The article previously appeared on EW.
Meryl Streep accepted the Cecil B. DeMille Award at Sunday’s Golden Globes ceremony, and used her speech as an opportunity to slam President-elect Donald Trump without ever mentioning him by name.
In her speech, Streep called out Trump for mocking New York Times reporter Serge Kovaleski for his disability during a rally in 2015. Kovaleski has a congenital joint condition, and Trump impersonated the reporter by waving his hands around. (The president-elect denied he was making fun of Kovaleski.)
“There was one performance this year that stunned me — it sank its hooks in my heart. Not because it was good, there was nothing good about it. But it was effective and it did its job. It made its intended audience laugh and show their teeth,” she said. “It was the moment where the person asking to sit in the most respected seat in our country imitated a disabled reporter. Someone he outranked in privilege, power and the capacity to fight back. It kind of broke my heart when I saw it and I still can’t get it out of head because it wasn’t a movie, it was real life.”
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“There was one performance this year that stunned me — it sank its hooks in my heart. Not because it was good, there was nothing good about it. But it was effective and it did its job. It made its intended audience laugh and show their teeth,” she said. “It was the moment where the person asking to sit in the most respected seat in our country imitated a disabled reporter. Someone he outranked in privilege, power and the capacity to fight back. It kind of broke my heart when I saw it and I still can’t get it out of head because it wasn’t a movie, it was real life.”
“This instinct to humiliate when it’s modeled by someone in a public platform, it filters down into everybody’s life because it gives permission for other people to do the same,” Streep continued. “Disrespect invited disrespect, violence incites violence, and when the powerful use their position to bully others we all lose.”
Streep echoed sentiments voiced earlier in the evening by fellow Globe recipient Hugh Laurie, noting that “all of us in this room belong to one of the most vilified segments in American society right now … Hollywood, foreigners and the press.”
“But who are we and what is Hollywood, anyway? Its just a bunch of people from other places,” she continued, mentioning her New Jersey upbringing and acknowledging other actors born and raised in other parts of the United States and around the world.
“Hollywood is crawling with outsiders and foreigners,” she said, “so if you kick them all out, you’ll have nothing to watch but football and mixed martial arts, which are not the arts.”
Streep also voiced support for the press — “we’ll need them going forward and they’ll need us to preserve the truth,” she said — and ended with a tribute to her late friend, Carrie Fisher. “As my friend, the dearly departed Princess Leia said to me, take your broken heart, make it into art. Thank you friend.”
