Ashley Judd wants to make sure the sexual misconduct allegations made against Hollywood’s top stars and producers aren’t just treated as a statistic.
The 49-year-old actress – who, along with a number of other women, has claimed she was sexually assaulted by Harvey Weinstein – feels it is important to focus on each person’s story rather than see it as a collective problem.
She said: "It’s really hard to keep track. What about all of the women whose careers never got off the ground? What about the collective economic loss endured, especially by women in low-paying jobs, women on the margins of the margin, the undocumented, the field workers, the gals in the diners who get their bottom pinched all the time? What about them? …
"I want to talk about how it’s not about sex, it’s about power. I want to talk about how the statistics say that one in three or one in four of us experience sexual misconduct. But every time I get together with three or four women, it’s all three or four of us."
And Ashley thinks there will be some "unprecedented socio-cultural" change in the future because of people speaking out about what happened to them.
Speaking to students from the University of Kentucky, she added: "I want to talk about how there is naturally a chaotic, messy, unprecedented socio-cultural, sexual change – the reckoning as some folks are calling it – happening around us. And it won’t be tidy, and it won’t be easy, and we don’t have a playbook. We can’t go to page 463 and tear it out and say this is how we navigate what’s going on."