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(NewsNation) — Once dubbed (by Vogue, no less!) the “Most Beautiful Woman in the World” Angelina Jolie has long been viewed as a siren by men — but one man didn’t give in to her charms when they were allegedly forced on him.
Corey Levitan, currently a reporter for Casino.org, used to work for the New York Post and when he was first starting out in 1999 he had a more than awkward experience with the actress when he interviewed her for her role in “Girl Interrupted.”
Levitan told me in an interview for my YouTube show “The Scoop,” he was sent to the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills to interview the actress at the behest of his editor at the time.
“We all knew her from ‘Gia’ and for being the crazy girl with the Billy Bob Thornton blood around her neck,” Levitan said. (Jolie was married to Thornton at the time and the two carried vials of each other’s blood around their necks).
In scenes reminiscent of a Harvey Weinstein operation, Levitan said, “I was walked into a suite at the hotel, a bedroom suite at the Four Seasons by her publicist, then left alone across my dining room table. Now this was my second assignment for the post, so I didn’t really know how these things went. I didn’t want to Eff up. That was my major motivation, not effing up,” Levitan recalled.
“So I’ve got my 20 questions, and I know I have a half hour with her, or 25 minutes, whatever it was, so I’m reading the questions. And I get to one about ‘How much of you is in the character?’ and then … I feel, I feel something on my leg. It’s, it’s, it’s her foot. I think, ‘Oh, hey, maybe she uncrossed it or something’.”
But she hadn’t.
Angelina Jolie ‘holds all the power’: Levin
“She’d taken her foot out of her high heel shoe. And, no, it wasn’t a mistake,” Levitan said. “The foot starts making like a cricket with my thighs, and it’s moving up, ladies and gentlemen, it’s moving up to the crotch area… She holds all the power in this relationship, this is sexual harassment. It’s also sexual harassment that every guy I’ve ever told the story to you know is jealous of.”
A severely uncomfortable Levitan tried to ignore the foot in his crotch and powered through the interview acting like Jolie’s foot wasn’t near his genitals.
“My prime concern was not losing this gig (at the New York Post). It was my second story for the Post, so I did the same thing it did in high school when it happened to me, and I swear I would never let that happen again. I just ignored it and sweated and started stuttering, and then she eventually felt sorry and stopped. But she was swirling. She … she… she was in there,” Levitan recalled.
“I’m thinking maybe she wants me to write that that happened and then threaten a lawsuit. I don’t know. Maybe she wants to say that I harassed her or she wants the publicist to find us rolling around on the bed and say that I forced myself on her — I don’t know what it was.”
Reporter on Angelina Jolie interview: ‘I have a case’
Levitan eventually wrote about the incident for Men’s Health — and Jolie never responded.
“It’s not me too sexual harassment,” Levitan said. “I’m not going to file a lawsuit, although any lawyer willing to contact me, (please do) because I have a case.”
I left detailed messages with Jolie’s lawyer, Tara Cole, who didn’t return my calls. I also spoke with Levitan’s former editor who confirmed they remember the story.
Soon after the interview, Jolie split with Thornton (whom she’d met while he was living with his then-girlfriend Laura Dern) for Brad Pitt — who was married to Jennifer Aniston at the time.