sharanjit leyl with shara njit leyl with bbc sharanjit leyl with bbc world news. but top story, the bombardment by the syrian government of the rebel held on clip of eastern ghouta continues, continuing to warn of the risk of a second aleppo. more than 200 people have been killed since sunday. hospitals have been hit, making it even harder to treat the wounded. as survivors of last week's florida school shooting continue to demand changes to gun laws, president trump says he is willing to ban so—called bump stocks, which turned the rifles into rapidfire weapons. in this story is trending on the bbc.com. the queen is that in the front row with vogue magazine's anna wintour. and now on bbc news, it is 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's your overriding emotion right now? joy- just unmitigated, electrifying joy. i'm so happy. i'm so happy it's is here. i've been telling this 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 seven years old and the first thing i did was go to a grown up and say hey, thisjust happened. and as 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 i am such a crusader for gender equality and the full eradication of gender and sexual—based violence. because i experienced it as a youth, i experienced it in hollywood and it 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. if we just stick with harvey weinstein for a moment, what happened to you with harvey happened in 1997, but the truth and your story and so many other people's 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 name him in the piece. 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, and 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 and i came straight from the hotel at the peninsula down 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, the writer and producer. all of whom over the years have discussed it in an ongoing way with me and it's 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's why he blackballed me. i think that's why he blacklisted me and did unfortuantely as we know now such a successfuljob sabotaging my career, because 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 for all sorts of legal reasons that harvey 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? well, i would bump 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 had reached the up with 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 i getting ready to call him out in front of whoever happened to hear, to be within ear distance, whatever i'm 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 miro sorvino were difficult, you and miro 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. —— mira sorvino. 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 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 the highest paid female actor in hollywood. and... then when i was on that shortlist, and it wasjulia roberts, sandy bullock and me and a couple of other people, when it would down to it, so often without explanation, 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's what we heard, yes, 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've been doing so passionately for all of these years since. and i've been to 18

countries around the world, and 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, i've been tojordan 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 dates back to some twitter comments

you had put up about 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 cyber mob and suddenly, it was rape threats and decapitation threats and just all kinds of extraordinarily misogynistic, and — it was hate speech. you know, 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 feeling today about relations between men and women? so i could have just cut you off at the beginning and said

i love men. because i do, i love men. and i love boys and men. the problem is toxic masculinity. the problem is the patriarchy, which is a system that we all live in and operate, including me. i think that the patriarchy is as constraining and limiting to boys and men as it is to girls and women. and that y'all may not necessarily 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 to you one american writer and journalist, claire burlinski, she says "mass hysteria has set in, it's become a classic moral panic. and one that is ultimately as dangerous to women as to men." can you see where she's coming from at all? well, i think that 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 may also, in my opinion, simply have missed the point. and... you know, there's. .. i suppose one of the points is about the inflation of different kinds of behaviours. —— conflation. 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 women regard them as unacceptable, are not criminal? i 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's so important. you know, 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 news 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'm 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 in entertainment and other industries too where, it seems 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 all together, 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's less harassment

when there is more diversity. and it takes that kind of individual accountability to collectively make the change on a large scale. this is political, though, isn't it, for you? absolutely. you have become very political in that you are a goodwill ambassador for the population fund at the united nations. you travel the world, as you've 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've 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 and 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 toward equal pay. you have miles to go on all of that. we've miles to go, and i'm so glad that the story about the disparity of pay between the great michelle williams, who's been nominated for two 0scars, 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 that it's become public.

now, 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 is 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'm from eastern kentucky, and my people have been there for 10 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, ithink, 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's been vacated by bob corker. i am supporting a candidate who's running for 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 oprah winfrey, for example? much talk post—golden globes

of her being possibly presidential material, if she wants it, if she has the 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, i love being creative. and it's given me so much, it's given me the opportunity

to work with the unfpa, and be with grassroots 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. yeah, 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 very precious friendship for almost 20 — well, 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 somewhat 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. thanks forjoining me. time we updated you on the weather prospects for the whole of the british isles over the next few days or so. fairly slow change, i would have thought, over the next few days, simply because we are developing an area of high pressure which has rather strangled the old weather front which provided quite a veil of cloud sometimes through parts of the british isles through tuesday, but with the development

of the high pressure close by to the british isles, that as i say has the effect of killing off the front. a veil of cloud, not much more than that. maybe the odd drib and drab of rain, but essentially it's a dry pattern, and increasingly we will be talking about high pressure linked to the one over scandinavia as we go through the weekend and into next week. the veil of cloud doing its stuff to keep temperatures above freezing across england and wales for the most part. scotland and ireland, a different kettle of fish, someone‘s going to get to “11 or —5. so here we are on the new day. a little bit of mist and fog around, particularly in scotland and northern ireland, but that will soon pop away. essentially it's a dry day. maybe the odd spot of rain passing by, maybe a shower coming in on a north—easterly breeze towards kent and essex. those temperatures, not too bad when you compare them to what's to come, and i'll show you those in just a second. here is thursday. just the first signs of us wanting to pick up something a little bit sort of continental in origin. certainly that wind coming

in from a pretty cool continent at the moment, and you will feel the like of that in norwich, for example, four degrees only, and generally across the british isles, despite the fact there's a lot of sunshine around, variable amounts of cloud, temperatures just beginning to tick away from where we were at the start of the week. so as we move towards the tail end of the week, things beginning to settle down. notice temperatures around the five, six, seven degree mark or so. the forecast in edinburgh rather caught my eye. that's the second big fixture of saturday when we get on to the next round of the six nations rugby. i don't think the weather will get in the way in dublin or indeed in edinburgh. as i say, once we get towards the weekend, our high pressure begins to become amalgamated with a big area pressure over scandinavia. now, that's really quite important, because, if you follow the isobars around the eastern and southern flanks, then we begin to look away, up towards siberia, for the source of the air that comes towards us as we start the new week, and that's really quite crucial. we haven't seen that sort of setup for quite awhile, but there's no doubt about it.

next week, yes, there will be some sunshine, there will be some chilly nights around. a bitter wind in from the east and the chance of snow as temperatures tumble. this is newsday on the bbc. i'm rico hizon in singapore. the headlines: hundreds are killed in eastern ghouta as syrian government forces step up their bombardment. the un says the situation is "spiralling out of control". as florida shooting survivors push for changes to gun laws, president trump says he wants to ban bump stock devices. i signed a memorandum directing the attorney general to propose regulations to ban all devices that turn legal weapons into machine—guns. i'm sharanjit leyl in london. also on the programme: thailand's so—called "ba by factory" case. a court names a wealthy japanese man the legal parent of 13 children.