Meryl Streep recently spoke about sexual assault at an event for the Committee to Protect Journalists and offered stories of a couple events that changed her life. One was defending a woman from a man who was assaulting her. And she had a witness.
Said Streep:
“I learned something about life that I wouldn’t have known otherwise and I was lucky because my instincts served me well. In one instance, I played dead and waited until the blows stopped — watching like people say you do from about 50 feet above from where I was beaten. And in the second instance, someone else was being abused and I just went completely nuts and went after this man. Ask Cher — she was there. And the thug ran away, it was a miracle. [I was] changed by these events on a cellular level because women do know something particular about coming to the danger place. We come to it disadvantaged through the many millennia preceding our present moment and because of our vulnerability, we anticipate danger, we expect it, we’re hyper alert to it.”
“The two times in my life when I was threatened…in one instance I played dead and waited until the blows stopped.”
Actress Meryl Streep opens up about her experience of physical violence which she says has profoundly changed her. pic.twitter.com/Pb20UahTjU
— Channel 4 News (@Channel4News) November 17, 2017
The two Academy Award-winning actors worked together in 1983. In an interview with Us Weekly, Cher talked about the time she and Streep saved a girl from a mugger in New York. Streep may have been referring to that encounter in her speech.
