Seinfeld star Jason Alexander took his apology to Courtney Stodden to the next level.
According to TMZ, the actor-director heeded Stodden’s call for “accountability” after she called him out for a 2012 sketch in which he “repeatedly grazed her breasts” when she was 17-years-old. Stodden appeared in the Funny or Die sketch alongside Alexander with her then-52-year-old husband Doug Hutchison, and has since become an advocate for banning marriage under the age of 18.
After Alexander declared in a statement to the Daily Beast that he was “deeply sorry” for the sketch on Tuesday, Stodden said she hoped that he would donate to the advocacy group Unchained At Last, which works to ban child marriage in the U.S.
TMZ reports that an insider claimed Alexander, who was making a six-figure salary per episode for Seinfeld in the late ‘90s, donated $15,000 to the organization, and that Alexander’s representative confirmed the donation but would not comment on the amount.
The back-and-forth began when Stodden posted a screengrab of Alexander rubbing his phone against her breasts in the sketch on Monday. Alexander was playing a parodied version of a motivational TV host with Stodden and Hutchison as guests on his Donny Clay Show. The couple had become a tabloid fixation for their age gap in 2011.
“I was a minor. I didn’t have the legal power to decide whether I wanted to participate,” Stodden wrote of the sketch in the caption of the post. Alexander’s character “repeatedly rubbed his phone across my breasts while saying there was ‘no signal’ in my head but ‘plenty of signal’ in my chest. Later in the sketch, he joked that when I turned 18 he’d like to take me behind the couch and ‘have his way’ with me.”
Stodden cited the experience as one of the ways she felt taken advantage of as a teen in her marriage to Hutchison, whom she divorced after nine years in 2020. Hutchison denied her characterization of their marriage and insisted they were “genuinely in love.”
Alexander told the Daily Beast in response to Stodden’s post, “Looking back at the comedy sketch in which Ms. Stodden and I participated in 2012, I completely agree that it was inappropriate and I truly regret it,” he wrote. “But more importantly, I am deeply sorry for any harm or distress it has caused Ms. Stodden. I offer her my sincerest apologies.”
Unchained At Last’s latest initiative is to push California lawmakers to pass its co-sponsored bill AB 1267, which would ban anyone under the age of 18 from marriage and domestic partnerships, without exception for parental or court approval.
