Grace Jones Says She Was a Victim of Sexual Misconduct

Grace Jones said she was a victim of sexual misconduct when she went up for her first movie role at the age of 17. The singer and actor told her story during a recent interview with CNN (video below) and recalled how she’d been invited to a producer’s home to discuss her appearance in the film.

“I already had the part. I remember Ossie Davis -- [it] was [the] first film he was directing, and the producer came and said to meet him at his place because … Ossie didn’t have the last word,” Jones said. “I had to bring my portfolio to him. When I got to his house – and I don’t remember his name, thank God – he poured some champagne. He was in his bathrobe. ... and he took me to a room, which, of course, I didn’t know his house, and it was his bedroom. So with the champagne, even at that young age I was, I splashed it in his face and walked out the door. I got flowers the next day.”

Although she didn’t confirm full details of the movie, IMDB lists Davis’s first directing credits as Kongi’s Harvest and Cotton Comes to Harlem in 1970. Jones’s first acting credit came for Gordon’s War, also directed by Davis, in 1973, by which time she was 25 years old.

“It is a power thing,” she said of sexual misconduct, arguing that it’s not necessarily about sex itself. “Because this person obviously can’t get it in the normal route, or he has no patience, I don’t know, or he feels he doesn’t have to. And that feeling of, ‘I have the last word,’ that’s what really upset me. I knew I had the role through Ossie, but to say to me, ‘No, I have the last word,’ is what he said, ‘and you don’t get it unless you go through me.’”

Speaking in more general terms about other potential young victims, she said: “It’s a really difficult call because when you’re in that position you’re so vulnerable, you’re so nervous. You want this break so badly because you’ve been banging away at the pavement… and you finally think, 'I’ve made it to the big time,'… and now you have a monster to confront.”

Jones’s next movie appearance is in Bloodlight and Bambi, a documentary about her life and career, which premiered in the U.K. last year and opens in Australia in March.