Selma Blair Says James Toback Once Made Her Read a Monologue While Naked

She went on, "I felt disgust and shame, and like nobody would ever think of me as being clean again after being this close to the devil. His energy was so sinister.”

After Toback finished, he implied that if Blair spoke about the incident to anyone, he would have her kidnapped or killed. She told her boyfriend at the time what had happened but made him promise not to share what had happened with anyone. When her representatives later asked her to have another meeting with the director, she refused and told them Toback was "vile" and they should not be sending any women to meet with him.

"I didn’t want to speak up because, it sounds crazy but, even until now, I have been scared for my life," she said.

Like Blair, McAdams had a disturbing incident with Toback in a hotel room when she was just starting her career.

She was 21 when she met with the director, and he insisted that they meet at a hotel room at night.

When she arrived, he asked her to sit on the floor of his room—where magazines and books were spread out—and she said she felt "awkward."

“Pretty quickly the conversation turned quite sexual and he said, ‘You know, I just have to tell you. I have masturbated countless times today thinking about you since we met at your audition,’” McAdams said.

She said the director then began "that kind of manipulative talk" in order to "build some intimacy" between the two of them. He asked her to read passages from reviews of his films out loud and eventually went into the bathroom.

"When he came back he said, 'I just jerked off in the bathroom thinking about you. Will you show me your pubic hair?' I said no," she said.

McAdams eventually excused herself from the room, but the encounter has been "a source of shame" for her, and she felt like she had been thrown into a lion's den.

"I kept thinking, This is going to become normal any minute now. This is going to all make sense. This is all above board somehow," she said. "Eventually I just realized that it wasn’t."

McAdams said that she hopes her experience will continue to shed light on how prevalent sexual harassment is in the film industry.

"We need to start acknowledging what an epidemic this is, and what a deep-seated problem this is," she said. "You have to get it all out in the open and in the light so that we can really understand how pervasive this is. I think we almost have to exhaust ourselves sharing our experiences before the rebuilding can begin. And hopefully, we never slip back into this darkness again."

Blair shared a similar sentiment, adding that, more specifically, she wants Toback to admit to the allegations.

"None of us are asking for money, for jobs, or for fame. We don’t want to be threatened on social media or called whistleblowers by people who don’t know what it means to be defiled and degraded and made to feel worthless," she said. "What I do want, in my dreams, is for someone bigger than me to call him out. I want to light the pyre of public opinion."

Toback has denied all allegations from the Los Angeles Times report.