An old interview in which Megan Fox rehashed the inappropriate way Michael Bay treated her when she served as an extra on the set of Bad Boys II has gone viral again, prompting the culture to reexamine Fox’s unfairly maligned career—as well as stories of Bay’s sexist behavior toward numerous female stars in his films. On Monday, however, Fox released a statement addressing the ongoing conversation, clarifying she “was never assaulted or preyed upon” by Bay.

“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,” Fox wrote in a statement posted to Instagram.

In the viral 2009 interview, Fox told Jimmy Kimmel that she was 15 when she appeared in Bad Boys II. Because she was too young to sit at a bar during her scene, Bay opted instead to have Fox dance under a waterfall wearing a bikini—sexualizing her at a young age. “That’s sort of a microcosm of how Bay’s mind works,” Fox said as the audience laughed. The clip has also prompted Fox fans to recirculate a story about Bay allegedly making Fox wash his Ferrari as part of her audition for the Transformers franchise.

In her statement, Fox clarified that she was 19 or 20 when she auditioned for Transformers, and that she didn’t wash Bay’s car. “I did ‘work’ (me pretending to know how to hold a wrench) on one of Michael’s Ferarri’s [sic],” she said. “It was at the Platinum Dunes studio parking lot, there were several other crew members and employees present and I was at no point undressed or anything similar.

“I was not made to ‘wash’ or work on someone’s cars in a way that was extraneous from the material in the actual script,” she added.

Though Fox thanked her supporters, she also discouraged their focus: “These specific instances were inconsequential in a long and arduous journey along which I have endured some genuinely harrowing experiences in a ruthlessly misogynistic industry,” she wrote.

“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. But when it comes to my direct experiences with Michael, and Steven [Spielberg, a Transformers producer] for that matter, I was never assaulted or preyed upon in what I felt was a sexual manner.”

Even so, the viral clip has prompted a debate about how Fox was treated after she spoke out about working with Bay, claiming he frequently told her to “be hot” and “just be sexy” when she would ask questions about character motivation on set. She also compared Bay to Hitler and called him “a nightmare to work for”—and was subsequently replaced with Rosie Huntington-Whiteley in the third Transformers film. Huntington-Whiteley, too, had unsavory things to say about Bay after working with him, recalling in a GQ interview that when they first met, Bay drove her out to the desert and asked her to walk in heels in the sweltering heat for several minutes, all while wearing nothing but a bra, underwear, and a cape. “I was pretty pissed off afterwards,” she recalled.

Unlike Fox, Bay has not suffered career consequences for his purportedly sexist behavior, or for on-the-record remarks like this 2001 comment about working with Kate Beckinsale on Pearl Harbor: “I didn’t want someone who was too beautiful,” he said of the actor. “Women feel disturbed when they see someone’s too pretty. When you look at Titanic, Kate Winslet is pretty, but not overwhelmingly beautiful. That makes it work better for women.”

Fox, for her part, has spoken out previously about how she has been treated in Hollywood, telling the New York Times in 2018 that she had “quite a few” #MeToo stories. Unfortunately, she added, she spoke out about the industry’s sexist nature before doing so became commonplace for actors.

“I was ahead of my time and so people weren’t able to understand,” she said. “Instead I was rejected because of qualities that are now being praised in other women coming forward. And because of my experience, I feel it’s likely that I will always be just out of the collective understanding. I don’t know if there will ever be a time where I’m considered normal or relatable or likable.”

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