A woman says Dustin Hoffman sexually harassed her when she was 17 years old and working as an intern on one of his projects.
Anne Graham Hunter, now 49, wrote that when she was a senior in high schoo, she interned as a production assistant on Death of a Salesman, a 1985 TV movie that earned Hoffman an Emmy.
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She wrote in her op-ed that she felt conflicted about Hoffman. “I loved the attention from Dustin Hoffman. Until I didn’t,” she wrote.
“He asked me to give him a foot massage my first day on set; I did,” she 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.’ His entourage burst out laughing. I left, speechless. Then I went to the bathroom and cried.”
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Hunter said she wrote her sister letters detailing the inappropriate encounters and made copies of them for herself.
She said that one day, during the second week of her internship, Hoffman said to her, “So, did you have sex over the weekend like I told you?”
“Today, when I was walking Dustin to his limo, he felt my ass four times,” she wrote days later. “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.’ “
Hunter wrote that after two weeks, she told the actor she “didn’t appreciate his wandering hands or his comments” and that “he apologized and said he would stop.”
However, a few days after he apologized, she said he was angry after she was able to meet Warren Beatty during a set visit and said “You might as well have undressed yourself. You were saying, ‘F–k me, f–k me, Warren.’ “
More than a month into her internship, she wrote to her sister, “No one is 100 percent good or bad. Dustin’s a pig, but I like him a lot.”
“Yes, he was gross,” she wrote in her op-ed. “But he could also be sweet and wanted me to like him. Which I did…Not long ago I watched All the President’s Men for the first time in years and then texted my sister: Is it weird that I find him kind of sexy in this after what he did?“
“At 49, I understand what Dustin Hoffman did as it fits into the larger pattern of what women experience in Hollywood and everywhere,” she said. “He was a predator, I was a child, and this was sexual harassment. As to how it fits into my own pattern, I imagine I’ll be figuring that out for years to come.”
“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,” Hoffman told The Hollywood Reporter in response to the accusations, which are detailed in a THR op-ed titled “Dustin Hoffman Sexually Harassed Me When I Was 17.”
Hunter’s accusations come amid a rise of public allegations of sexual harassment and assault against powerful men in Hollywood, most notably producer Harvey Weinstein, who has denied sexually assaulting anyone.
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