Olivia Munn says she wouldn’t sign NDA after ‘harrowing’ set experience

Olivia Munn is recalling a troubling on-set experience that left her “so upset and frustrated.”

The New Girl actress recalled “things that happened on this movie set personally to me that [were] really not okay” on Tuesday’s episode of Monica Lewinsky’s new Reclaiming podcast. “It was so traumatic that I had to file complaints with the studio. It got to this place where I was offered a lot of money – seven figures – to accept, I guess, their apology, and them taking acknowledgement of it.”

The fact that the payout “came along with an NDA,” or non-disclosure agreement – a legal contract that binds parties to confidentiality – tipped Munn off that something was wrong.

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“Not that I would ever have talked about it, truly, because I just wanted to move past it all,” she explained, but she says she told the studio, “‘I’m not signing an NDA.’ And they said, ‘You have to.’ And I just felt that it was so wrong.”

Munn explained that the unnamed project was under production around the time that the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements kicked off in Hollywood. Activist Tarana Burke created #MeToo in the mid-2000s to promote awareness around sexual assault and a cultivate a community of victims on MySpace, but the hashtag went viral again in Oct. 2017, following the cascade of misconduct and abuse allegations leveled against Harvey Weinstein.

Similarly, the Time’s Up Movement was founded as a non-profit organization by celebrities including Shonda Rhimes, Reese Witherspoon, and Eva Longoria in Jan. 2018 to help raise funds for victims of sexual assault and harassment.

Munn recalled that the “reckoning” around sexual violence and justice in the industry at the time led to a culture in which “people were targeting anyone who signed an NDA saying, ‘Oh, you only did it for the money.'” She confessed to being “afraid that my voice in speaking up would just reverse any kind of validity to my voice. And I was concerned that they would leak it out. I was concerned that the studio, in an effort to diminish my voice, would leak out that I had signed an NDA for money.”

#MeToo and Time’s Up’s work raising awareness around the practice of pushing NDAs on victims of sexual violence in the workplace helped lead to the passage of two important pieces of legislation in the state of California. The 2018 STAND Act (Stand Together Against Non-Disclosure Act) prohibited the use of confidentiality agreements in settlement negotiations where claims derived from sexual assault, harassment, and discrimination allegations. The 2021 Silenced No More Act expanded that legislation to prohibit confidentiality provisions on any protected basis in workplace settlement agreements.

While Munn did not specify which past project she was discussing, in 2018, at the height of #MeToo and Time’s Up’s storm through Hollywood, Munn’s projects included The Predator.

You can watch the rest of Munn’s appearance on Reclaiming below.