Actor and activist Minnie Driver has said she stood down as an ambassador for Oxfam to “send a clear message” to the charity’s bosses over sexual abuse, which “they knew was going on and did nothing” about.

Driver was speaking at an event in London in which she also elaborated on her experiences with Harvey Weinstein and her involvement in the #MeToo movement.

Oxfam, which is embroiled in a scandal over the cover-up of its employees using sex workers in Haiti in 2010, has since lost 7,000 donors. Driver was the first celebrity ambassador to step down from her role.

“I’ve been an ambassador for 20 years,” she said. “It broke my heart … because here’s the thing; there had been a lot of talk of this going on. I had heard rumours about things, I had asked questions [and] I had been assured that there was nothing going on.

“The programmes that I have been involved with are to do with women who have to work as sex workers to supplement their income. They need retraining and help to not have to do that. Young girls who have been told the only thing in their life they can do is prostitution, in Cambodia; in Laos; in Thailand. It cut me to the very heart of what I’ve been involved with.

“I needed to send a very clear message … to the corporate people who knew this was going on, who hush-hushed it, who were not transparent and who didn’t do anything about it. They need to clean house.”

On Weinstein, Driver told how the producer attempted to block her casting in her 1997 breakout role, Good Will Hunting, because, in his words, she wasn’t “fuckable”.

“I remember him taking me aside, saying ‘I am doing you a huge favour because you need to go for parts where that is not going to be a problem’,” she said. “‘You are not going to be a lead actress.’ So even at 23 or 24 I was terrified of him, that he was right. But these men banded around me: Matt [Damon], Ben [Affleck], [producer] Chris Moore, [director] Gus Van Sant said: ‘we’re making the film with this girl.’ But that stayed with me.”

Minnie Driver and Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting. Photograph: K/Miramax/Kobal/Rex/Shutterstock

Driver also referred to criticisms she made of Damon last year over comments the actor made on the Weinstein scandal, in which he called for restraint in a “culture of outrage and injury”.



“What was interesting about Matt Damon was not that he was an ex-boyfriend or that I had any sort of beef with him, because I don’t,” she said. “But he represented every intelligent, nice, white, male who feels it is their job to comment on the way that women metabolise stuff. And what he happened to be talking about in this instance was how women should metabolise abuse.”

Driver, who works mostly in America and is currently starring in ABC’s Speechless, has just been granted US citizenship. She has an American son, and wanted to vote in primaries and become more politically active. The #MeToo movement, however, had to move away from Hollywood circles to have real impact, she said, suggesting independent bodies needed to be set up as routine.

“What about the woman who is working in a motel in Kansas or its equivalent in Leicester? That’s the only way that this evolves, if it moves out of the clickbait of pretty actresses – who I am really sorry suffered because they did – and into the realm of women everywhere,” she said.