Megan Fox is having a moment. This much we all know. Every red carpet she steps on, every Kardashian she steps out with and every outfit she wears is analysed, idolised, or meme-ified, generating headlines on a near-daily basis. Despite not having an account herself, she’s celebrated as a goddess on TikTok for her wit, style and unapologetic honesty. And then, of course, there’s her equally unapologetic.

Her rise to fame in the early Noughties saw her emerge as an almost cartoon-like Sєx symbol whose pin-up, all-American good looks garnered her a reputation for some roles that seemed solely to serve the male gaze. And the public and the media treated her accordingly. I, too, was guilty of underestimating Megan Fox in the past, buying into the Sєx-symbol narrative and not taking her seriously enough. But no longer.

Because, as I learn, Megan has always been outspoken – radically so – intelligent, boundary-breaking and feminist. And in 2009, the same year she filmed Diablo Cody’s cult horror movie, Jennifer’s Body, she spoke out in the media about being relentlessly Sєxualised and enduring what she called some “genuinely harrowing experiences in a ruthlessly misogynistic industry.

Megan relays that she was too young to appear in a bar scene, so the ‘high-heel waterfall’ scenario was the director Michael Bay’s solution, to which Kimmel laughs and says, “Perfectly wholesome.” Megan continues, “At 15, I was in tenth grade. So that’s a sort of a microcosm of how Bay’s mind works.” Kimmel replies to canned studio laughter: “Yeah, well, that’s really a microcosm of how all our minds work, but some of us have the decency to repress those thoughts and pretend that they don’t exist.” It makes for uncomfortable viewing now.

While Megan has since reconciled with Bay  and worked with him again in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise – she’s continued to speak out about her experiences of misogyny in general, before suffering a “psychological breakdown” and retreating from the limelight due to the wide-scale objectification from the media, industry and the internet.