A woman says Dustin Hoffman sexually harassed her when she was 17 years old and working as an intern on one of his projects.
The allegations come amid a rise of public accusations of sexual misconduct against several Hollywood celebs and power players, notably producer Harvey Weinstein, who has denied taking part in non-consensual sex.
"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," Hoffman told The Hollywood Reporter in response to the accusations against him, which are detailed in a Hollywood Reporter op-ed posted on November 1 and titled "Dustin Hoffman Sexually Harassed Me When I Was 17."
Anna Graham Hunter, now 49, says that when she was 17 and a senior in high school, she interned as a production assistant on Death of a Salesman, a 1985 TV movie that earned Hoffman his first and only Emmy.
Hunter feels conflicted about the actor. She said in her op-ed, "I loved the attention from Dustin Hoffman. Until I didn't."
"He asked me to give him a foot massage my first day on set; I did," she wrote. "He was openly flirtatious, he grabbed my ass, he talked about sex to me and in front of me. One morning I went to his dressing room to take his breakfast order; he looked at me and grinned, taking his time. Then he said, 'I'll have a hard-boiled egg...and a soft-boiled clitoris.' His entourage burst out laughing. I left, speechless. Then I went to the bathroom and cried."
She said she wrote her sister letters detailing her encounters with the actor and made copies of them for herself.
In one letter, she wrote that on week two, Hoffman asked her, "So, did you have sex over the weekend like I told you?"
"Today, when I was walking Dustin to his limo, he felt my ass four times," she wrote days later. "I hit him each time, hard, and told him he was a dirty old man. He took off his hat and pointed to his head (shaved for the part) and said, 'No, I'm a dirty young man, I have a full head of hair.'"
She wrote that after about two weeks, she told the actor that she "didn't appreciate his wandering hands or his comments" and that "he apologized and said he would stop."
However, she said that a few days later, after she got to meet Warren Beatty when he visited the studio, Hoffman told her, "You might as well have undressed yourself. You were saying, 'F--k me, f--k me, Warren.'"
After more than a month, she wrote, "No one is 100 percent good or bad. Dustin's a pig, but I like him a lot."
"Yes, he was gross," she said. "But he could also be sweet and wanted me to like him. Which I did...Not long ago I watched All the President's Men for the first time in years and then texted my sister: Is it weird that I find him kind of sexy in this after what he did?"
"At 49, I understand what Dustin Hoffman did as it fits into the larger pattern of what women experience in Hollywood and everywhere," she said. "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."