Asia Argento Compares Encounter With Accuser to Harvey Weinstein Rape

One week after Asia Argento’s accuser, Jimmy Bennett, told a live Italian television audience that the actress had raped him, Argento told her version of events on the same popular Sunday night program.

The Daily Beast reports that Argento had previously denied having sex with Bennett in California when he was 17, though she has admitted that she and her boyfriend, the late Anthony Bourdain, had paid Bennett some $380,000 for his silence in 2018.

But on the Sunday night telecast of, Non e l’Arena (“Outside the Arena”), Argento did admit to having sex with Bennett, but compared the encounter to being raped by Harvey Weinstein.

According to The Daily Beast, Argento explained that she “froze” when Bennett literally “crawled on top of me.”

.@asiaargento pic.twitter.com/yn96UGUJ7a

— rose mcgowan (@rosemcgowan) September 27, 2018

Argento told host Massimo Giletti that they met at the hotel and she told Bennett that they could do a movie together. The two hugged.

“He began to kiss me and touch me in a way that was not like a child with his mother, but like a boy with crazy hormones,” she said, according to The Daily Beast. “He said he had a sexual attraction for me, and hearing this from him made me freeze. I did not expect it.”

Argento says that Bennett pushed her on the bed, not the other way around, as Bennett has claimed.

Although I am grateful to @rosemcgowan for her full apology following her groundless allegations about me, if she had issued it earlier, I may have kept my job on X-Factor and avoided the constant accusations of paedophilia which I have been subjected to in real-life and online. https://t.co/ZwH0poL0nR

— Asia Argento (@AsiaArgento) September 27, 2018

“He literally jumped on me,” she said, according to The Daily Beast. “He undressed me, put me sideways on the bed, climbed onto me and had complete sex without even using a condom. I was cold and still. Then he told me that I was his sexual desire since he was 12 years old.”