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.â€
“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.â€
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.â€
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.â€