Hollywood’s leading actresses rail against pay disparity and casting couch sexual harassment by top studio executives

Hollywood actresses bemoan pay disparity with their male counterparts, as well as the despised “casting couch” - where film executives sometimes make sexual advances before deciding who gets a coveted movie role.

But some of Hollywood’s top female stars are saying “no more,” and are hailing this as a banner year for women in film.

Ashley Judd was the latest to join the chorus, telling Variety magazine ”one of the industry’s most famous, admired” bosses - whom she declined to name - had lured her to his hotel suite in the late 1990s.

She said that after it became clear that she would not return his sexual advances, he asked if she would watch him shower.

“I did not recognise at the time what was happening to me,” the 47-year-old actress said in the latest issue of Variety. “It took years before I could retrospectively evaluate that incident, and realise there was something incredibly wrong and illegal about it.”

Though Judd’s story is by no means unique, harassment of women in Hollywood is only the most explicit manifestation of their treatment as second-class citizens.