Eliza Dushku Breaks Silence On Alleged Sexual Harassment In Powerful Op-Ed

Eliza Dushku was fired after she spoke to her co-star about his alleged sexual harassment

Eliza Dushku penned a powerful op-ed that details the sexual harassment she faced on the set of Bull and the truly repulsive ways that the CBS network tried to undermine her story. The painful gist: Dushku’s co-star Michael Weatherly sexually harassed her. She talked to him about it. Then, she was fired.

Dushku decided to speak out after The New York Times ran a story about CBS paying her $9.5 million to settle harassment allegations. She declined to comment because she was trying to honor their settlement but Weatherly and Bull writer-producer Glenn Gordon Caron happily gave quotes to the reporter, minimizing the incidences and making excuses.

So, Dushku decided to speak up and bravely tell her story.

“I took a job and because I did not want to be harassed, I was fired,” she writes.

Dushku explained that there are tapes of the inappropriate comments that Weatherly made on-set. “Weatherly harassed me from early on,” she wrote. “The tapes show his offer to take me to his ‘rape van, filled with all sorts of lubricants and long phallic things.’ There was also his constant name-calling; playing provocative songs (like ‘Barracuda’) on his iPhone when I approached my set marks; and his remark about having a threesome.”

She wrote that he called her “Legs” and commented on her “ravishing” beauty, while making “audible groans, oohing and aahing.” He bragged about his sperm. When she messed up a take he said: “I will take you over my knee and spank you like a little girl.”

Are you so disgusted you want to throw your laptop out the window? Same.

After weeks of this harassment, Dushku decided to speak to Weatherly. “Framing my request as a plea for ‘help’ in setting a different tone on the set, I asked him to ‘be my ally’ and to ‘help ease the sexualized set comments,'” she recalled. She said that he responded: “Eliza, no one respects women more than I do.” In fact, he said, he’s been accused of being “too respectful of women.” Really? REALLY?

48 hours later, Dushku was fired. She later learned Weatherly texted CBS Television President David Stapf and asked about her being written off the show. He said that she had a “humor deficit.’’

During the settlement process, CBS tried to defend itself by presenting a picture of Dushku in a bathing suit that she had posted to Instagram. Yup, they were literally saying that because Dushku once wore a bathing suit it warranted her being sexual harassed.

Dushku settled for $9.5 million, just a piece of what she would have earned if she had completed her potential six-year contract. She also insisted on a meeting with Steven Spielberg, whose company coproduces Bull, so that she can explain to him what’s going on on his set.

“Watching the Golden Globes and seeing Spielberg front-and-center wearing a ‘Time’s Up’ pin shortly after my settlement made me especially eager to meet with him,” she wrote. That meeting still has yet to happen and, if Spielberg is going to wear a “Time’s Up” pin, he sure as hell better be doing everything in his power to deal with a sexual harassment situation that happened on his own show.

The internet was applauding Dushku for speaking up and expressing their complete disgust over Weatherly’s conduct.

“I am recently married and very happily finishing my college degree at home in Boston,” Dushku concluded in her op-ed. “But I do feel it is my duty to respond honestly and thoroughly to CBS, Michael Weatherly, and Glenn Gordon Caron’s latest revisionist accounts.”