LOS ANGELES: Hollywood actress Ashley Judd has revealed that she was sexually harassed by a top Hollywood studio executive.

The 47-year-old actress says she was repeatedly summoned to hotel rooms while filming the 1997 film Kiss the Girls by the head of a rival studio and asked to watch him shower. She did not name the person, reports mirror.co.uk.

The Divergent actress said, “He was very stealth and expert about it. He groomed me, which is a technical term — ‘Oh, come meet at the hotel for something to eat’.

“It went on in these stages. It was so disgusting. He physically lured me by saying, ‘Oh, help me pick out what I’m going to wear’. There was a lot that happened between the point of entry and the bargaining.

“When I kept saying no to everything, there was a huge asymmetry of power and control in that room.”

Judd discovered years later that a number of other actresses also experienced the same thing.

“Only when we were sitting around talking about it did we realise our experiences were identical. There was a mutual strengthening and fortification of our resolve.

“The ultimate thing when I was weaselling out of everything else was, ‘Will you watch me take a shower?’ And all the other women, sitting around this table with me, said, ‘Oh my god — that’s what he said to me too’,” Judd told variety.com.

The star, who has never been offered a movie by the executive’s studio, said that she beat herself up for a while following the incident, before realising there was something “incredibly wrong and illegal about it”. — IANS