Matt Damon is taking a lot of heat for his controversial recent comments about sexual harassment.
The internet slammed the actor last week for saying that “there’s a spectrum of behavior” when it comes to these cases and each incident needs to be analyzed individually, in an interview with film critic Peter Travers. Damon’s remarks didn’t exactly go over well with his former girlfriend and “Good Will Hunting” co-star Minnie Driver.
The actress called out Damon on Twitter over the weekend, saying that the comments were “utterly tone deaf.”
“Gosh it’s so interesting how men with all these opinions about women’s differentiation between sexual misconduct, assault and rape reveal themselves to be utterly tone deaf,” Driver tweeted.
God God, SERIOUSLY? https://t.co/NDZFrLDXil
— Minnie Driver (@driverminnie) December 15, 2017
Gosh it’s so *interesting how men with all these opinions about women’s differentiation between sexual misconduct, assault and rape reveal themselves to be utterly tone deaf and as a result, systemically part of the problem( *profoundly unsurprising)
— Minnie Driver (@driverminnie) December 15, 2017
Driver spoke at length about her reaction to Damon’s comments in an interview with the Guardian posted on Sunday.
“I felt I desperately needed to say something,” she told the publication. “I’ve realized that most men, good men, the men that I love, there is a cut-off in their ability to understand. They simply cannot understand what abuse is like on a daily level.”
Driver went on to say that, until everyone is on the same page about the subject, men “can’t tell a woman about their abuse.”
“A man cannot do that. No one can,” she said. “It is so individual and so personal, it’s galling when a powerful man steps up and starts dictating the terms, whether he intends it or not.”
The actress also questioned why Damon defended someone like Louis C.K. in his controversial remarks about sexual harassment in Hollywood.
“I don’t understand why Matt would defend Louis CK,” she said. “It seems to me that he thinks that because he didn’t rape somebody – so far as we know – that what he did do wasn’t as bad.”
“That’s a problem,” Driver added. “If good men like Matt Damon are thinking like that then we’re in a lot of f–king trouble. We need good intelligent men to say this is all bad across the board, condemn it all and start again.”
