DISPATCHES FROM WEIMAR AMERICA: The Agony of Ellen Page.
Last year, Ellen Page—now going by ‘Elliot’ and identifying as a man—released the memoir, Pageboy.
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After moving to Toronto from Nova Scotia at age 16, Page was stalked by an older male fan and feared for her life. Upon arriving in Hollywood, she was, as The Guardian put it, “the perfect target for predators.” A director groomed Page, took her to dinner, and then began stroking her thigh under the table, telling the teenage girl, “You have to make the move, I can’t.” Others were not so reticent. Reviews of Pageboy describing this grooming carefully refer to Page as a “he”; doing so undermines the power imbalance of the predation as well as the gut-wrenching, very female fear Page experienced. She was targeted because she was Ellen, not Elliot.
In a chapter titled “Leeches”—a telling reference to the slimy, bloodsucking parasite worm—she described how another male actor abused her. She had thought of him as kind, and thus she took him up on the offer of a drive home one day. Once there, he took her by the shoulders, guided her firmly into the bedroom, laid her on the bed, took her clothes off, and forced himself on her. She describes being paralyzed with fear; only after it was over did she regain her voice and order him to leave. She was only 17 years old, a short, slight teenage girl whose acting career had just begun to take off.
The following year, she starred in Juno (2006), earning an Oscar nomination for Best Actress. Page played a 16-year-old who gets pregnant, goes to an abortion clinic, and changes her mind at the last moment after one of her classmates who is protesting outside the clinic tells her that her baby has fingernails. She decides to give the baby up for adoption instead and begins to spend time with the couple she has chosen—until the middle-aged husband hits on her. Knowing now what Page was enduring in Hollywood at the time, the storyline is eerily apt. Unsurprisingly, she writes that some of the films she acted in traumatized her because they were, in many instances, far too close to real life.
Nobody knew, as Page’s fame grew, what predatory men in Hollywood were doing to her. She had a waif-like, vulnerable, wide-eyed demeanor that should make men feel instinctively protective, but to a certain sort of man marked her as prey. Her vulnerability as a teen girl in a cutthroat industry should have gained her protection; instead, it made her a target. When she came out as a lesbian, a famous actor—whom she does not name—told her, drunkenly, that he would “f**k” her to prove to her that she was straight and graphically described the things he would do. “He was, and still is, one of the most famous actors in the world,” Page wrote, but provides no further details.
It’s like the city’s chief industry operates as a sex grooming gang or something.