Megan Fox recalls getting laughed at when she opened up about being sexualized at 15: 'It was just very dark'

• Megan Fox said she was laughed at when she opened up about being sexualized as a teenager.
• "That was a microcosm of my whole life and whole interaction with Hollywood," she recalled.
• According to Fox, it was "just very dark" to be met with laughter when sharing a serious incident.

Megan Fox recalled how she was met with laughter during a 2009 appearance on "Jimmy Kimmel Live" when she opened up about being sexualized as a teenager.

"That was a microcosm of my whole life and whole interaction with Hollywood," she said in a new interview with Ilana Kaplan for the Washington Post. "It was just very dark."

"I was so lost and trying to understand, like, how am I supposed to feel value or find purpose in this horrendous, patriarchal, misogynistic hell that was Hollywood at the time?" Fox told Kaplan.

The clip Fox was referring to was from her 2009 interview with Kimmel on his late-night talk show. In the old interview, when Kimmel asked about her experience working with "Transformers" director Michael Bay, Fox explained that she'd first worked with Bay when she was 15 on his film "Bad Boys II."

Fox recalled how she was cast as an extra in a bar scene and was wearing a "stars and stripes bikini" along with a red cowboy hat and "six-inch heels." Since she was underage at the time, she said Bay was told she couldn't be sitting at the bar or have a drink in her hand.

"The solution to that problem was to then have me dancing underneath a waterfall getting soaking wet," Fox told Kimmel during the 2009 interview.

After Kimmel and the studio audience burst into laughter, Fox reminded Kimmel that the scene was filmed when she was "15, I was in tenth grade."

Even though the interview happened over a decade ago, the clip went viral again last year, with many condemning the misogyny Fox had faced in her career.

In response to the clip resurfacing in 2020, the "Jennifer's Body" star subsequently clarified "some of the details" of her experience working with Bay in a statement posted to Instagram.

"When it comes to my direct experiences with Michael, and Steven [Spielberg, executive producer of "Transformers"] for that matter, I was never assaulted or preyed upon in what I felt was a sexual manner," Fox wrote.

She also called the "Bad Boys II" incident "inconsequential in a long and arduous journey along which I have endured some genuinely harrowing experiences in a ruthlessly misogynistic industry."