Rita Moreno, survivor of toxic Hollywood men, addresses Ansel Elgort allegations

During her 70-year career in Hollywood, Rita Moreno experienced many of the horrors of the film industry’s sexist culture, including being raped by her agent when she was a struggling teen actor.

Even as the 90-year-old legend has proclaimed her support for the #MeToo movement, she was reluctant in a recent interview to make any judgement about the sexual assault allegations against Ansel Elgort, her 27-year-old co-star in the new screen version of “West Side Story.”

“I think it would have been absolutely horrendous and wrong for anyone to take sides in that matter. It’s not for me to make those judgments,” Moreno, who lives in Berkeley, said about Elgort in an interview with the Hollywood Reporter.

In June 2020, a woman accused Elgort of sexually assaulting her in 2014 when she was 17 and he was 20. Elgort stars as the musical’s romantic lead, Tony, while Moreno plays Valentina, a drugstore owner who acts as Tony’s mentor and confidante. She famously won the first of her EGOT awards — a best supporting actress Oscar — for playing Anita in the beloved 1961 version.

The allegations against Elgort surfaced on social media nine months after shooting for the new “West Side Story” wrapped. The actor responded by saying that his relationship with the woman was “brief, legal and entirely consensual.”

Elgort and director Steven Spielberg have avoided addressing the allegations while doing press for “West Side Story.” So, typically, the women “are left to address the elephant in the room,” the Hollywood Reporter said.

Moreno was jointly interviewed by the Hollywood Reporter with co-stars Rachel Zegler and Ariana DeBose, and none of the women shied away from the Elgort question even if all “remain circumspect in their answers.” At media events, Moreno, Zegler and DeBose have all appeared to get along well with Elgort.

“Nobody really knows what’s going on in anyone’s head. Only the people who were involved in that situation know what actually went down,” DeBose said. Playing Maria, Elgort’s romantic partner in the film, Zegler has been asked most often to weigh in, the Hollywood Reporter said.

“We made a movie two and a half years ago, and a lot has gone on in the world since then,” Zegler said. “A lot has changed very publicly, and privately as well. There’s been a lot of awakening. You just hope that the people involved are OK, that they are asked in a respectful manner and that they are given the opportunity to answer for themselves.”

Certainly, a lot has changed in how sexual harassment and assault are talked about in Hollywood since the start of the #MeToo movement in 2017. Most women would probably say not enough has changed.

Moreno has become increasingly open about discussing her experiences with toxic Hollywood men in recent interviews and in last year’s autobiographical documentary, “Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go For It.”

Moreno told Bill Whitaker of “60 Minutes” about how difficult it was to film the scene in the 1961 version of “West Side Story” when Anita, who, like Moreno is Puerto Rican, is attacked and nearly raped by members of the White Jets gang. As Insider reported, Moreno told Whitaker how the scene brought “all of those scars” from the trauma of being sexually assaulted by her agent.

“During rehearsals when they were mauling me, I pushed them away and started to cry and I could not stop,” Moreno told Whitaker.

In the documentary, Moreno also said she felt shame about the assault, even though she was too young to stop it. She also continued to work with the agent “because he was the only one who was helping me, in my so-called career. That’s what’s astonishing to me, that I thought so little of myself.”

Moreno was trying to make it in an industry that wasn’t very nice to women and, specifically, to women of color. She told the New York Times that she was stuck with a sex symbol identity that meant she was limited to roles as one-dimensional “dusky maidens” of various identities.

“I wanted to be a movie star,” she told the New York Times. “But I never imagined that it would be so hard, and so painful. Never. Never.”

Moreno has long talked about her volatile, eight-year relationship with Marlon Brando. She has admitted that he was the “lust” of her life, even though she endured his chronic philandering and emotional abuse.