‘UNCOMFORTABLE’

Oscar Winner Addresses Shocking Allegations in New Memoir

Dustin Hoffman was accused of misconduct by eight different women in 2017.

Dustin Hoffman is defending himself against the sexual misconduct allegations that have haunted his reputation since 2017 in his new memoir, Look at Me, out Nov. 10.

The two-time Best Actor Oscar winner wrote in the book, according to People, “I’m sure it’s true that in my life, especially forty years ago, I made some women uncomfortable. But ‘uncomfortable’ is a subjective emotional state. What is crass and offensive to one person, another individual might find hilarious, or enlivening, or even sort of cozy.”

In 2017, three of his accusers, Anna Graham Hunter, Cori Thomas, and Kathryn Rossetter, recounted their claims that Hoffman either exposed himself, touched them inappropriately, or tried to force them into sexual acts, in an interview with NBC Nightly News. Thomas and Hunter alleged the incidents took place when they were under the age of 18.

Five others also came forward to accuse the two-time Oscar winner of similar behavior.

Hoffman chalked the allegations up to his misunderstood sense of humor: “I love a so-called dirty joke. I am ‘a Borscht Belt flirt,’ as Bill Murray once put it. That’s not the same thing as pressuring someone to do something they didn’t want to do.”

He went on to deny that he had ever sexually pressured anyone, as he discussed the #MeToo movement: “When a reckoning started making its way around the internet, and tearing through Hollywood, I thought it was a very good thing.”

“I knew by then that plenty of women had put up with way too much for way too long in my industry. Not for a second did I worry that anything negative would be said about me, because the idea of taking something from someone sexually that they didn’t want to give,” he also wrote. “It’s just not something I’ve ever done.”

The actor also suggested that he was unfairly maligned after the accusations emerged: “There was no innocent until proven guilty. There was no ‘proving’ anything at all.”

Hoffman wrote the “reckoning” against his alleged behavior was “crazy.”

“I was sort of bewildered by how to defend myself... or if I should even try. I didn’t want to be fighting against something that I thought was important. I didn’t want to be on the wrong side of my own values. The only problem was that things were being said about me that just weren’t true.”

As for his misunderstood “jokes” with the young women who were “not my wife,” Hoffman said he doesn’t believe he had the “power” that his accusers say made them feel silenced.

Rossetter, who starred with Hoffman in 1983’s Broadway production of Death of a Salesman, and alleged he would fondle her every night backstage and tried to penetrate her with his fingers, said Hoffman was an “abusive” “bully,” who she felt forced to comply with. “I was told to suck it up,” she told CBS. “He was the most famous actor in the world, it was the top of his career. I was a nobody. Nobody was going to believe me.”

Hoffman did not address the alleged physical violations in the book, but wrote, “I’m not a person who gets off on having power, or pressuring people to do things. To be perfectly honest, I never thought of myself as a person with power in the first place.”

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Eboni Boykin-PattersonEntertainment Reporter

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