Megan Fox describes 'harrowing' experiences in film industry and hints at 'many' men who deserve to be exposed

Megan Fox has released a statement on Instagram addressing a resurfaced video that went viral yesterday, leading people to criticise the way they believed she was sexually exploited by the movie industry.

The 2009 clip saw Fox appear on Jimmy Kimmel's show talking about her experiences working with Transformers director Michael Bay, who she described as being a "tyrant".

She spoke about her experience as an extra on Bay's Bad Boys II, which she shot when she had just turned 15 – a literal child, saying:

They were shooting this club scene and they brought me in and I was wearing a stars and stripes bikini and a red cowboy hat and six-inch heels.

He approved it and they said, ‘Michael, she’s 15 so you can’t sit her at the bar and she can’t have a drink in her hand.’ So his solution to that problem was to then have me dancing underneath a waterfall getting soaking wet.

People were shocked to be reminded of the scene and her age at the time, and outraged that Kimmel's reaction was essentially to laugh it off.

Megan Fox began trending and people started sharing other disturbing examples of ways in which she's been consistently sexualised throughout her career.

Last year, Fox gave an interview with Entertainment Tonight, in which she explained the toll that it had all taken, saying it led to a "psychological breakdown", and that her concerns had been ignored pre-MeToo.

After all of this came back to the forefront yesterday and people expressed sympathy, outrage and support for what she went through.

Now, the actor has spoken out.

In a series of screenshots, Fox says she was "never assaulted or preyed upon" by Bay or Stephen Spielberg, who produced Transformers. But she also added a scathing critique of Hollywood more broadly, saying:

I have endured some genuinely harrowing experiences in a ruthlessly misogynistic industry.

There are many names that deserve to be going viral in cancel culture right now, but they are safely stored in the fragmented recesses of my heart.

Wow.

While people are of course speculating, it's possible we will never really know who Fox is referring to.

Perhaps the more important question is why is it that years after #MeToo, women in Hollywood still feel that they cannot speak up about the names of the men who exploited them?

It's almost as if a hashtag alone can't actually undo centuries of patriarchal oppression...