Getty Images for The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences/Lars Niki(NOTE NATURE, CONTENT)In a detailed guest column for The Hollywood Reporter, a woman named Anna Graham Hunter claims that back in 1985, while she was a 17-year-old working on the set of a TV production of Death of a Salesman, Dustin Hoffman sexually harassed her.
Hunter claims the legendary actor — who would have been 47 or 48 at the time, and married — made many sexual comments to her, which Hunter noted in a daily, handwritten diary, excerpts of which are published in The Hollywood Reporter.
“He was openly flirtatious, he grabbed my a**, he talked about sex to me and in front of me,” Hunter recalled, looking back, adding that his breakfast order to her once included “a hard-boiled egg…and a soft-boiled clitoris.”
Even so, Hunter admits, “I loved the attention from Dustin Hoffman. Until I didn’t.”
One letter to her sister, dated January 31, 1985, read: “Today, I realized some things about this business that scare me. First of all, Dustin’s a lech. I’m completely disillusioned. After Tootsie, I thought I wanted to marry him.”
She goes on to detail a series of inappropriate comments and touching incidents that ultimately prompted her to complain to Hoffman” “I told him that I didn’t appreciate his wandering hands or his comments. He apologized and said he would stop.”
Hunter says Hoffman’s inappropriate comments largely ended after that. “No one is 100 percent good or bad,” she wrote after that. “Dustin’s a pig, but I like him a lot.”
Hunter, now a Los Angeles-based writer, is much less generous in retrospect: “At 49, I understand what Dustin Hoffman did as it fits into the larger pattern of what women experience in Hollywood and everywhere. He was a predator, I was a child, and this was sexual harassment. As to how it fits into my own pattern, I imagine I’ll be figuring that out for years to come.”
In a statement to The Hollywood Reporter, 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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