With Hollywood still getting rocked by the fallout from the New York Times and New Yorker stories about Harvey Weinstein’s long history of alleged harassment, Björk has come forward with a story of her own about a different man in the movie industry who abused his power. Björk laid it all out in a Facebook post today, and while she doesn’t name the man, she does say that he’s “a Danish film director.” In the post, Björk explains that the differences between her successful music career and her status in the acting world were immediately evident, saying her “humiliation and role as a lesser sexually harassed being was the norm” among the unnamed director and the “staff of dozens” who enabled and encouraged his behavior.
Björk says she rejected the director’s advances repeatedly, so he “sulked and punished” her while convincing the crew that she was difficult to work with. Because she had “no ambitions in the acting world” and could depend on her own “great team,” Björk says she was able to simply walk away from the ordeal and eventually recover from it, but she worries that “other actresses working with the same man did not.” Björk also claims that the next movie this director made was about his experience with her, possibly because she was the first person to stand up to him. She also thinks he has had “a more fair and meaningful relationship” with his actresses since then.
As Variety notes, Björk has only appeared in two films: Kietzchka Keene’s The Juniper Tree in 1990 and Lars Von Trier’s Dancer In The Dark in 2000. Björk and Von Trier had “clashes” during filming according to an old Guardian report, but some people working on the movie suggested that their disagreements were “deeper than that.”