Brie Larson has said that her decision not to applaud Casey Affleck at the Academy Awards in February “spoke for itself”.

Larson presented Affleck with the Oscar for best actor but remained conspicuously motionless while the rest of the audience applauded him.

Affleck was sued by two women for sexual harassment in 2010 and settled the case out of court. The allegations resurfaced in recent months in the wake of the actor’s success with Manchester By the Sea.

“I think that whatever it was that I did on stage kind of spoke for itself,” Larson told Vanity Fair at the premiere of Kong: Skull Island on Wednesday. “I’ve said all that I need to say about that topic.”

Affleck has denied the claims made against him. “I believe that any kind of mistreatment of anyone for any reason is unacceptable and abhorrent, and everyone deserves to be treated with respect in the workplace and anywhere else,” the Boston Globe reported him as saying on February 28. 

Larson is a prominent advocate for sexual assault survivors. In 2016, she won the best actress Oscar for Room, a film in which she played a victim of sexual abuse, and she was spotted during the ceremony embracing a group of sexual assault survivors who had taken part in a Lady Gaga performance.

Larson was asked about her Oscars appearance on US talk show Live With Kelly on Thursday, but seemed reluctant to discuss it. “I am grateful it was televised, because I have no memory of it,” she told host Kelly Ripa.

Earlier this week, Manchester By the Sea director Kenneth Lonergan defended Affleck in a letter to a college newspaper. “Casey denounced the allegations as being totally fabricated,” he wrote. “Like most civil suits, this one was settled out of court by mutual consent on undisclosed terms. In other words nothing was proved or disproved.”