Emily Ratajkowski says she’s frustrated that her allegation about Robin Thicke groping her breasts on the “Blurred Lines” music video set was “leaked” before fans could read about in context in her upcoming book.
In a new interview with Extra, the model and actress addressed the portion of her book My Body that was released ahead of publication by the Sunday Times of London over the weekend. In the essay, the 30-year-old star recalled being on set for the “Blurred Lines” video when Thicke touched her bare breasts without her consent.
In talking to Extra, she expressed frustration that although the inappropriate encounter with the singer behind the 2013 Billboard Hot 100 chart-topper was written in her own words, it didn’t come out on her own time.
“What’s frustrating is I didn’t come out with it. It was leaked,” she says. “It’s been hard for me, I mean, I really like to have control over my image. And I wrote this book of essays to share the whole story, and all sides of it. And I feel like it just turns into a clickbait frenzy and all of a sudden, words like ‘sexual assault’ and ‘allegations’ are getting thrown around rather than people reading the actual essay. So again, I’m just looking forward to when people will be able to hear things in my own words.”
In another new interview with People, she explained why she stayed silent until writing about it for her book. “I was an unknown model and if I had spoken out or complained, I would not be where I am today; I would not be famous,” she says.
Thicke has not publicly responded to Ratajkowski’s essay, where she details what happened on set. “Suddenly, out of nowhere, I felt the coolness and foreignness of a stranger’s hands cupping my bare breasts from behind. I instinctively moved away, looking back at Robin Thicke,” she writes, adding that he returned “to the set a little drunk to shoot just with me.” The visual, which helped catapult Ratajkowski to fame, stars Thicke and the song’s featured artists T.I. and Pharrell Williams dancing around with her and fellow models Elle Evans and Jessi M’Bengue, who were semi-naked in the notorious video and topless in an unrated version.
My Body will be out Nov. 9 from Macmillan. It’s described as “a deeply honest investigation of what it means to be a woman and a commodity… a profoundly personal exploration of feminism, sexuality, and power, of men’s treatment of women and women’s rationalizations for accepting that treatment. These essays chronicle moments from Ratajkowski’s life while investigating the culture’s fetishization of girls and female beauty, its obsession with and contempt for women’s sexuality, the perverse dynamics of the fashion and film industries, and the grey area between consent and abuse.”
“Everything I talk about is about the evolution of my politics,” Ratajkowski tells Extra. “It’s not some big reveal, it’s not some crazy thing; it’s a part of a larger essay. I’m just excited for people to hold nuance and understand that.”
She also tells People how what she experienced is not an isolated event. “I think all women, we all play the game, capitalizing off of your image, commodifying their body, that’s the world that we live in and I would never tell a woman that she shouldn’t but I also would hope that they understand that that’s sort of a double-edged sword,” she explains.
When it comes to her and her husband Sebastian Bear-McClard’s six-month-old baby Sylvester “Sly” Apollo, she wants to raise him in a world where the “unspoken” “power dynamics” and double standard between men and women changes.
Watch Ratajkowski speak on the leaked portion of the book in the Extra interview below.