Rob Cohen, the director of The Fast and the Furious, is being accused of sexual assault by his daughter, Valkyrie Weather, who made the claim in a Facebook post published on Thursday, Feb. 21.
“When I was very young, Rob used my body for his own sexual gratification,” Weather began. “My mother witnessed one of the assaults when I was between two and two and a half years old, and has since confirmed what she saw.”
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She also alleged that Cohen took her to visit sex workers in Thailand and the Czech Republic beginning when she was 13.
Weather, a transgender woman who was born Kyle Cohen, further discussed her claim with The Hollywood Reporter in an interview.
Weather said that she was always “dimly aware” that she had been molested, explaining, “mostly what I remembered was the pain, the memory of the place and time, just being there, in the bath.”
“I just thought I had untrustworthy memories. I thought I was being fanciful,” the 32-year-old added, continuing, “it was so painful that I couldn’t verbalize it for a long time.”
“I demonstrated from a very early age that I was probably trans and queer, and that was not the child that my dad wanted,” she said. “He wanted his son to be a straight, hyper-sexual, womanizing b——d like himself. I have my own theory that he thinks that he broke me when he molested me and he was somehow trying to undo that damage by hetero-sexualizing me from a very young age.”
Weather shared that she came forward for personal reasons as well as as a result of the #MeToo movement.
“There’s very little [Cohen] can take from me that he hasn’t taken already,” she said. “I have very little money. If he wants the $400 I have, he can take it. If he wants to ruin my career as someone who works in a vintage clothing store in Savannah, Georgia, he can try to do that — although my boss has been pretty great about all of this. My lack of resources has been pretty freeing.”
Weather’s mother, Diana Mitzner, confirmed in a separate interview that she had witnessed the alleged assault Weather described.
Cohen denied the accusations in a statement to THR, calling them “categorically untrue.”
“This is extremely painful. My beloved child has accused me of the most awful thing imaginable,” the statement reads. “Knowing that it is categorically untrue is painful enough. Having to write this and saying that my kid is not telling the truth is heart wrenching. I hope and pray that one day, my child will come into the realization that no matter what anyone says or tries to convince her was the case when she was a child, it is both untrue and unimaginable.”
Photo Credit: Getty / Gabriel Olsen
