Molly Ringwald gets public apology from huge Hollywood exec 22 years after sexually explicit comment

Actress Molly Ringwald fired a shot at a studio executive who made a sexually explicit remark about her two decades ago.

The actress called out Jeffrey Katzenberg in an essay for The New Yorker about sexual harassment in Hollywood called, “All The Other Harvey Weinsteins.”

“I wouldn’t know [Molly Ringwald] if she sat on my face,” he was quoted as saying in an article from 1995, a time when Katzenberg had just founded DreamWorks SKG with Steven Spielberg and David Geffen. Ringwald, who was 24 years old at the time, recalls the remark in her essay.

“In that article, the head of a major studio—and, incidentally, someone who claims himself to be horrified by the Harvey allegations—was quoted as saying, ‘I wouldn’t know [Molly Ringwald] if she sat on my face,” she wrote. “Maybe he was misquoted. If he ever sent a note of apology, it must have gotten lost in the mail.”

Katzenberg responded in a statement to The Hollywood Reporter, apologizing for the comment even though he didn’t believe he ever made it.

“That Molly Ringwald had to read those words attributed to me and believe I said them is horrifying, mortifying and embarrassing to me,” Katzenberg said.  “Anyone who knows me now or back then knows I do not use language like that as a matter of course, or tolerate it. Ms. Ringwald, 22 years too late, I am deeply, deeply sorry.”

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Currently appearing on the CW series, “Riverdale,” Ringwald starred in 1980s classics like “Sixteen Candles,” “The Breakfast Club” and “Pretty in Pink.”

She weighed in on the Weinstein sex scandal in her essay, noting that she has “had plenty of Harveys of my own over the years.”

She recalled when, at 13 years old, “a fifty-year-old crew member told me that he would teach me to dance, and then proceeded to push against me with an erection;” and at 14 years old, “a married film director stuck his tongue in my mouth on set.”

“The tale of Harvey Weinstein is now a thread that has tangled its way through Hollywood, connecting women, mostly actresses, in a depressingly common way,” the 49 year-old actress wrote. “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.”

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