Jimmy Bennett, the actor who has claimed that he was sexually abused as a teenager by the Italian actress and director Asia Argento and who sought a cash settlement from her, issued his first public statement about the matter on Wednesday. He said he was too “afraid and ashamed” to speak up after the incident happened, and when The New York Times approached him in recent days with questions about the case.

“I tried to seek justice in a way that made sense to me at the time because I was not ready to deal with the ramifications of my story becoming public,” he said in a statement provided to The Times. “At the time I believed there was still a stigma to being in the situation as a male in our society. I didn’t think that people would understand the event that took place from the eyes of a teenage boy.”

The Times reported Sunday that in November, a month after Ms. Argento emerged as a leading figure in the #MeToo movement with her account of sexual assault at the hands of the movie producer Harvey Weinstein, Mr. Bennett sent her a notice of his intent to sue.

The document, sent to The Times through encrypted email by an unidentified party, described a May 2013 sexual encounter in a hotel room in Marina del Rey, Calif., when Mr. Bennett was 17 and Ms. Argento was 37. The age of consent in California is 18.