syria's war in eastern ghuota has intensified as air attacks have rained down in the battle for one of the countries last rebel held areas. hundreds have been killed and scores injured. the united nations has demanded an end to the targeting of civilians in the damascus suburb. students have been protesting outside the white house, demanding action on gun control, and are planning a march on washington. president trump has signalled he is now "supportive" of improved background checks for people buying guns, in the wake of the florida school shooting that killed 17 students and staff. the turkish government has said it will confront syrian forces if they enter the north western district of afrin, to help the kurdish ypg militia repel a turkish offensive. turkey regards the kurdish fighters, just across its southern border, as terrorists. now it's time for hardtalk. welcome to hardtalk from new york, with me stephen sackur.

this city and los angeles are the twin capitals of america's giant movie, media and entertainment business. a business that has been rocked by allegations of systemic sexism, misogyny and abusive behaviour. my guest today is ashleyjudd, the actor and activist and one of the first women to go public with her accusations about the mega—producer harvey weinstein. what began with voices of anger and pain has become a movement, demanding radical change. how far can it go? ashleyjudd, welcome to hardtalk.

thank you. in recent weeks and months something quite extraordinary has happened. kickstarted, i suppose, by the allegations concerning harvey weinstein and what we see now is the growth of a real movement of women speaking out. are you satisfied that this has come about or are you deeply frustrated that it has taken so long for this to come about, what is your overriding emotion right now? joy- just unmitigated, electrifying joy. i am so happy. i am so happy it's is here. i have been telling the story of a long time from the moment it

happened in fact, my particular moments of harassment with harvey weinstein, i am a teller to use the words used that laura dern used on stage at the golden globes, i am a taddler. you know, i was molested when i was 7 years old and the first thing i did was go to a grown up and say hey thisjust happened. and is so often the case, i was told this is an old man, this is not what he meant. but i somehow managed to stay absolutely authentic in my truth in telling this was what has happened and that is why am such a crusader for gender equality and the full eradication of gender and sexual—based violence. i experienced it as a youth, i experienced it in hollywood and has been the core of my work 15 years and now that this movement has collectivised and catalysed and is here, it is incredibly gratifying to me. we stick with harvey weinstein for a moment, what happened to you with harvey happened in 1997, but the truth in your story

in so many other peoples stories has only emerged in the last few months. so what happened to the telling that you did at the time? no one could hear me. and i told the story in great detail to variety magazine two years to the month prior to the publication of the new york times piece and everyone knew i was talking about harvey, he was named in the comments that were posted on variety's website. sometimes people called him by name, sometimes they used loosely disguised names like shmarvey schmeinstein. but you didn't name him in the piece? no i didn't, i was talking with variety in their women in film issue, powerful women in hollywood issue, whatever they call it. the journalist asked the question had i ever been been harassed. i was like not yes, but hell yes. everyone in the room with me, my team was like no.

of course i'm telling the story, my dad was with me when it happened i came straight from the hotel to the lobby and told my dad immediately what had happened, including everyone that night with whom i was filming on kiss the girls, the director, writer and producer. all of whom over the years have discussed it in an ongoing way with me and it is just that now the world could hear. and the pattern is clear from so many of the different stories, weinstein often operating out of a hotel room, summoning a female actor to his room and appearing in the bathrobe and demanding different acts which were clearly of a sexual nature. you fled when that pretty much happened to you. were you then, for a long time, frightened of harvey weinstein?

i was not frightened of harvey weinstein and i think that is why he blackballed me. i think that is why he blacklisted me and did unfortuantely as we know now did such a successfuljob sabotaging my career as he continued to harass me between 1997 and 1999 and i have other examples and i haven't gone into detail because i don't want to give it oxygen. you know what i have to do, i have to say that he continues to absolutely deny in any of the cases that have been discussed in the last few months that he ever acted in a way that was not consensual when it came to sexual activity. right, he also hasn't denied that he harassed me and in fact he has apologised for it. in my particular example he said, a direct quote, he didn't lay a glove on me. he didn't because as you noticed i was able to flee the room, he harassed me, abused his power and he lorded it over me, this imbalance between us, with vitriol and abuse of charm for two years and then all of a sudden...

so you continued to see him? i bumped into him at the hotel, i would bump into him at different events and he was always like "wink wink, i will find that great part for you". at the premiere of doublejeopardy in 1999 i reached the up to which i could no longer put. i'll always remember this because barbara walters was to my right and i wondered if on an unconscious level having a powerful woman next to me helped inflame my own audacious courage because i started to go at him. i literally started to go at him and was getting ready to call him out in front of whoever happened to hear, to be within the distance, whatever i am trying to say. he knew it and he said you know, i'm going to let you out of that little deal we made. i said, you do that harvey. you do that. he never bothered me again,

but of course he blacklisted me which peterjackson and fran walsh have since confirmed. he says that he received information that you and another actress mira sorvino were difficult, you and mira shouldn't be touched because you were too demanding and too difficult and peterjackson has since said i took that information and i wish i hadn't. but does it leave you feeling that your career has, in a substantial way, been ruined by this man? not ruined, but definitely impacted. definitely impacted. i deeply appreciate peter and fran‘s apology and that they wrote me a very detailed letter with an absolute blow by blow timeline of what happened and what was said and how it was confusing for them because this notion that i was difficult didn't match their experience of me personally. it really, it is in a way, it a relief because it explains what previously had been inexplicable, why i was always on that, at the time

i was was the highest paid female actor in hollywood. then when i was on that shortlist, julia roberts, sandy bullock and me and a couple of other people. without explanation it would come down to it that i wouldn't get the offer and i didn't know why. again, miramax have denied that they put out a blacklist or blackballed individuals including yourself. there are a lot of contradictions in there and other people have since come forward and said yes, that is what we heard, we had a feeling it wasn't true. the good news is i have such a robust life and i have a great curiosity about the world and in a way that led me to the humanitarian work that i have been doing so passionately for all of these years since. and i have been to 18 countries around the world,

in particular i visited congo and rwanda multiple times and i spent a month in india last year, i've been to the warzone in ukraine and jordan recently and on my way to bangladesh and sri lanka. to use an expression used in texas, i don't know if y'all know it. i have made a hand. a good hand for myself. in a sense you are saying it certainly modified the trajectory of your life. it did, yes. it did. let's talk about the somewhat bigger picture because this is part of something much bigger. in a fascinating ted talk that you delivered last year, you talked of sexism, misogyny, of vile, violent abuse that you had been getting online. and this is nothing to do with the specifics of the weinstein case, i think much of it comes from a twitter comments you had put up at a basketball game. yes, that was an ovarian moment, where i thought i had to up my game.

i was at a kentucky basketball game, that is my team, celtic is my team. i didn't like a piece of refereeing and i said something about it in a tweet and all of a sudden it went viral and what is called a a cyber mob and suddenly it was rape threats and decapitation threats and just all kinds of extraordinarily misogynistic, and it was hate speech. it was hate speech and i decided to write about it. what about your attitudes today about men. raped as a girl, suffered at the hands of, it seems, people like harvey weinstein. what is your feelings today of our relations between men and women? so i could have cut you off at the beginning and said that i love men. i love men. i love boys and men.

the problem is toxic masculinity. the problem is the patriarchy of the system that we all live in, including me. i think that the patriarchy is as constraining and limiting to boys and men as it is to girls and women. y'all may not see it that way because when one is entitled and has privilege and seems to have a status that affords different kinds of power and licences, that that actually is as limiting and unfulfilling to boys and men as it is to girls and women. the metoo campaign that has arisen since this focus on hollywood and misogyny and sexism and abuse began, the metoo campaign according to some women, has gone too far. if i quote you one american writer and journalist, claire burlinski, she says mass

hysteria has set in, it's become a classic moral panic. one that is ultimately as dangerous to women as to men. can you see where she is coming from at all? i think there is always room for critique and that we can be spacious enough in our perspective to hold paradox and to hold dissent. there may be something to learn from that and she maybe also, in my opinion, simply have missed the point. and... i suppose one of the points is about the inflation about different kinds of behaviours. this alleged criminality of harvey weinstein and then there is what other women writers have called the presumptuousness and boorishness that women have seen in men and dealt with men for time immemorial. is there a danger of conflating different behaviours and criminalising some behaviours which, while many regard them as unacceptable, are not criminal?

think it's fantastic to have the conversation and starting to articulate and identify and really, and have a gradient of behaviours and understand that there is a spectrum of behaviour. that is so important. unless we talk about this and tease each part of it out we can't understand what is unacceptable and what is and we also need the lexicon for describing the behaviour. yesterday i switched my tv on and there was use of another actor, james franco, who has been the subject of a number of different accusations from women, mostly online. james franco's response is look, hey, i didn't do the things that i am accused of but if i did in the past behave badly then i am going to work my very hardest to put things right. i wonder now about the atmosphere that you see in your industry and in entertainment and other

industries too where, it seems that some men feel that they are, in a sense, being presumed guilty without due process. i think that whatjames said is terrific, and i think that we've all behaved at a certain level unconsciously, and done things that were insensitive, inappropriate, without necessarily understanding that they were. i mean, we've all operated with a certain amount of tone—deafness. and i like the culpability, and we have to have restorative justice. this is about men and women being altogether, and having a more equitable and just workplace, home life, social spaces. i mean, we know that, when women are empowered in the workplace, and are in decision—making positions, that workplaces have better financial outcomes, and there is less harassment when there is more diversity. and it takes that kind of individual accountability to collectively make a change, on a large scale. this is political, though,

isn't it, for you? absolutely. you have become political in that you are a goodwill ambassador for the population fund at the united nations. you travel the world, as you said, often addressing women's groups and talking to women and girls about the need for them to be part of a campaign to deliver better lives across the world for females. look at the united states. how much work does there need to be in the united states on these issues? a ton, a ton. our teen pregnancy is skyrocketing. we have some of the highest teen pregnancy in the developed world. you know, we don't have paid family leave, except at individual companies, who have had the courage to lead internally, and i'm very aware that we have great strides to be made here. i mean, there are 49 countries in the world that don't have laws

prohibiting intimate partner and domestic violence, and while we do have laws against it, they too need to be more evenly enforced. and our restraining orders are in some instances quite ineffective, and grant the abuser all kinds of freedom of movement, that constrain the victim to certain hours and safe zones. well, it was very striking at the golden globes the other day. you and many other leading actors were dressed in black, and many of you invited as your guests activists from different spheres across the united states, representing all sorts of different ethnic and working groups of women. and i know that the #metoo campaign said that one of its absolute driving forces was the correspondence it had had with 700,000 female farmworkers whom it was determined to draw into this campaign for equality, equal pay, women's rights.

do you think, in all honesty, that you and other movie stars, and very famous women, are best—placed to be relatable, and to deliver real change, for people like the female farmworkers of america? i believe we are best—placed to clean up our own industry, and we're doing that. you know, we're writing codes of conduct across unions in our business so that, for example, business meetings can no longer take place in hotel rooms. and we're working for equal representation, both behind the camera and in front of the camera. we're working towards equal pay. you have miles to go on all of that. we have miles to go, and i'm so glad that the story about the disparity in pay between the great michelle williams, who has been nominated for two oscars, and mark wahlberg has come out, because i knew those facts myself, and it

wasn't my story to tell. and it's so egregious, i'm grateful it's become public. are we the most relatable, are we the most well—placed? i don't know. they reached out to us, and our collective and individual empathy and understanding is absolutely with them. you know, we responded to their identification with us, because, you know, it doesn't... whether it's the server who gets her bum pinched, or the factory worker who's harassed by the line boss, or the female janitor who's trapped in a building after hours with men who threaten her, we experience it in the brain stem the same way. any kind of threat is a physiological experience, and it doesn't matter what the pay is, or what the setting is. men and women experience it the same, and that's really what we're addressing. trump and his supporters do tend to portray people in your business as out—of—touch elites,

liberals who know nothing, frankly, of the lives of white, working—class americans in middle america. do you think that faultline could be dangerous, if it develops further? i am from eastern kentucky, and my people have been there for ten generations, and i grew up around the coal mines. i live in rural middle tennessee, surrounded by folks who voted for our current president. i think that i am uniquely positioned as an american to understand all kinds of people, from all backgrounds and all classes, and all levels of achievement. well, let's just continue the politics conversation a little further. you, it is reported, seriously considered running for the senate, in i think 2013, 2012-2013. do you still feel there might be a political career for you? i want to be useful.

you know, i want to be useful to my fellows, and to the god of my understanding, and i like to think i'm willing to do whatever it takes to be useful. it seems right now i'm in the right space, and i wouldn't rule it out. and it's not a coy answer, i just don't know. i was very serious at the time, and then a young person in my family came to live with me. i was given an opportunity to help finish raising a 16—year—old child, and that's why i chose not to run, and i'm very content with that decision. i think mitch mcconnell needs to be unseated. i'm really hoping a democrat can win the seat that has been vacated by bob corker. i am supporting a candidate in marsh's seat, as he has been held hostage for so many years. but right now, i'm not a candidate. and would you back 0prah winfrey, for example?

much talk post—golden globes of her being possible presidential material, if she wanted, if she has ambition. if she... you know, she's clearly a genuinely exceptional human being, and she has a capacity to bring people together, which is maybe the single greatest balm and healing glue that our nation needs right now. what i really heard, and what she said the other night, and i was mere feet away from her, was one person can spark change, that then inflames a second person, who may go on to do something that changes the whole world. let's end by returning to your own industry, and yourfuture in it. having experienced what you experienced, do you want a future in it? i do, i love acting and i love being creative. and it's given the opportunities to work with the unfpa, and working with organisations around the world that help bring reproductive health and access

to millions of women who don't have it, and of course, that's the key to eradicating poverty. and i love being creative. yes, but you have said it yourself. you work in an industry where i think, of the top 100 grossing movies of 2016, only 6% were made by women. women are still, compared to men, underpaid in all the different aspects of your industry. and, of those 6%, only four were women of colour. but salma hayek and i have enjoyed a precious friendship for 20—something years. i now have that kind of friendship with women i have admired on the screen for years. the way we have come together is something terrifying to the industry. from now on, will you only takejobs where you know you are paid equally with the male lead, whether it be in a movie,

whether it be in a theatre production? are you going to be different in the way that you handle your career in future? it's a great question, and the answer is yes, in addition to asking for 50% male—female participation below the line, which means all the crew members, including equal representation of men and women as department heads. because it's behind the camera, where we start telling the story, that the story emerges on film. so this is a movement which can change your business, and maybe change america. i am an optimist. i believe that we are at... you know, it's a great time to be alive, and it's a great time to be a woman. and revolutions are messy, and they‘ re not linear. and we don't have the playbook for this, and that's all right. what matters is that we keep our nose to the grindstone, and we do it.

we have a singleness of purpose. boys and men, girls and women, are equally valuable, and all of our spaces need to reflect that. we have to end there, but ashleyjudd, thank you so much for being on hardtalk. thank you very much, i really appreciate it. once again, ijust want to bring you up to date with how we see the weather developing right across the british isles in the coming day. i think there will be something of a transformation for many of us as early as today. a much brighter day for central and western parts compared to monday, simply because monday's weather front slowly, but surely is easing its way over towards the north sea, but not quite completing the job, and that's quite important

because it gives leaden skies for tuesday. the last of the mild air trapped with that weather front slowly just becoming confined to the east. 0ut towards the west underneath clear skies, tuesday will start fairly cool. western scotland, northern ireland, parts of wales too. there could be a touch of frost if you're very prone. now, let's see how we're going to do for the school run and the morning commute. as i say, with the weather front making its progress over towards the east, there will be brighter skies. just putting the detail model on here to show you there's a speckling of showers there, particularly over the high ground. they could be wintry across scotland. but dry to start with to the western side of the pennines, through northern ireland, the west midlands, wales and the south—west of england. but go that bit further east, anywhere really from about yorkshire down to the far south—east, and you're looking at a fair amount of cloud and the prospect of some rain as well, which could, for some, hang around for the greater part of the day. you've got an onshore breeze as well, along these eastern shores. that combination of the cloud,

the lack of sunshine and that breeze, 7, 8 or 9. but further towards the north and the west, where you get some sunshine at last, at last, will push those temperatures up nicely — 10, 11, 12 degrees or so. now, with high pressure building in across that old weather front, we're left with just a residue of cloud, which helps to keep the temperatures up as we start the new day on wednesday, but either side of it, where the skies are clear, we will end up with a touch of frost and that is the shape of things to come as we move into the latter part of the week and indeed on into the weekend. high pressure trying to build in and starting to connect us to a really cold continent. we won't be looking to the atlantic, as we have done through monday and tuesday, we will be looking towards the continent and scandinavia. so here is wednesday, with a high pressure close by to us, keeping the atlantic fronts at bay, but there will be sunshine, yes, there will be a lot of dry weather, but notice the temperatures, after that coolish sort of start — it's 7 to about 9 degrees.

no more the 10, 11 or 12, if indeed you ever saw that. here we are into thursday and indeed towards the tail—end and of the week, and here is the mechanism that eventually this is the briefing. i'm sally bundock. our top story — spiralling out of control — the un warns syria to stop bombing civilians in eastern ghouta as dozens die in the past 2a hours alone. students protest outside the white house, demanding action on gun control. president trump says he will support efforts to tighten background checks. the brexit secretary heads to austria to deliver a keynote speech, setting out the uk's aim of maintaining even—handed cooperation after leaving the eu. pre—tax profits more than double at europe's biggest bank as hsbc leaves its problems firmly in the past. a new boss starts work at hsbc tomorrow. we'll be getting an expert view on whatjohn flint will bring