Molly Ringwald says 'predators' took advantage of her during her rise as an '80s film star.
Molly Ringwald is opening up about a "harrowing" time in her life. During an appearance on the latest episode of the WTF With Marc Maron podcast, the Pretty in Pink alum told host Marc Maron that she was "taken advantage of" as a young actress in the '80s.
"I never really felt like I was part of a community when I was in Hollywood just because I was so young, really," Ringwald, 56, recalled during Monday's episode. "I wasn't into going out to clubs. I feel like I'm more social now than I was then. I was just too young."
"Well, you're lucky you didn't get taken advantage of or got into some sort of horrible situation," Maron, 60, responded.
"Oh, I was taken advantage of," Ringwald said. "You can't be a young actress in Hollywood and not have predators around. I wasn't raped by Harvey Weinstein, so I'm grateful for that. But I also did write an essay for The New Yorker that was all like, 'It's not all Harvey Weinstein. He's not the only one.'"
Noting that she was "definitely in questionable situations," Ringwald said she relied on her "incredible survival instinct and a pretty big superego" to "figure out a way to protect myself."
"But, yeah, it can be harrowing," the Riverdale alum continued. "And I have a 20-year-old daughter (Mathilda Ereni Gianopoulos) now who is going into the same profession, even though I did everything I could to convince her to do something else. And it's hard."
Ringwald became an onscreen icon for her roles in the 1984 John Hughes flick, Sixteen Candles, as well as fellow '80s classics The Breakfast Club and Pretty in Pink, which both hit the big screen before she turned 18.
She welcomed Mathilda with her husband, Panio Gianopoulos, in October 2003. The 20-year-old is a big sister to the couple's other children, 14-year-old fraternal twins Adele Georgiana Gianopoulos and Roman Stylianos Gianopoulos.
In her New Yorker piece, published in October 2017 during the explosion of the #MeToo movement, Ringwald revealed that she was sexually assaulted when she was 13 years old.
"When I was 13, a 50-year-old crew member told me that he would teach me to dance, and then proceeded to push against me with an erection. When I was 14, a married film director stuck his tongue in my mouth on set," Ringwald wrote at the time. "At a time when I was trying to figure out what it meant to become a sexually viable young woman, at every turn, some older guy tried to help speed up the process. And all this went on despite my having very protective parents who did their best to shield me. I shudder to think of what would have happened had I not had them."
Ringwald described an audition in her 20s when she was allegedly asked to let the lead actor put a dog collar around her neck.
"The actor was a friend of mine, and I looked in his eyes with panic... I'd like to think that I just walked out, but, more than likely, there's an old VHS tape, disintegrating in a drawer somewhere, of me trying to remember lines with a dog collar around my neck in front of a young man I once had a crush on," she continued. "I sobbed in the parking lot, and when I got home and called my agent to tell him what happened, he laughed and said, 'Well, I guess that's one for the memoirs. . . .' I fired him and moved to Paris not long after."
"I could go on about other instances in which I have felt demeaned or exploited, but I fear it would get very repetitive. Then again, that's part of the point. I never talked about these things publicly because, as a woman, it has always felt like I may as well have been talking about the weather. Stories like these have never been taken seriously," Ringwald wrote. "Women are shamed, told they are uptight, nasty, bitter, can't take a joke, are too sensitive. And the men? Well, if they're lucky, they might get elected president."
A year later, Ringwald opened up to NPR about the problematic elements of several films, including Sixteen Candles and and The Breakfast Club.
In Sixteen Candles, male love interest and lead Jake Ryan (Michael Schoeffling) ponders about the possibility of "violating" his unconscious girlfriend, Caroline (Haviland Morris), and later shows Caroline not remembering having sex with Ted (Anthony Michael Hall) after Jake sends her home with him.
"Everyone says and I do believe is true, that times were different and what was acceptable then is definitely not acceptable now and nor should it have been then, but that's sort of the way that it was," Ringwald said of the '80s. "I feel very differently about the movies now and it's a difficult position for me to be in because there's a lot that I like about them."
Ringwald also noted that it's important for her not to criticize or "appear ungrateful" to late director Hughes, who is known for Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller's Day Off and more classics, but added, "But I do oppose a lot of what is in those movies."
The '80s icon insisted that she was concerned about some of the content in Sixteen Candles even back when they were making it. "There were parts of that film that bothered me then. Although everybody likes to say that I had, you know, John Hughes' ear and he did listen to me in a lot of ways, I wasn't the filmmaker," she noted. "And, you know, sometimes I would tell him, 'Well, I think this is kind of tacky' or 'I think that this is irrelevant' or 'this doesn't ring true,' and sometimes he would listen to me, but in other cases he didn't."
Ringwald admitted that she was cautious about crossing a line with the director at the time. The actress added that just because she finds parts of Sixteen Candles problematic, that doesn't mean she's opposed to all of the films she made with Hughes.
"Having a teenage daughter myself, I know that it's not always easy to get teenagers to talk. But these films [were able to] break through that," she said. "There's something that really touches teenagers, especially The Breakfast Club, I feel like sort of gives them permission to talk about their feelings -- says that teenagers' feelings really matter."
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