Dolly Parton had spent decades singing about other women’s heartbreak. But in a 2019 interview with Elle magazine, she decided to talk about her own.
She said that sexual harassment also affected her career in the music industry, as it did for so many colleagues who began breaking their silence with the #MeToo movement. The difference, she said, was that she never let fear paralyze her: “I was strong enough to escape” those situations, she said, without giving more details about the specific incidents.
Parton explained that some of that strength was born long before fame, in the small Tennessee town where she grew up. There, she said, men had wives, sisters, and cousins, and that environment helped her learn to read intentions and set boundaries in time. A lesson that, she said, served her throughout her life in a business that was not always kind to women.
