SHARON STONE SHOCKER! Or Here-Go-Hell-Come With #MeToo Again!

"Crazy" and "difficult" are adjectives female movie stars just can't seem to escape. And the #MeToo stories which accompany them? They just keep coming. Late last week, Sharon Stone dropped a doozy. It was the 1980s. She was a young, rising star gaining notice for her beauty and her acting abilities - a formidable combo. All of which earned her several "general meetings" with powerful studio executives around town, or the type of meetings which allow executives to size up a star they've heard so much about, ask them what types of projects they're interested in, and who they'd like to work with. Or at least that's how it's supposed to go. 

But when Stone entered the office of an unnamed Sony executive at this time - I'm going to take a wild guess and assume it wasn't Dawn Steel - the tenor of the meeting changed when the executive, unprompted and out of nowhere, dropped trou and expected a hood rinse, as they say. "Of course I was very young," Stone recently disclosed, "so I started laughing, laughing and crying at the same time, and I couldn't stop because I became hysterical. He didn't know what to do."

Luckily for Stone, he backed away, pulled his pants back up and silently walked out of the office, leaving the still rattled and laughing Stone to be shown out of the office a few minutes later by the executive's (surely complicit) female assistant. Some news outlets are saying that the executive was Jon Peters - allegedly! - but the name is less important than the telling of the story, because the more these stories are told, the more male perpetrators in power will think twice about harassing and abusing young women, and the less these women will be irreversibly labeled as "crazy" and "difficult" by those same men. Or at least that's the hope. 

Sadly, this wasn't the only time Stone found herself in similar circumstances, and shortly after "Basic Instinct," she was predictably branded as "difficult to work with," which severely shortened her leading actor career. Likewise, the harassed Sean Young was branded as "crazy" and "difficult" by many men in the industry, very publicly by James Woods. And later, in a grim replay of Stone's Sony harassment, she found herself faced with Harvey Weinstein in his office where he dropped trou and expected her to get to business. "You know, Harvey," she told him, "you really shouldn't be pulling that thing out, it's not very pretty." This delightful response put her career in cement shoes. And before anyone says, "But she has to be 'crazy,' she voted for Trump," just. Stop. It. If you can't stand up for all women who are harassed - yes, even Megyn Kelly - then you're very much a part of the problem. You don't have to like their politics (you can even hate them) to recognize the wrongs committed against them. 

The upside to Weinstein's downfall is that "general meetings" are no longer held in hotel rooms, as countless were. Jason Blum, himself a (physically assaulted) Miramax/Weinstein Company veteran and now the head of Blumhouse, notably holds all meetings with female stars and directors in his office - with the door wide open. 

All of which brings us back to "crazy" and "difficult." The next time you hear a female star (or recently, female directors, like Olivia Wilde and Elizabeth Banks, to name just two) described with these words, please take it with a gargantuan, even colossal, grain of salt, because as the old adage goes, there's two sides to every story - and one of them is true. Or try remembering how Stone reacted when asked in a recent TV interview if she'd ever faced harassment as a young star. She had no words. She didn't need them. She just laughed: