Column: Dustin Hoffman Groped Me When I Was 17

Former production assistant recounts experience
By Evann Gastaldo,  Newser Staff
Posted Nov 1, 2017 10:50 AM CDT
Column: Dustin Hoffman Groped Me When I Was 17
Actor Dustin Hoffman poses for photos upon arrival at the premiere of the film "The Meyerowitz Stories" during the London Film Festival in London on Oct. 6, 2017.   (Photo by Vianney Le Caer/Invision/AP)

Anna Graham Hunter was a 17-year-old high school senior in 1985 when she got an internship as a production assistant on the set of the Death of a Salesman TV movie. In a column for the Hollywood Reporter, using her own letters from her five weeks on set as a guide, she recounts how Dustin Hoffman allegedly sexually harassed her on set. Her interactions with him started when he asked her to massage his feet one day during lunch (his daughter, who was in eighth grade at the time, was in the room) and progressed to "flirtatious" behavior like asking her if she had sex over the weekend, talking about breasts in front of her, teasing her about wanting to sleep with Warren Beatty, and telling her he wanted "a hard-boiled egg ... and a soft-boiled clitoris" for breakfast one morning.

Hunter's letters say that she realized Hoffman was "a lech" around the time he started allegedly groping her butt; she says when he did that she hit his hand away and told him he was a "dirty old man." She says another production assistant called him a pig when he said he wanted her breasts for lunch, and that the office manager said if the producer found out about it, "she would have been gone in a second"—causing Hunter to wonder if she'd be fired should someone find out she was rejecting Hoffman's advances. She eventually stood up to Hoffman and he apologized, even though her supervisor had told her that for the sake of the production she needed to let certain things "roll over [her] head." In response to the Reporter, Hoffman said he feels "terrible that anything I might have done could have put her in an uncomfortable situation. I am sorry." (More Dustin Hoffman stories.)

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