said. “And if we’re at the cusp of this moment where all of this action, all of this legislation, but also this culture changing where we’re working with children, we’re working with high school students, we’re working with men to change the idea of what being a strong man is and how to not do this to people and for women and boys and girls to know their rights, then all of this will have been worth it in some crazy way. If culture’s going to change and less people will be sexually assaulted because of this movement and this outcry among millions across the world, then it was all worth it.”

Sorvino’s interview on The View covered much the same ground. On that show, she referred to Weinstein as “a serial rapist…a Jack the Ripper of sexual crimes.”