Legendary actor Meryl Streep appeared to deflect a question about the wave of sexual misconduct allegations being made in Hollywood by calling out two women who have remained silent about their own relationship with an alleged sexual predator.

“I don’t want to hear about the silence of me. I want to hear about the silence of Melania Trump. I want to hear from her. She has so much that’s valuable to say,” Streep said in an interview with The New York Times.

“And so does Ivanka. I want her to speak now.”

In the interview Streep also broke her silence on Dustin Hoffman, confirming rumours that claimed the Oscar-winning actor slapped her while they were filming the award-winning family drama Kramer vs Kramer in 1980.

“This is tricky because when you’re an actor, you’re in a scene, you have to feel free. I’m sure that I have inadvertently hurt people in physical scenes,” explained Streep.

“It was my first take in my first movie, and he just slapped me. And you see it in the movie. It was overstepping.”

She went on to say: “But I think those things are being corrected in this moment. And they’re not politically corrected; they’re fixed. They will be fixed, because people won’t accept it anymore.” In recent times Streep has been widely criticized for her silence in the days after the Harvey Weinstein scandal broke because of her silence, with many assuming she must have been aware of the movie mogul’s shocking sexual misconduct and multiple harrasment of actors.

Streep says she was not aware of the sexual assaults Weinstein had been committing over the course of four decades she later revealed, and in the interview she discusses the days after The New York Times expose was released.

“I found out about this on a Friday and went home deep into my own life. And then somebody told me that on Morning Joe they were screaming that I haven’t responded yet. I don’t have a Twitter thing or – handle, whatever. And I don’t have Facebook,” said Streep.

“I really had to think. Because it really underlined my own sense of cluelessness, and also how evil, deeply evil, and duplicitous, a person he was, yet such a champion of really great work.”

She later admitted she had heard of Weinstein’s affairs, but dismissed stories she heard about relationships he had with other actresses.

“Well, honestly for me in terms of Harvey, I really didn’t know. I did think he was having girlfriends. But when I heard rumors about actresses, I thought that that was a way of denigrating the actress and her ability to get the job,” said Streep. “That really raised my hackles. I didn’t know that he was in any way abusing people.”

Streep also revealed that she had gone through difficult times of her own as a younger woman, acknowledging that she was physically assaulted by one man.

“I mean, I was really beaten up, but I don’t want to ruin somebody’s mature life,” said Streep, who also said that the 70s were a bad time due to cocaine, which she suggested was responsible for amplifying people’s “sh***y behavior.” Of Weinstein she added: “He never asked me to a hotel room. I don’t know how his life was conducted without people intimately knowing about it.”