Dustin Hoffman has been accused of sexual assault by Anna Graham Hunter, an intern on the actor’s 1985 TV movie Death of a Salesman.
Hunter told The Hollywood Reporter that the harassment from the actor, who is now 80, was constant.
‘He asked me to give him a foot massage my first day on set, I did,’ Hunter wrote. ‘He was openly flirtatious, 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.”
Hunter continued, ‘His entourage burst out laughing. I left, speechless. Then I went to the bathroom and cried.’
The actor has responded to Hunter’s claims, telling The Hollywood Reporter, ‘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.’
Hunter, who was 17 at the time, kept a diary while working onset and emailed her sister passages at the time.
One of the letters read, ‘Today, when I was walking Dustin to his limo, he felt my ass four times. I hit him each time, hard, and told him he was a dirty old man. He took off his hat and pointed to his head (shaved for the part) and said, ‘No, I’m a dirty young man, I have a full head of hair.”
According to her penned letter, Hunter explains she had a conversation with Hoffman about his behaviour and said he’d apologised and was incredibly kind to her following the chat, but that her own supervisor advised her not to make it an issue.
She claims she was told to put up with his behaviour by a supervisor and ‘sacrifice’ some of her values for the sake of the production.
This is not the first time Hoffman has been accused of sexual misconduct. Actress Teri Garr, who played opposite Hoffman in the 1982 film Tootsie said that Hoffman would grab her bottom when they were filming.
Meryl Streep, his co-star on Kramer vs. Kramer, has never worked with him again after he slapped her in a dramatic scene, he says, to improve her performance, while taunting her about the death of her boyfriend.
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