Five new accounts of sexual misconduct hit Dustin Hoffman
Andrea Mandell, USA TODAY Published 6:53 p.m. ET Dec. 14, 2017 | Updated 8:34 p.m. ET Dec. 14, 2017
Another woman has come forward to accuse Dustin Hoffman of sexual misconduct. The woman, Kathryn Rossetter, said Hoffman repeatedly groped her breasts and put his hand up her slip during a Broadway performance. USA TODAY
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Five new women have stepped forward with allegations of sexual harassment or assault by Dustin Hoffman.
According to
Variety, Hoffman allegedly exposed himself to a teenager in 1980, sexually assaulted an actress during the production of 1987's
Ishtar and the same year assaulted a woman in the back of a station wagon.
The Hollywood Reporter followed with its own story Thursday, reporting that one woman named Pauline (her last name was not given), said in the early '70s when she was 15 Hoffman masturbated in front of her. Another woman said Hoffman forced her to perform oral sex when she was 21 during the period the actor shot
All the President's Men.
A representative for Hoffman, 80, did not immediately reply to USA TODAY.
Variety said its parent company received a letter from Hoffman’s attorney calling the accusations against the actor “defamatory falsehoods.”
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Variety reports that Cori Thomas, then 16 and a friend of Hoffman's daughter, Karina, ended up alone at the actor's hotel room after her friend had gone home.
“He came out of the bathroom with a towel at first wrapped around him, which he dropped,” Thomas said. “He was standing there naked." She says Hoffman eventually put on a robe and asked her to massage his feet. Thomas was saved, she says, by a phone call from her mother that she was downstairs to pick her up.
Melissa Kester says while Hoffman was recording audio for
Ishtar he stuck his fingers down her pants in the recording booth with her boyfriend nearby.
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A third unidentified woman says during a ride home from the set of
Ishtar she and Hoffman lay next to each other in the back of a crowded station wagon. She was wearing a skirt. “There are people inches from us,” she said. “And he just took his hand and stuck his fingers right up inside of me. I didn’t know what to do. He’s smiling at me. I was frozen. I was outside of my body.”
Later, the woman met the actor at his apartment, where he performed oral sex on her and they had intercourse. She said she is not sure if that part of the evening was consensual.
According to
THR, a fourth woman cited as Pauline met the actor in a New York shop in 1973 when she was 15. He began a friendship with her, she said, and invited her to a premiere.
One night, she says he asked if she wanted to meet his daughter's puppy. Once at Hoffman's apartment, Pauline says Hoffman then unzipped his pants and exposed himself to her. Then he began to masturbate in front of her. "I’d never even seen a naked man before. I had never seen anything like it. I didn’t know what to say."
After Hoffman finished, he walked her down to the street and hailed a cab, sending the young woman home, she says. "I didn’t tell anybody. I was just crying. I never told anybody — it was so embarrassing."
THR also reports that another woman, using the pseudonym "Carolyn," was 21 in 1975 and working as a tour guide in Washington, D.C. Hoffman, in town shooting
All the President's Men, randomly boarded her bus with his assistant one afternoon. Afterward, the assistant said Hoffman would like to see her again, and she met him at the Watergate hotel.
After they spoke for a while in his hotel room, the young woman said she wanted to go home. She alleges Hoffman replied, "Go home? You don't think you're getting out of here without having sex, do you?" She says Hoffman blocked the doorway and presented her with two options of sex acts. She chose oral sex — "I can't remember the other option." When it was over, she claims, Hoffman handed her a $20 bill for a cab home.
These five new accounts follow previous allegations that have dogged Hoffman, who has been accused of groping actress Kathryn Rossetter
"night after night" offstage during a 1983-84 production of
Death of a Salesman.
In
The Hollywood Reporter, writer Anna Graham Hunter accused Hoffman of groping and sexually harassing her when she was a 17-year-old production assistant on the
Death of a Salesman TV movie in 1985.
In response, to Hunter's op-ed, Hoffman apologized and said the allegations were “not reflective of who I am."
Playwright Wendy Riss Gatsiounis previously told
Variety that in 1991 the Oscar winner made verbal advances and tried to convince her to leave his production company's office and go to a nearby hotel.
Eight women have now spoken out publicly against the actor. At a recent anniversary event for the film
Wag the Dog, moderator John Oliver
took Hoffman to task over the allegations.
