Dustin Hoffman has been accused of sexually harassing and assaulting an actress who appeared with him in the play “Death of a Salesman” in 1983 and in the 1985 TV adaption.
Kathryn Rossetter detailed the “horrific, demoralizing and abusive experience” of working with Hoffman in a guest column for The Hollywood Reporter, published Friday. The actress said she was just starting out in New York City when she land the role in the Broadway play.
Hoffman hand-picked Rossetter for the part, which made him a “hero” in her eyes, she said ― until the two started working together.
“One night in Chicago, I felt his hand up under my slip on the inside of my thighs. I was completely surprised and tried to bat him away while watching the stage for my cues,” the actress wrote, adding that the incidents happened nearly every show, for six to eight shows a week.
Rossetter said she repeatedly begged Hoffman to stop, but he only became more aggressive.
“One night he actually started to stick his fingers inside me. Night after night I went home and cried,” she wrote. “I withdrew and got depressed and did not have any good interpersonal relationships with the cast.”
Rossetter said that Hoffman once lifted her costume ― which consisted of a slip and no bra ― over her head in front of the entire crew as a “surprise.” He also would put his hand over Rossetter’s breast whenever the two were asked to take pictures together.
“My issue isn’t what he said; it’s what he did,” Rossetter wrote. “Along with the nightly sexual harassment, he eroded my confidence, my dignity. He humiliated and demeaned me. He robbed me of my joy in the experience and he left dirty fingerprints on my soul.”
Read the rest of Rossetter’s account in The Hollywood Reporter.
Last week, in her own guest column for The Hollywood Reporter, writer Anna Graham Hunter accused Hoffman of sexually harassing her during the TV adaptation of “Death of a Salesman” when she was a 17-year-old intern. Hunter said the actor repeatedly groped her and make inappropriate sexual comments.
Writer and producer Wendy Riss Gatsiounis told Variety last week that Hoffman once asked her during a meeting if she had “ever been intimate with a man over 40.”
Hoffman issued a response to Hunter, but declined to comment on Gatsiounis and Rossetter’s accounts. A representative for Hoffman declined to comment to HuffPost.
“I have the utmost respect for women and feel terrible that anything I might have done could have put her in an uncomfortable situation,” he told The Hollywood Reporter. “I am sorry. It is not reflective of who I am.”
