In the wave of allegations made against actor Kevin Spacey, one of the most prominent was made by Harry Dreyfuss, the son of Jaws actor Richard Dreyfuss. Dreyfuss alleged that Spacey groped him when he was just 18, while his father was in the room and unaware. Dreyfuss tweeted out that his son was very brave for coming forward and that he was proud of him.

Unfortunately, Richard Dreyfuss is back in the news, this time with allegations of sexual harassment leveled against him by L.A. writer Jessica Teich. In an interview with Vulture, Teich explains her confusion seeing Dreyfuss come forward against sexual assault when he allegedly harassed her for years.

“When I read about his support for his son, which I would never question, I remember thinking, ‘But wait a minute, this guy harassed me for months.’ He was in a position of so much power over me, and I didn’t feel I could tell anyone about it. It just seemed so hypocritical.”

Teich detailed the harassment she had to deal with while working with Dreyfuss on an ABC comedy special in the 1980s, while she was in mid-twenties, and Dreyfuss over a decade her senior. In a story that is now uncomfortably familiar, Teich alleges that Dreyfuss exposed himself to her without her consent.

“I remember walking up the steps into the trailer and turning towards my left and he was at the back of the trailer, and just — his penis was out, and he sort of tried to draw me close to it. He was hard. I remember my face being brought close to his penis. I can’t remember how my face got close to his penis, but I do remember that the idea was that I was going to give him a blow job. I didn’t, and I left.

It was like an out-of-body experience. I just tried to swiftly get out of the room. I pretended it hadn’t really happened. I kept moving because it was part of my job, and I knew he was, at the time, a very important guy, and certainly important to me. I trusted him. That’s what’s always so weird. I liked him. That’s part of why it’s so painful, because of the level of innocence one brings to these things. I felt responsible, that I must have indicated in some way that I was available for this.”


According to Teich, this was not an isolated incident, with Dreyfuss continuing to harass her, leaving “love notes,” telling her that he “wanted to f*ck her,” and trying to kiss her in business settings.

New Line Cinema, a division of Time Warner, received a sexual harassment complaint about Brett Ratner more than a decade ago, according to two former employees.

Terri Goddard, a former assistant at New Line, said that Ratner was notorious around the office for ogling the assistants, invading their space, and making them uncomfortable. His behavior was sufficiently persistent and unwelcome that she and several other employees complained to the human resources department.

“It’s humiliating to be objectified when you’re trying to do your work,” she said. “People were just appalled.”

Goddard said that Ratner’s behavior stopped after she and the other assistants complained to New Line’s HR department, and that it appeared the company had talked to him about the allegations. A second employee, who also complained to HR, said that Ratner called her a few days later to confront her about why she had reported him.

Ratner’s attorney, however, denied that he was ever informed of the allegations.

“Brett wasn’t aware of any report being filed against him by anyone at New Line,” said the attorney, Andrew Brettler of Lavely & Singer. “No one came to Brett to tell him he needed to curb his behavior.”

At the time, New Line operated as a independent studio under Time Warner’s ownership out of offices on Robertson Blvd. near Beverly Hills. Subsequently, it became a division within Warner Bros. and relocated to the studio’s Burbank lot.

In a statement, Warner Bros. said it was unable to locate a record of the complaint.

“We have no evidence of any claim filed in this matter,” a spokesman said.

Ratner was not an employee of New Line, but he had directed “Rush Hour,” “Money Talks,” and “Rush Hour 2” for the studio, making him an important creative force there.

In addition to Goddard, five other former New Line employees said they either witnessed or were told about Ratner’s harassment at the time. Eric Stauble, a former New Line assistant, said that Goddard complained about it to him. During that period, he said New Line had a reputation as a boys’ club. The culture was documented in a 1998 article in Premiere Magazine, which detailed numerous complaints from female executives.

“This was kind of the heyday of when a lot of this stuff was going on,” Stauble said. “There was a blind eye turned.”

Three former employees who asked not to be identified said they had personally witnessed or experienced Ratner’s harassment.

Marty Singer, another attorney for Ratner, has repeatedly stated that no one has ever filed a legal claim against him for sexual harassment.

“I have represented Mr. Ratner for two decades, and no woman has ever made a claim against him for sexual misconduct or sexual harassment,” Singer wrote in an Oct. 31 letter to Variety.

Goddard said she was coming forward to counter the notion that no one had ever complained about Ratner’s behavior. She said she began working at New Line in late 2005. Over the course of a couple of months, Ratner would regularly come in for meetings. Each time, he would stop to flirt with the assistants who sat in a row in front of the executive offices.

“It was someone leaning over your desk, in your personal space, looking at your body up and down with a smile on their face,” Goddard said.

She said Ratner would badger her with questions about her personal life and relationship status. Goddard said that because Ratner was so important to New Line that she felt pressure to be polite with him.

“You have to pander to it,” she said. “And you’re trying to pander to it to make it go away.”

Goddard said she was interviewed by HR and was assured that corrective measures would be taken.

After that, she said, Ratner stopped harassing her. “He would come in and give me a dirty look,” she said. “He knew something had been said.”

Warner Bros. cut ties with Ratner last week following an L.A. Times report in which six women alleged that Ratner had engaged in various forms of sexual misconduct. The same day, Ratner filed a libel suit against Melanie Kohler, a former Endeavor Talent Agency employee who wrote a Facebook post alleging that he had raped her. Variety also reported on Thursday that Ratner and producer Russell Simmons were investigated in 2001 for an alleged sexual battery. No charges were filed in that case.

Another actress has come forward with allegations that actor Steven Seagal sexually harassed her. Eva LaRue, who starred on CSI: Miami for eight seasons and on All My Children for nine, told Deadline that Seagal locked her in a room during an audition at his home in 1990 and then opened his kimono, standing before her with nothing else on but his underpants.

Her allegation comes in the wake of similar claims of sexual harassment by Seagal by Jenny McCarthy, Portia de Rossi and Juliana Margulies.

LaRue was 22 when she got a call from her agent, saying that he’d set up an audition for her at Seagal’s house. “Even at 22, I knew better than to go to an audition at somebody’s house,” she said. “But my agent assured me that the reason it was at his house was because they hadn’t secured their studio offices yet.”

“Don’t worry,” her agent told her, “there will be two producers there and the casting director. It’s totally on the up and up.”

“So I went, against my better judgment,” she recalled, “and sure enough, there were two other guys and some woman who was supposed to be the casting director. And there we were, sitting in his living room, talking about the character I was going to play and the story plot and what they’re looking for – the usual audition chitchat. But I didn’t have the sides. It was a meeting but not a reading. And then the casting director said, ‘I think she’s perfect for the role.’”

Now, all these years later, LaRue said that she doesn’t think there was a role, or even a movie – that it was all just a setup.

Seagal, dressed in a kimono, got up and told her to follow him to get the script. “I don’t know why we don’t have the script in the living room where we were meeting,” she said, “but I said, ‘OK,’ and I follow him, thinking we’re going to his office. We go down the hallway to this room, which is like an office and guest room kind of thing. And he says, ‘Have a seat on the couch.’ It was like a literal casting couch. And as I was walking towards the couch, with my back towards the door, he’s busy closing and locking the doors behind my back. I go to sit on the couch, and he comes towards me and he’s opening his weirdo kimono. There’s no script or anything. Just him standing there with his kimono open. He had underwear on, thank God, and he was bare everywhere else. And it was clear he was not just getting cozy.”

Jumping up from the couch, LaRue moved quickly to the door, making excuses to get out of there. “I wish I could stay, but I can’t,” she told him. “I have another meeting right after this.”

“No, no, sit down,” he said.

She kept moving to the door but found that he’d locked it from the inside. “I don’t know what’s happening,” she recalled. “I’m fumbling with the lock and he says, ‘No, no, come back. You’ve got to stay. Come sit on the couch and have a drink with me.’”

“I’d love to, but I have to go,” LaRue told him. “Send the script to my agent. I’ll read it, but I gotta go.” She said he never touched her, but the encounter was unnerving all the same. And as she made a “beeline” through the house and out the front door, she wondered: “Why am I even being nice to this guy? What is it about us women in general that it’s somehow beaten into our brains not to hurt somebody’s feelings even if they are about to horribly hurt ours.”

Once she got home, she called her agent and told him what happened.

“All these agents back then knew what was going on for ages. Thanks for not telling us. Everybody knew but us actors. But nobody followed up or anything,” LaRue told Deadline.

McCarthy said in a radio interview that in 1995, Seagal told her to take off her dress and then unzipped his pants during an audition for a role on Under Seige 2. She said she told him “No thanks” and fled the room in tears, only to be chased by him out into the parking lot, where he allegedly threatened her not to tell anyone — “or else.”

De Rossi tweeted on Wednesday that she too was auditioning for a role on one of Seagal’s films when he sat down beside her and unzipped his leather pants, allegedly telling her “how important it is to have chemistry off-set.” She says she ran out of his office and called her female agent, who allegedly told her, “Well, I didn’t know if he was your type.”

Margulies said she was 23 when a female casting director asked her to go to the actor’s hotel room at 10 PM to go over a scene. The casting director wasn’t there, but Seagal was. “I don’t know how I got out of that hotel room. … I sorta screamed my way out,” Margulies said.

Seagal could not be reached for comment regarding LaRue's allegations, but a spokesman earlier denied that the actor ever harassed McCarthy.

“Most of us have had to dodge these bullets our entire careers,” LaRue said. “It was part of being a woman in the industry. It’s like wearing pumps: It’s painful, but we gotta wear pumps.”

And it’s not like these are untold stories, she said. “I told this story a thousand times, and finally it matters, I’m not ‘suddenly’ coming forward. All these women who have accused Harvey Weinstein aren’t ‘suddenly’ coming forward. These are not new stories that girls are ‘suddenly’ coming out with. These are stories we’ve been telling at dinner parties, and to our friends, our family members, our agents and our fellow actors for years. But nobody cared until now, and now people are ‘suddenly’ coming forward.”