Salma Hayek Questions Why She 'Didn't Have The Courage' To Speak Up About Harvey Weinstein Sooner

The Grown Ups actress acknowledged others weren’t as lucky to escape his wrath unscathed. "Some people got raped," she told the outlet. "It makes you wonder if you had said something [back then], would it have been different? How come I didn't have the courage? But I dealt with it to the best of my ability at the time."

Weinstein, 69, eventually tried to sabotage the 2002 film altogether by demanding script rewrites and a near-impossible task of securing notable names in minor roles — which only fueled Hayek to see the drama to its completion. “For me Frida was a political statement, a social statement, a feminist statement," she explained. "It was my way of screaming. And Harvey used my way of screaming to repress me even more. So I could not let him win." (The film — in which Hayek portrays Mexican painter Frida Kahlo — went on to win two Academy Awards.)

This is not the first time Hayek has spoken up about the mistreatment she faced as a result of working with Weinstein. In 2017, she penned a moving New York Times op-ed in which she revealed that at first, she was thrilled to work with the former Hollywood heavyweight. “He had taken a chance on me — a nobody. He had said yes,” the Fools Rush In actress explained. “Little did I know it would become my turn to say no. No to opening the door to him at all hours of the night, hotel after hotel, location after location, where he would show up unexpectedly, including one location where I was doing a movie he wasn’t even involved with.”