Crazy Rich Asians star Constance Wu recounts sexual assault in her 20s, then Hollywood’s ‘latent sexism’
- Constance Wu discussed the sexual assault in her new memoir, ‘Making a Scene’
- Wu also recounts ‘Fresh Off the Boat’ producer sexually harassed her in first seasons
US actress Constance Wu, known for her lead roles in Fresh Off the Boat and Crazy Rich Asians, has come out about being raped in her 20s.
It happened on a second date with “Ty”, an aspiring novelist who invited her up to his flat for a “gift” that proved to be “an original 20-page medieval fantasy in which I was the central character,” wrote Wu, 40, in her new book, Making a Scene. “A fantasy he’d written after one date.”
She had agreed to go upstairs to his flat to receive this gift, ignoring a “twinge of warning in my gut”. It was there that he plied her with the gift-wrapped box, donned a condom and ignored her when she said, more than once: “I’m not ready to have sex with you”.
While it was clear in her head at the time that she had not consented, neither did she think to call it rape, she wrote. This was both for self-preservation and because it did not seem to fit the usual definition of rape.
Because of that, Wu wrote in the book, excerpted by Vanity Fair, she realised in retrospect that she most likely would not have been believed. She also recognised his bafflement, pointing out that it seems to be shared by many men who see themselves as “the good guy”.
Yet telling, perhaps, was Ty’s reaction when Wu definitively told him via email – after months of calls and texts that she ignored – that she did not want to date him.
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“I think he must have felt hurt and rejected, but instead of being sad that a girl didn’t like him, he turned to anger,” she wrote. “He made a scene, calling me a heartless b****, an ugly wh*** who would never get anywhere in life.”
More than a decade later, she found herself filming her first television show, and she got a “front-row seat to Hollywood’s latent sexism and misogyny”, harassed by a producer during the show’s first couple of seasons. She had filed the rape memory away, and it resurfaced only later.
By then she was contending with unwanted advances from a Fresh Off the Boat producer, harassment she at first endured for the sake of the show’s groundbreaking depiction of Asians.
“It was the only show on network television in over 20 years to star Asian-Americans, and I did not want to sully the reputation of the one show we had representing us,” she said in an interview, according to People. “I kept my mouth shut for a really long time about a lot of sexual harassment and intimidation that I received the first two seasons of the show.”
Again, she said, she was only able to push back when “I was no longer scared of losing my job”.
Wu, who was born to Taiwanese immigrant parents in Virginia, had a breakout film role in Crazy Rich Asians in 2018 and another lead role in the film Hustlers in 2019.
When ABC announced in 2019 that Fresh Off the Boat was renewed for a sixth season, Wu reacted on Twitter with an explicit post that was widely criticised. She said last Friday that the controversial tweet came from “the emotions I suppressed”.
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“It negatively affected my career, but in many ways it positively affected me personally because it made me take a break from my career, it made me go to therapy and understand it, and ultimately come out better,” she said at the Atlantic Festival.
“If we want to be seen, really seen … we need to let all of ourselves be seen, including the parts we’re scared of or ashamed of – parts that, however imperfect, require care and attention,” she said in the July statement.
