Actress Meryl Streep is the latest celebrity to be the subject of President-elect Donald Trump‘s tweets, after using her Golden Globes acceptance speech to defend journalists and those being bullied by “the powerful.”
Streep took several shots at Trump during her acceptance speech for a lifetime achievement award Sunday without even mentioning his name.
READ MORE: Golden Globes 2017 winners: Full list of TV and movies awards
“All of us in this room, really, belong to the most vilified segments in American society right now. Think about it – Hollywood, foreigners and the press,” Streep joked after thanking the Hollywood Foreign Press for the award.
WATCH: Meryl Streep took aim at Donald Trump and his treatment of Hollywood, foreigners, and press during her Lifetime Achievement award speech
Comparing Trump’s presidential run to that of a Hollywood movie, she said what stunned her the most over the past year was when “the person asking to sit in the most respected seat in our country” mocked a disabled reporter from The New York Times.
READ MORE: Donald Trump criticized for mocking reporter with a disability
Streep was referring to an incident during a Trump campaign rally in November 2015, when Trump ridiculed Times reporter Serge Kovaleski.
“Now the poor guy, you gotta see this guy,” Trump shouted before launching into an impression of Kovaleski, jerking his arms around and holding his hands at a sharp angle in front of his chest.
Kovaleski has arthrogryposis, a congenital condition that affects joint movement.
WATCH: Donald Trump mocks reporter
“It kind of broke my heart when I saw it,” she said. “I still can’t get it out of my head, because it wasn’t in a movie. It was real life.”
She continued, “when the powerful use their position to bully others, we all lose.”
In a series of tweets published Monday morning, the President-elect denied “mocking” the reporter’s disability, calling Streep “one of the most over-rated actresses in Hollywood.”
WATCH: Celebrities defend Meryl Streep’s comments against Trump
“She is a Hillary flunky who lost big. For the 100th time, I never ‘mocked’ a disabled reporter (would never do that) but simply showed him ‘groveling’ when he totally changed a 16-year-old story that he had written in order to make me look bad,” said Trump.
“Just more very dishonest media!”
Trump faced heavy criticism for the so-called mocking incident. At the time, he said he had “no idea” who Kovaleski was, “what he looks like” or “his level of intelligence.”
READ MORE: Donald Trump: Reporter ‘should stop using his disability to grandstand’
But Streep’s Trump remarks didn’t stop at the mocking incident; she also used her speech to bring attention to Trump controversial stance on immigration and his criticism of what he often describes as “the dishonest media.”
While reviewing the background of several of her actor colleagues – including Canadian-born Ryan Gosling – she noted that Hollywood is a community filled with people from other places that aim to portray people from all walks of life.
WATCH: Meryl Streep highlights the ‘foreign’ in the Hollywood Foreign Press Association
“What is Hollywood anyway? It’s just a bunch of people from other places,” she said.
“So Hollywood is crawling with outsiders and foreigners. And if you kick ’em all out, you’ll have nothing to watch but football and mixed martial arts, which are not the arts.”
Streep also came to the defense of journalists, urging her colleagues to donate to the Committee to Protect Journalists.
Streep, who has had 48 Oscar and Golden Globe nominations, won the annual Cecille B. DeMille Award during Sunday night’s show. She was also nominated for her portrayal of a bad opera singer in “Florence Foster Jenkins.”
The award winning actress also choked up when mentioning her friend Carrie Fisher, who died just after Christmas, saying Fisher urged others to “take your broken heart and make it into art.”
– With files from Andrew Russell and The Associated Press
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