Jimmy Kimmel Faces More Backlash After Old Megan Fox Interview Resurfaces; Fox and Michael Bay Release Statements

Television host Jimmy Kimmel who is already facing backlash for having said the “N-word” in an old, resurfaced song, has now found himself in more controversy.

In an old clip from Jimmy Kimmel Live!, actress #MeganFox detailed an uncomfortable experience she had with Hollywood Director #MichaelBay on the set of Bad Boys II when she was a teenager.

Jimmy Kimmel really said that all men think about underaged girls in bikinis, and the audience laughed when Megan Fox retold what was probably a very traumatic experience for her… and y’all wonder why women don’t come forward after being sexually abused. https://t.co/1blrdifr9B

— kristen barry (@kmbarry27) June 21, 2020

The actress explained to Kimmel that at the time because she was 15, she couldn’t sit at a bar, so Bay came up with an alternative solution.

“[His] solution to that problem was to then have me dancing under a waterfall getting soaking wet,” Fox explained to Kimmel. “At 15, I was in 10th grade. That’s sort of a microcosm of how Bay’s mind works.”

“Well, that’s really a microcosm of how all our minds work, but some of us have the decency to repress those thoughts and pretend that they don’t exist,” Kimmel jokingly responded.

However, Kimmel’s response wasn’t well-received by social media users as they came across the 2009 clip.

But, Fox, 34, has since come forward in an Instagram post, to inform her audience that though she’s “endured some genuinely harrowing experiences in a ruthlessly misogynistic industry,” she was “never assaulted or preyed upon in what I felt was a sexual manner” by Bay, 55.⠀⠀⠀

https://www.instagram.com/p/CBwkEQ0lc62/?igshid=1llb4hwq6ddyg

“I know that a discussion has erupted online surrounding some of my experiences in Hollywood and the subsequent mishandling of this information by the media and society in general,” she wrote. “While I greatly appreciate the outpouring of support, I do feel I need to clarify some of the details as they have been lost in the retelling of the events and cast a sinister shadow that doesn’t really, in my opinion, belong. At least not where it’s currently being projected. …There are many names that deserve to be going viral in cancel culture right now, but they are safely stored in the fragmented recesses of my heart.”

Bay also released a statement along with an image from her audition clip for her role in ‘Transformers’ a few years after her roles as an extra in the second film of the ‘Bad Boys,’ franchise.

“This is a still from her Audition taping 13 years ago. No. She is not washing a car nor in a bikini like the press have falsely said for many years. And I personally think Megan is fantastic. I’m proud to have worked with her, and still am planning on working with her,” Bay wrote.

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A post shared by Michael Bay (@michaelbay)

Kimmel has yet to comment on the matter, however, he recently announced he was taking a hiatus for the summer to spend time with his family, following backlash he faced last month when old footage of him in blackface went viral on the web.