Olivia Munn, who has starred in The Newsroom, Beyond the Break and Magic Mike, recently appeared on Monica Lewinsky’s ‘Reclaiming’ podcast and opened up about her traumatic experiences working in the TV and film industry.

The actress explained that her childhood was riddled with bullying, and she became ‘really feisty’ as a result. ‘So things were really black and white for me and I would make decisions without thinking them through enough,’ she explained. ‘I was just like, “This is wrong, this is right,” and I would never really be able to see the grey.’

This, Munn explains, affected her in an adult life, particularly in the workplace. ‘There were other things that happened on this movie set, personally to me, that was really not ok, and it was so traumatic that I had to file complaints with the studio,’ she told Lewinsky.

Munn went on to say there were ‘a lot of other little’ warning signs and off behaviours on set, but she did not go into further detail. ‘It got to this place where I was offered a lot of money. A lot of money – seven figures to accept, I guess, their apology and them taking acknowledgement of it.’

However, the payment ‘came along with an NDA’. ‘Not that I would ever have talked about it, truly, because I just wanted to move past it all,’ she said. ‘That’s why I don’t want to talk about the specific things that happened in that situation, but I said, “I’m not signing an NDA.”’ She was then allegedly told she’d have to in order to receive the money.

Munn explained that the situation unfolded right at the beginning of the #MeToo movement that was popularised in 2017, which saw multiple allegations of sexual misconduct levelled against men in Hollywood.

‘This was like, the reckoning, the Harvey Weinstein reckoning that began it all,’ she continued. ‘This was that time period, and this was when people were targeting anyone who signed an NDA saying, “Oh, you only did it for money”, so I was afraid that my voice and speaking up would reverse any kind of validity to my voice.’

Munn admitted she was ‘concerned’ that the studio would ‘leak out that [she] had signed an NDA for money’ in ‘an effort to diminish [her] voice’. As a result, she told her lawyer that she was not going to sign the NDA or accept the money and they encouraged her to think about the offer further before acting.

‘That comes into the feistiness of not thinking things through and being so upset and frustrated that this would be offered to me that I did not think about negotiating,’ she added. ‘I did not think about anything besides how disrespectful that was.’

Despite Munn’s lawyers thinking she was ‘crazy’ for not accepting the deal, she concluded that ‘it is not a lot of money to lose my voice’. Ultimately, she felt ‘so proud’ of herself after walking away.

‘Look, was it the right thing to do and do the people in my life think that I did the right thing and are proud of me for that? Yes,’ she added. ‘It’s not that I wouldn’t have ended up with the same decision, it’s that I made that decision based on anger, and that is something I had to learn how to do to rein in and use for my benefit.’

Munn might not have elaborated on her experience during the podcast, or named anyone in particular, but she has voiced her opinion on similar subjects in the past. In 2010 in her collection of essays, Suck It, Wonder Woman!: The Misadventures of a Hollywood Geek, she alleged that Brett Ratner masturbated in front of her when she visited him on the set of After the Sunset in 2004.

She did not originally name the director but later identified him after other women came forward with their own accusations of sexual misconduct. Ratner denied Munn’s allegation of sexual harassment via his lawyer, and has denied all other allegations of misconduct.

In 2018, she spoke about finding out that she had shared a scene with a registered sex offender in Predator, which she flagged to 20th Century Fox and had the scene cut entirely. Steven Wilder Striegel, a close friend of the Predator director Shane Black, was featured in a brief scene with Munn in the film.

Munn discovered that Striegel pleaded guilty in 2010 to felony risk of injury to a child and felony enticing a minor by computer after attempting to lure a 14-year-old girl into a sexual relationship. He spent six months in prison.

‘[I found it] both surprising and unsettling that Shane Black, our director, did not share this information to the cast, crew or Fox Studios prior to, during, or after production,’ the actress told the Los Angeles Times in a statement. ‘However, I am relieved that when Fox finally did receive the information, the studio took appropriate action by deleting the scene featuring Wilder prior to release of the film.’

The studio responded in a statement: ‘Our studio was not aware of Mr Striegel’s background when he was hired. We were not aware of his background during the casting process due to legal limitations that impede studios from running background checks on actors.’

Since Striegel’s release from prison, he has starred in Black’s films Iron Man 3 and The Nice Guys. When asked about this decision, Black told The Times, ‘I personally chose to help a friend. I can understand others might disapprove, as his conviction was on a sensitive charge and not to be taken lightly.’