On Sunday, Björk released a statement in which she alleged that an unidentified Danish director had sexually harassed and humiliated her on the set of of his film. While she has declined to explicitly specify the director in question, the fact that Björk has only ever worked with one director from Denmark was enough to prompt Lars von Trier to deny that he had been sexually inappropriate with her her on the set of his 2000 movie Dancer in the Dark. “That was not the case,” he told the Danish publication Jyllands-Posten. “But that we were definitely not friends, that’s a fact.”
Now Björk has shared further details about what happened to her, using the #MeToo hashtag under which women have been sharing their experiences of sexual harassment, abuse, and assault on social media.
here comes a list of the encounters that i think count as sexual harassment :
1 after each take the director ran up to me and wrapped his arms around me for a long time in front of all crew or alone and stroked me sometimes for minutes against my wishes
2 when after 2 months of this i said he had to stop the touching , he exploded and broke a chair in front of everyone on set . like someone who has always been allowed to fondle his actresses . then we all got sent home .
3 during the whole filming process there were constant awkward paralysing unwanted whispered sexual offers from him with graphic descriptions , sometimes with his wife standing next to us .
4 while filming in sweden , he threatened to climb from his room´s balcony over to mine in the middle of the night with a clear sexual intention , while his wife was in the room next door . i escaped to my friends room . this was what finally woke me up to the severity of all this and made me stand my ground
5 fabricated stories in the press about me being difficult by his producer . this matches beautifully the weinstein methods and bullying . i have never eaten a shirt . not sure that is even possible .
6 i didnt comply or agree on being sexually harassed . that was then portrayed as me being difficult . if being difficult is standing up to being treated like that , i´ll own it .
In 2000, the British music magazine Q printed an anonymous report that Björk had become so distraught while filming Dancer in the Dark that she ripped up the blouse she was wearing and ate pieces of it before storming off the set. But since she says in this new post that she was accused of eating a shirt and not a blouse, clearly she must be talking about some other mysterious movie by some other mysterious Danish director. Who that is, the world may never know.
Here is Björk’s most recent statement in full:
