British actor Thandie Newton put a spotlight on sexual abuse in Hollywood during an interview with W Magazine revealing the behavior of a director during a casting audition early in her career.

The director, who Newton did not identify, “had a camera shooting up my skirt”, she said, “and asked me to touch my tits and think about the guy making love to me in the scene. I thought, ‘OK, this is a little weird,’ but there was a female casting director in the room and I’d done weird stuff before so I did it.”

Newton, who has starred in films such as Mission Impossible II and the Oscar award-winning Crash, said that years later at a film festival, a producer drunkenly told her, “‘Oh, Thandie, I’ve seen you recently!’ And he lurched away looking really shocked that he’d said that.” When Newton’s husband asked the man for clarification he explained that “the director was showing that audition tape to his friends after poker games at his house. And they would all get off on it,” Newton said.

Newton, who has made the allegations before, is just the latest woman in Hollywood to go public about some of the industry’s sexism, which has been largely ignored and suppressed for decades. In an interview at the Cannes film festival last month, Chloë Sevigny told a panel audience that she’s “had the ‘what are you doing after this?’ conversation,” and the “‘do you want to go shopping and try on some clothes and, like, I can buy you something in the dressing room’ [conversation],” she added. “Just like crossing the line weirdness.”

Less than 2% of the top 100 grossing films in 2013 and 2014 were directed by women, despite the fact that men and women graduate out of film schools equally. This disparity means that women going out for parts are routinely placed in rooms with men who hold all the cards. The small number of female directors who do work in the industry, are also forced to ensure every manner of verbal sexual abuse and degradation, captured at least partially captured in the Tumblr blog Shit People say to Women Directors.

Newton said audition taught her a lesson. “I was so so naive when I started out and I realize now that we have to prepare our kids – I’ve got two beautiful daughters, one is 16 one is 11,” Newton said. “One person will read this and it will stop them getting sexually abused by a director. That’s the person I’m interested in,” she added.