Constance Wu feared being fired if she complained about harassment
Constance Wu was “scared” of losing her job if she reported the sexual harassment she allegedly experienced on the ‘Fresh Off the Boat’ set.
The 40-year-old actress recently that she was harassed by a producer on the sitcom but she felt her ordeal was “pretty common” and not “that bad” in comparison to other situations she had faced.
Speaking on ‘Good Morning America’, she said: “I was scared of losing my job, and compared to the other stories of the harassment I endured, it ‘wasn’t that bad.’ In fact, to be honest, what I went through was pretty common.”
The ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ star “repressed” her pain because her alleged abuser was Asian American and “such a good proponent for Asian American issues” that she didn’t “want to bring him down.”
She added: “It really was a conflict for me, because I didn’t want to stain the reputation of the one show Asian Americans had to represent themselves.”
But by the ABC show’s second season, the actress “made him furious” when she began to turn down his “inappropriate requests” and she has not spoken to him since then.
In 2019, Constance famously sparked a backlash when she tweeted about how “upset” she was that ‘Fresh Off the Boat’ had been renewed for a fifth season and she admitted the alleged harassment was one of the reasons why she was ready to move on from the show.
She said: “I’d gotten these other jobs that I was really excited about and I was ready for a clean slate.
“I was ready to stop working at a place that held so many memories of sexual harassment and shame and fear. So when I found out that I couldn’t move on, I felt — honestly, in that moment, I felt betrayed and I felt lied to.”
While the actress acknowledged her tweet was “reckless,” “graceless” and “dramatic,” she doesn’t feel the backlash she received was fair.
She said: “The backlash was immediate. There was a huge pile on. I was essentially cancelled for coming off as ungrateful, and the most painful thing of all was that it was really the Asian American community that either ostracised or avoided me the most.
“Do I think the proportion of the hatred and the cancellation pitted at me was equal to the amount of error I did? No.”
Constance was left feeling suicidal after receiving DMs from another Asian actress who “shamed” her “to the point of me thinking that I needed to end my own life.”
She added: “She basically said I had become a blight on [the] Asian American community, and nothing I could ever do would make up for the damage I’d done to the community. That I was like, a disgrace. And it made me feel like Asian Americans feel like it would be better if I just didn’t exist.”
