In a guest column for The Hollywood Reporter on Wednesday, author Anna Graham Hunter accused Dustin Hoffman of sexually harassing her when she was a 17-year-old intern on the set of the 1985 TV film Death of a Salesman. Including letters she sent to her sister in 1985 detailing Hoffman’s misconduct, Hunter’s Reporter piece added further explanation of the actor’s repeated offenses, as well as commentary on how her perception of the events has changed over the years.
“He was openly flirtatious,” Hunter writes, revisiting the actor’s behavior. “He grabbed my ass, he talked about sex to me and in front of me. One morning I went to his dressing room to take his breakfast order; he looked at me and grinned, taking his time. Then he said, ‘I'll have a hard-boiled egg … and a soft-boiled clitoris.’ His entourage burst out laughing. I left, speechless. Then I went to the bathroom and cried.”
In the letters to her sister, she describes many more incidents of harassment, saying that Hoffman “felt my ass four times” when she escorted him to his limo, insisted she give him a foot massage on her first day on set, and that he once asked her if she had sex over the weekend. Hunter adds that a supervisor—whose name was changed for anonymity—told her to “sacrifice” some of her values for the sake of the production.
“At 49, I understand what Dustin Hoffman did as it fits into the larger pattern of what women experience in Hollywood and everywhere,” Hunter reflects. “He was a predator, I was a child, and this was sexual harassment.”
Contacted by the Reporter, Hoffman issued an apology: “I have the utmost respect for women and feel terrible that anything I might have done could have put her in an uncomfortable situation. I am sorry. It is not reflective of who I am.”
The sexual harassment allegations against Hoffman are the latest against a male figure in the entertainment industry. Since Harvey Weinstein was accused of sexual harassment, assault, and rape in early October in reports from The New York Times and The New Yorker, James Toback, Kevin Spacey, Brett Ratner, and others have been accused of sexual misconduct.
You can read Hunter’s column for The Hollywood Reporter here.
Update, November 2: In an interview with Variety published Wednesday night, a second woman came forward accusing Hoffman of sexual harassment. Genius producer Wendy Riss Gatsiounis said Hoffman propositioned her in 1991, when the two met—along with Tootsie screenwriter Murray Schisgal—to discuss adapting her play, A Darker Purpose, into a feature film.
After an uneventful first meeting, according to Riss Gatsiounis, then in her 20s, the second time she met Hoffman, he asked her if she’d ever been intimate with a man over 40. “I’ll never forget—he moves back, he opens his arms, and he says, ‘It would be a whole new body to explore,'” she told Variety. He then asked if Riss Gatsiounis wanted to go shopping with him at a nearby hotel, which she declined. “And then Murray Schisgal says, ‘Look, we’re not really interested in your play, because it’s too film noir-ish.’ And that was it,” Riss Gatsiounis remembers.
A spokesperson for Hoffman declined to comment on the allegations, while Schisgal told Variety that he had “no recollection” of the meeting.
