‘I just felt that it was so wrong’: Olivia Munn turned down a ‘disrespectful’ 7-figure settlement following ‘traumatic’ movie experience
Olivia Munn is speaking out about a “traumatic” experience she underwent on the set of a movie, one that almost led to her signing a non-disclosure agreement. But in the end, she decided not to sign—her voice was too important.
The story came up while Munn was sitting down with Monica Lewinsky for the “Reclaiming” podcast. She discussed how she was bullied as a child and how that affected her adult self. “So things were really black and white for me and I would make decisions without thinking them through enough,” she said. “I just was like, ‘This is wrong, this is right,’ and I would never really be able to see the gray.”
However, the situation she described actually does sound fairly black and white. During filming on the unnamed movie, “There were other things that happened on this movie set personally to me that was really not OK and it was so traumatic that I had to file complaints with the studio.”
“There’s a lot of other little things that go along with it, but it got to this place where I was offered a lot of money,” she went on. “Seven figures to accept, I guess, their apology and them taking acknowledgement of it. But it came along with an NDA.”
Munn didn’t actually want to discuss her experience on that set, she “just wanted to move past it all”… but she was still unsure about signing the non-disclosure agreement.
“That’s why I don’t want to talk about the specific things that happened in that situation but I said, ‘I’m not signing an NDA,’ and they said, ‘You have to,’ and I just felt that it was so wrong,” she explained.
The Time’s Up movement was in full swing at the time. “This was like the reckoning, the Harvey Weinstein reckoning that began it all,” she said. “This was that time period, and this was when people were targeting anyone who signed an NDA saying, ‘Oh, you only did it for the money.’ So I was afraid that my voice and speaking up would just reverse any kind of validity to my voice.”
She also worried that the studio would leak that she had signed an NDA, and “diminish” her thoughts and feelings. So when the time came to sign, she refused, and she’s still fine with that decision.
“That comes into the feistiness of not thinking things through and being so upset and frustrated that this would be offered to me that I did not think about negotiating, I did not think about anything besides how disrespectful that was,” she said. “I said to [the studio lawyer], ‘I know this is a lot of money to you but it is not a lot of money to me to lose my voice.’ And we walked out of there and I remember feeling so proud when I walked out — so proud of myself.”
While Munn didn’t name the movie, many people have their suspicions that it may have been The Predator, which came out in 2017. Munn filmed a scene with a man named Steven Wilder Striegel, a registered sex offender and friend of the director, Shane Black. When Munn found out Striegel was a sex offender, she objected, and eventually Fox cut the scene. But her later comments have indicated a lot was going out behind the scenes there.
“I don’t know why this has to be such a hard fight,” she told The Hollywood Reporter in 2018. “I do feel like I’ve been treated by some people that I’m the one who went to jail or I’m the one that put this guy on set. I found out, and it was really important to me to have the scene deleted.” Proof, as if any was needed, that young actresses often end up having a terrible time in Hollywood.
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