Jimmy Bennett, the actor who accused actress Asia Argento of sexually assaulting him when he was aged 17, has said that he decided to speak out after she came forward as a victim of producer Harvey Weinstein.
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Bennett told The Hollywood Reporter that he did not speak out about the encounter with the actress because he had wanted to “handle it in private.” When the first reports of the alleged assault emerged, the actor maintained his silence, saying that he was “ashamed and afraid to be part of the public narrative.”
The statement comes just days after a New York Times report in which it was alleged that Argento paid off Bennett after he accused her of sexually assaulting him in 2013. Bennett was aged 17 at the time of the alleged encounter, while Argento was 37. The legal age of consent in California is 18.
“I was underage when the event took place,” Bennett said in the statement. “I tried to seek justice in a way that made sense to me at the time because I was not ready to deal with the ramifications of my story becoming public.”
“At the time I believed there was still a stigma to being in the situation as a male in our society. I didn’t think that people would understand the event that took place from the eyes of a teenage boy,” he added.
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Argento is said to have paid Bennett $380,000 in November last year, a month after she accused Harvey Weinstein of sexually assaulting her in a New Yorker expose. Argento denies the assault and said the payoff was the idea of her boyfriend, the recently-deceased celebrity chef and travel documentarian Anthony Bourdain.
“I am deeply shocked and hurt having read the news that is absolutely false,” she told New York Magazine journalist Yashar Ali. “I have never had any sexual relationship with Bennett.”
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