The "casting couch" has long been an open secret in Hollywood, and up until the last 10 to 15 years it was largely winked at.

To the extent it was seen as abusive, it was largely seen as an abuse by the directors of their position of power -- not so much of the women themselves, but of the responsibility they had to cast objectively. Kinda similar to how people get mad that Hollywood puts nepobabies in roles today rather than the very best person for the role, that's more how it was seen for directors to cast roles based on who'd give them sex rather than merit.

Similarly, the women involved were generally looked down on, much like nepobabies of today. They were generally seen as using their sexuality to get something they hadn't earned. And this wasn't limited to Hollywood -- see "sleeping your way to the top".

It really is a much more recent development that folks have come to realize what role the power dynamics really play here. In the past it was man-wants-sex, woman-controls-sex, and so they were viewed as more equal participants. You could see this play out even at the greatest extremes of power imbalance: in the 90s, a 22 year old intern was given just as much of a hard time for their sexcapades as the President of the United States was. We just didn't perceive what he was doing as abusive -- she was an adult, she was capable of choosing to consent or not, and she chose to do so (and probably because she wanted to be closer to power). I'm not defending that view, I don't hold it anymore, but I did hold it when I myself was a 20 year old college student and the news had just broken, and I think I was pretty much dead center in how people viewed it. My sister (22) had a similar but slightly more liberal view, which was more "Why does anyone give a fuck about what two consenting adults do with themselves? Not our business".

Now I'm overstating things a bit, by the 1990s the term "sexual harassment" had come into being, and we had trainings about it in both work and school. I remember a special episode of a Different World, where Whitley was harassed crystallized the problem in way that hadn't really been portrayed before. But largely it was seen as a problem of refusing to take no for an answer -- coercing someone into sex through the power dynamics was seen as okay/consenting.

Anyway, if you want more context about just how long this whole kind of thing was an open secret, here's an article about a 1956 piece on the "casting couch": https://slate.com/culture/2017/10/1956-casting-couch-expose-shows-little-has-changed.html

And from a 2000 paper by a couple economists on the give and take of the casting couch:

"Further, sexual exploitation is taken less seriously by those in this extremely sophisticated if not wholly cynical industry than one might expect. The industry is built in part on sex, so sexy talk off the set is common and a selling point in the gossip network which generates a great deal of valuable publicity. Exchanges of all sorts of favors are routine amongst those in this business, and quid pro quo sex may be one of the commodities. In any case complaints to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission are rare, and suits under California law are as well. [25 Interestingly, other than the odd case law decision - which is very rare since most complaints are settled out of court - little has been written about Hollywood sexual harrassment in the law or policy journals, nor is there a book or dissertation on the subject as far as we could determine.]"