'The Fast and the Furious' Director Rob Cohen Faces Second Sexual Assault Accusation
Rob Cohen, who directed the action hits The Fast and the Furious and xXx, has been accused of [...]
Rob Cohen, who directed the action hits The Fast and the Furious and xXx, has been accused of sexual assault by a woman who claims to have met Cohen in New York in 2015 to discuss a TV pilot. Cohen was also accused of sexual assault by his daughter, Valkyrie Weather, who claimed Cohen molested her when she was 2 years old. Cohen has denied both allegations.
On Saturday, The HuffPost published the new allegations by Jane, whose last name was withheld to protect her identity. She claims she went to a cigar lounge to meet Cohen about a TV show pilot. He ordered her a drink, even though she did not ask for one, Jane, then 28, claims. He then allegedly had the meeting moved to a restaurant inside the hotel he was staying at and "encouraged her to drink some more."
Jane said her memory of the evening is "incomplete," but she remembers some details vividly. At one point of the night, she felt "fuzzy" while Cohen kissed her cheek. She also remembered going to a different bar at one point.
"The next thing she remembers is waking up naked, she said. She remembers Cohen's face in her crotch and his fingers inside her. She had not consented to any of this," the HuffPost reports. "She made her way to the bathroom to vomit and stumbled back to the bed. Cohen tried to penetrate her, but he stopped when she told him to, she said."
The HuffPost reports that it reviewed medical records showing that she did seek treatment for a sexual assault. However, the HuffPost did not report if she went to law enforcement.
Cohen's attorney, Martin Singer, wrote a 13-page letter to the HuffPost. "The proposed Story is an outrageous defamatory hit piece, making extraordinarily offensive assertions that my client engaged in heinous sexual misconduct, criminal wrongdoing, and other inappropriate behavior, which are vehemently disputed and denied by my client," he wrote.
Jane told the HuffPost she reached out to Cohen in October 2017, after exposes on Harvey Weinstein's sexual misconduct were published. They talked over the phone, and Cohen apologized for "causing her pain but framed the incident as a misunderstanding between two people who had drunk too much," Jane said, the HuffPost reported.
"My client recalls receiving an odd text or email from [Jane] inferring that she had been taken advantage of, which my client understood to be a complaint that she had never gotten paid for consulting on the defunct project," Singer wrote to the HuffPost after seeing an apologetic text Cohen wrote to Jane. "Significantly, my client categorically disputes that [Jane] said anything to him during that call about any alleged sexual assault."
Jane told the HuffPost she only chose to come forward after she read about Weather's allegations. Weather, who was born Kyle Cohen, accused Cohen of sexual assault in The Hollywood Reporter in February. Cohen called Weather's allegations "categorically untrue."
Photo credit: Visual China Group via Getty Images/Visual China Group via Getty Images