During an interview with actress Salma Hayek this week, Oprah Winfrey said she believes Reese Witherspoon suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder after the New York Times published its bombshell report on Harvey Weinstein back in October.
Oprah and Witherspoon were on the set of A Wrinkle in Time together when the story broke. Per Entertainment Tonight, Oprah told Hayek - who recently opened up about her own horrific experiences with Weinstein — that shortly after the Times story dropped, Witherspoon and other actresses started acting like they were “suffering from PTSD.”
“Everybody was acting like they were afraid and they were having the conversation,” Oprah said, adding:
“I remember Reese saying, ‘Oh god, this is just so upsetting. And someone mentions his name, I start tearing up. And every time I hear someone else speak, it just causes me to be upset and I haven’t slept in two days.’ So I said, ‘Jeez, you guys are suffering from PTSD. Did something happen to you?’ Nobody said anything at the time.”
A few days after the first Times story broke, Witherspoon told the audience at an Elle Women in Hollywood event that a director had sexually assaulted her when she was only 16:
“I have my own experiences that have come back to me very vividly and I find it really hard to sleep, hard to think, hard to communicate a lot of the feelings that I’ve been having about anxiety, honest, the guilt for not speaking up earlier.”
Earlier this week, Witherspoon also said she had been in an abusive relationship when she was young, and that leaving it changed her “on a cellular level.”