【transendental eroticism】

Hollywood's disgusting revelations of sexual assault and transendental eroticismharassment continue, this week with the staggering number of women who have spoken out about director James Toback. Over 200 women have now accused Toback of harassment or assault, beginning with 38 in an exposé from the Los Angeles Times.

As with the allegations against Harvey Weinstein, the accusations against Toback have empowered his victims to come forward in solidarity. Selma Blair and Rachel McAdams spoke to Vanity Fairabout their unsettling encounters with the director; Blair's meeting ultimately ended with a death threat, and McAdams was severely shaken before working her first big television job. Until now, they were too terrified and disgusted to revisit these traumatic episodes.

SEE ALSO: James Toback is the latest filmmaker to be outed as a sexual predator

Blair's team arranged for her to meet Toback at a hotel. She was nervous from the outset about their encounter, during which Toback allegedly said he could have her father killed and questioned her confidence as an actress.

"I really believed that when he started to talk...that he was going to be my mentor," she told VF. "That is how he got into my brain. You know, in acting classes they get into your personal history and connect that to work. So this conversation didn’t seem that strange."

Toback then asked her to perform a scene naked, insisting that this was a professional exercise, and criticized her body. Like Weinstein, he quickly changed tack and made the encounter sexual. He asked her to have sex with him and then refused to let her leave until he did, bragging – like Weinstein – about famous women he'd slept with.

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"I felt disgust and shame, and like nobody would ever think of me as being clean again after being this close to the devil," Blair recalled. "His energy was so sinister."

Before she left, Toback told her that if a girl "went against" him, he would have her thrown in the Hudson River to drown. Blair says she only told two people over 20 years about what happened, but told her manager Toback was "vile" and that no women should be sent to work with him. She said she felt "pure rage" when she saw that he was denying allegations after the Timesstory broke.

McAdams says she met with Toback the night before she had a 5 a.m. call time – he said he had an early flight and left her no other option to meet and supposedly workshop a scene. Once again he spoke in a manner that made the actress uncomfortable and maintained that this was somehow an acting exercise. Once again, he got explicitly sexual, and McAdams managed to make an excuse and leave.

"This has been such a source of shame for me — that I didn’t have the wherewithal to get up and leave," she said in the interview. "I kept thinking, 'This is going to become normal any minute now. This is going to all make sense. This is all above board somehow.' Eventually I just realized that it wasn’t."

The only thing that became normal, or normalized, was a pattern of harassment and assault by men of power in the entertainment industry – and the silence surrounding it. When she told her agent, the agent said this had happened before, and McAdams was shocked that no one warned her.

"This has all got to stop," McAdams told Vanity Fair. "We need to start acknowledging what an epidemic this is, and what a deep-seated problem this is. You have to get it all out in the open and in the light so that we can really understand how pervasive this is. I think we almost have to exhaust ourselves sharing our experiences before the rebuilding can begin. And hopefully we never slip back into this darkness again."

Toback told Vanity Fairhe had no comment on the allegations; You can read Blair's and McAdams' full accounts here.

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Topics Celebrities