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Dustin Hoffman issued an apology on Wednesday after a woman alleged the actor sexually harassed her when she was a 17-year-old working as a production assistant on the 1985 TV movie adaptation of Death Of A Salesman.
“He was openly flirtatious, he grabbed my ass, he talked about sex to me and in front of me,” Anna Graham Hunter wrote for the Hollywood Reporter.
“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,” she wrote.
The guest columnist published diary excerpts she penned as a teen on the film set in which she documented repeated instances in which she said Hoffman asked about her sex life, made vulgar comments, and asked her for a foot massage.
“At 49, I understand what Dustin Hoffman did as it fits into the larger pattern of what women experience in Hollywood and everywhere,” she wrote. “He was a predator, I was a child, and this was sexual harassment.”
American playwright Arthur Miller Hoffman on the set of Death Of A Salesman in 1985.
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In a statement to the Hollywood Reporter, Hoffman said, “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.”
A representative for Hoffman did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Graham Hunter’s specific allegations.
His costars from the TV movie, John Malkovich and Stephen Lang, who according to Graham Hunter heard Hoffman make vulgar remarks, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Hoffman is currently promoting Netflix’s The Meyerowitz Stories (New And Selected), directed by Noah Baumbach, and is a voice actor in the Kung Fu Panda franchise. He is set to be honored with the Actor Tribute Award at the Gotham Awards in November. Representatives for Netflix, Baumbach, Universal, and the Gotham Awards did not immediately respond to request for comment.