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Dustin Hoffman accused of harassment and sexual assault by five more women

Dustin Hoffman has denied several new claims of sexual harassment, including an allegation that he exposed himself to a 16-year-old friend of his daughter and assaulted others.

Speaking to Variety, playwright Cori Thomas, who was a schoolmate of Hoffman’s daughter Karina, said that the actor invited her and his daughter to a hotel that he was staying at in New York.

After Karina left the room, she claims Hoffman took a shower, and then emerged in a towel, which he then dropped.

“He was standing there naked. I think I almost collapsed, actually. It was the first time I had ever seen a naked man. I was mortified. I didn’t know what to do. And he milked it. He milked the fact that he was naked. He stood there. He took his time,” she said.

After putting on a robe, he then asked the teenager to give him a foot massage on the bed, which she did.

“I didn’t know that I could say no, so I did it,” Thomas adds. “And he kept telling me, ‘I’m naked. Do you want to see?’ What saved me was that the phone rang, and it was my mother downstairs to pick me up. So I left.”

In a statement to AP, Thomas said: “In response to why I’ve stayed quiet for so many years, I have not stayed quiet for so many years, friends and family have been aware of this story for many many years, I just didn’t go to newspapers with the story is all.

“And I regret that. I realise now, that the reason this continued to happen to others, was because of my silence, and I feel guilty about that but I hadn’t even processed how badly this shamed and hurt me.”

Hoffman’s reps told Variety that the claims were ‘defamatory falsehoods’.

However, several others have come forward with their own allegations against the actor.

Melissa Kester, who was the boyfriend of one of the sound crew on the movie Ishtar, said that Hoffman sexually assaulted her on the set after he insisted that she sit with him in a vocal booth while he did a take.

“He literally just stuck his fingers down my pants,” she said. “He put his fingers inside me. And the thing I feel most bad about is I didn’t know what to do. I just stood there. I just froze in the situation like ‘Oh my god, what is happening?’ It’s shocking when that happens to you.

“He kind of laughed. Then I just ran out of there, and I sat in the bathroom crying. I thought, ‘Oh my God.’ I felt like I’d been raped. There was no warning. I didn’t know he would do that.”

Another woman, who asked to remain anonymous, tells a similar story from the set of the 1987 movie, claiming that Hoffman assaulted her in a car on the way back from the movie’s wrap party.

“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. There were people there. What are they going to think of me, that I’m a whore, if a say something? What would I say? He’s Dustin Hoffman.”

Two more women also came forward to The Hollywood Reporter with their own stories of alleged harassment.

A woman identifying herself as Carolyn said that she met the actor when she was a tour guide in Washington DC. Hoffman was filming All The President’s Men in the city at the time.

She says that after agreeing to meet with him, he answered the door to his hotel shirtless. When she said she wanted to go home, he blocked the doorway saying: “Go home? You don’t think you’re getting out of here without having sex, do you?”

Another woman, identified as Pauline, said that after meeting Hoffman a number of times while working in a shop, her lured her to his house, on the pretence of showing her a puppy he said he had bought for his daughter.

She alleges that once there, there was no puppy, and he exposed himself and masturbated in front of her.

Hoffman was previously accused of three other instances of harassment, one in a column for for The Hollywood Reporter by Anna Graham Hunter, a production assistant on a TV movie of Death of a Salesman in 1985.

She accused Hoffman of groping her. She was 17 at the time.

In a prior statement, 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.”

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