It sucks to think that the set of the 1970s Wonder Woman TV show, the bastion of early pop culture feminism that it was, would be rife with sexual harassment. And yet to hear Lynda Carter tell it, that’s exactly what it was. Carter talks about this, and other moments of harassment and assault, one at the hands of a well-known predator currently facing justice, in an exclusive interview with The Daily Beast.
The interviewer asks Carter if she’s ever been sexually abused or harassed in her career, and she says that she has, mentioning, in particular, the fact that one of her biggest abusers is currently facing “some form of punishment and justice,” but refuses to name him. Carter says:
“He’s already being done in. There’s no advantage in piling on again. And, I believe every woman in the Bill Cosby case.”
When the interviewer asks her how it feels to see her unnamed abuser face consequences:
“Well, whatever it is, it isn’t enough. [He had violated not only her, but] a lot of people.
“I can’t add anything to it. I wish I could. But there’s nothing legally I could add to it, because I looked into it. I’m just another face in the crowd. I wish I could, and if I could I would. And I would talk about it. But it ends up being about me, and not about the people who can talk about it. I don’t want it to be about me, it’s not about me. It’s about him being a scumbag. So legally I can’t do anything. If I could I would.”
The fact that her go-to predator when talking about whose victims she believes is Bill Cosby (though she later also says that she believes Trump’s accusers, too, asking “why would they lie?”) could be very telling. However, when The Daily Beast asked Carter’s representatives if Cosby was indeed the abuser, they declined to answer, respecting their client’s wishes to leave the perpetrator unnamed.
As far as her time on the Wonder Woman set, she recalls a time when a cameraman on the show had drilled a hole in the wall of her dressing room on the Warner Bros. lot. Thankfully “They caught him, fired him, and drummed him out of the business.”
She talks about constantly fending off advances from any number of men over the course of her career, and the fact that when she’d confront them with an “are you kidding me?” they’d laugh off their behavior and say they were, so there was always plausible deniability.
When asked if she ever reported it, she says:
“No, because who are you going to tell? Who you are going to tell except your girlfriends and your circle of friends? You’d say or hear, ‘Stay away from that guy.’ ‘Watch out for this casting director.’ And so you would hear it from other people, other people would hear it from other people. ‘Watch out for so and so.’ That’s how you protected yourself: through the grapevine. We were women’s lib, burn the bra. We weren’t going to take any shit from people. So we felt strong in that, but there were still not a lot of parts for us.”
Carter is grateful for the #MeToo Movement, though she’s upset by the fact that it’s taken this long for such a moment to happen. “I asked my husband if he was surprised by all the #MeToo stories,” she explains. “‘Yeah, I’m surprised,’ he said. Ask any woman, they’re not surprised. It’s been going on for years. It’s not news to us [women], but it is news to you [men]. We’ve been trying to tell you. We’ve been trying to tell you for a long time and you haven’t listened.”
Are you listening now? Check out the full interview over at The Daily Beast.
(image: Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images for Glamour)
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