Casey Affleck has spoken out about the charges of sexual misconduct leveled against him.
The actor stated that he was “supportive” of the #MeToo movement during a recent appearance on Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast to promote the new film Light of My Life, which he directed and stars in.
Amanda White and Magdalena Gorka, who worked with him on the 2010 film I’m Still Here, both accused him of sexual harassment. Both lawsuits were resolved out of court.
The two women sued Affleck for $2 million and $2.25 million, respectively, alleging sexual harassment and disparagement on many occasions. He refuted the accusations and vowed to sue White and Gorka in retaliation.
Both claims against Affleck were resolved out of court in 2010 for an unknown sum of money, and he has stated that he is unable to address the topic due to the conditions of the deal.
“Who would not be supportive of the MeToo movement? That’s an idea that’s even out there?” he rhetorically asked. “That there are some people saying ‘We do not believe in equality. We think the workplace should be a dangerous place for certain people and not for others’. That’s preposterous.”
“But it is very, very hard to talk about, and it scares me,” he added. “Mostly because the values of the MeToo movement are values that are at the heart of my being; just the way I was raised, they are baked into my own value system having been raised by a mother who didn’t let us watch ‘Dukes Of Hazard’ when we were like eight years old because it was sexist.”
He continued: “The way I’m thought of, sometimes, by certain people recently has just been so antithetical to who I really am that it’s just been frustrating. And not being able to talk about it has been hard because I really wanted to support all but I felt like the best thing to do was to just be quiet so that I didn’t seem to be in opposition to something that I really wanted to champion.”
“It’s a tough spot to be in, especially if you really do appreciate and want to be in support of the side that seems angriest and the anger’s directed at you,” Affleck continued. “And I sort of decided, ‘Well I’ll just stay quiet mostly.’ … It’s not my experience but you have to respect that someone else had an experience and take that to heart and allow for it to be as possible as your memory of that experience.”
He expressed his dissatisfaction at being lumped together with the worst criminals.
“Suddenly your name is being mentioned in a group of people,” he said. “On the one hand it’s like a sweeping judgement, and on the other hand there has been a lot of talk about, ‘Can we even make these kind of distinctions between the worst cases and sort of what is perceived as the tamest examples of it?’”
While there has been “sweeping judgement” he added, there has also been discussion on how to distinguish “between the worst cases and sort of what is perceived as the tamest examples of it”
“[It] isn’t about, ‘Oh well this isn’t so bad, and that’s really horrible.’ It’s that it’s systemic. It is accepted culturally at it’s tamest manifestation of it and at it’s worst, and that it all needs to be turned on it’s head, eradicated, not allowed for, and that kind of like lightning bolt I think is effective.”
Casey stated that the mockumentary, which tracked Joaquin Phoenix’s move from acting to hip-hop, was shot in a party atmosphere, and that the crew didn’t often realize they were in it.
‘There was a ton of partying because that was the content of this at-times-documentary, at-times-mockumentary, so we’re recording everything,’ he said.
‘It was confusing for everybody, and it was deliberately, and that’s my responsibility. The intention was to have the crew as part of the movie. I don’t know how much they knew they were part of the movie.’
“I don’t know how much they knew they were a part of the movie … It was a big mess and it’s not something I would do again. I would be way smarter, more sensible, more sensitive to it being a workplace if I were to try to do this again.”
“I think that you can’t change the world if you don’t let the world change you. I don’t pretend to be changing the world in anyway; but I just mean like you aren’t going to change the world’s opinion of you. You aren’t going to make anything good or put it into the world in a meaningful way if it’s you’re just set on transmit. You’ve got to be on receive sometimes. You gotta be open to people saying ‘no man, you’re not hearing us. That was out of control. You can’t run a movie set that way. That was wrong.'”
After the claims against him were public, Affleck says he only told his version of the story to his closest friends and family.
“It is and remains kind of an ugly, difficult, painful period of, in this community and in this industry and in the culture in general,” he said. “And so for me, it was pretty hard to sit by for years and feel like even by people who I really like and respect who didn’t know me, sort of feel like piling on a little bit and to have to explain to people who I know and love who even if they say like, ‘Dude, are you kidding me? You don’t have to explain this. I know who you are.’ You still feel compelled to do that.”
Affleck remarked at the end of the conversation that he didn’t think he’d ever obtain “closure” on the subject.
“I don’t know if you ever get closure on things,” he said. “I constantly revisit things from my life and my past that are 20 years old. Relationships I’ve had. I think about them and turn them over in my mind. I grind everything pretty fine, usually looking for evidence of what a jerk I was. What mistake did I make — that’s my default setting.”
“I don’t think there’s closure until you finally punch the big clock,” he continued. “It’s going to just keep going. It shapes who you are. Everybody in life has gigantic challenges and even tragedies and they think they won’t get through them and they keep going and life goes on. I’ve seen people who have been dealt much worse hands.”
“I believe that any kind of mistreatment of anyone for any reason is unacceptable and abhorrent, and everyone deserves to be treated with respect in the workplace and anywhere else,” Affleck previously remarked in an interview with the Boston Globe after winning the Oscar in 2017.
