Charlize Theron has spoken up about her early experiences with sexual harassment, saying she was frustrated that she “didn’t do all of those things that we all want to believe we’ll do in those situations.”

Theron, who plays news journalist Megyn Kelly, spoke to NPR about her personal experiences while promoting her new film Bombshell, a drama about deposed Fox News chairman Roger Ailes, who was accused of sexual harassment.

The actress said she was sexually harassed by a “very famous” director in 1994, while she was just starting out. When Theron arrived at the director’s residence on a Saturday night to audition, he “wore silk pajamas and offered me a drink and rubbed my knee,” Theron recalls.

“I was just starting out; I didn’t know the ins and outs, and said to myself as I was driving there at 9pm … ‘Maybe that’s how they do it in the movie industry?’”

Theron added: “You don’t [know what to do] … if you haven’t experienced it, it’s a very difficult thing to wrap your head around. I wasn’t even fully convinced this was sexual harassment until later in my career.

“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.”

“I remember saying, ‘I’m sorry that I have to leave,’ because I was trying to remove myself from the room,” Theron said of her excuse to the director.

Theron claims she met with the director again eight years after the harassing event in the hopes of confronting him about it.

“I was going to have the moment I didn’t have with him,” she said. “[He] 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.”

Theron added: “Unfortunately, it was not the moment I so wanted. There was no reward in it … I’ve heard this repeatedly in hearing other women’s stories, and 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.”

When questioned why she didn’t name the director after the incident, Theron stated that she had previously done so, but that media did not choose to publish his identity.

“I actually did disclose his name,” she said. “You don’t know that because every time I disclosed his name, the journalist made the decision to not write his name, and it goes to show just how deeply systemic this problem is.”

Theron continued, “I remember the first time somebody asked me if I ever had a casting couch experience, and I openly shared the experience and named him, and the person decided to not write his name. So the story is out, and strangely, when the Harvey Weinstein story broke, I, for the first time ever, Googled the story and the story came up everywhere.”

“It popped up everywhere, and nowhere could you find this guy’s name,” she added. “And it was incredibly upsetting to me.”

Theron has already spoken about the event, first bringing it up in a 2009 interview with OK! magazine and then again earlier this year when she told Howard Stern that the director in issue “was a very big deal and still is a big deal”

On January 24, 2020, Bombshell will be launched.