In a new report from Los Angeles Times news, 38 women accuse director James Toback of sexual harassment.
The allegations against Toback somewhat resemble those against producer Harvey Weinstein, who was fired from his own company
earlier this month after scores of women said the career-making mogul
assaulted, harassed or intimidated them. Toback, 72, stands accused of
harassing women he employed and women he approached on the street.
It’s long been said that Toback was a sexual predator.
In 1989, Spy Magazine reported
that he would approach women, brag about being a Hollywood director,
ask whether they’d like to consider a role in one of his forthcoming
films and then ask them to meet him at late hours. Gawker echoed these
claims in 2008, 2010 and 2012. Now, days after the #MeToo hashtag
encouraged survivors of sexual assault to speak out on social
media, more than three dozen women told the Los Angeles Times that
Toback ejaculated in front of them, probed their masturbation habits,
demanded they disrobe and/or rubbed his groin against their bodies.
These incidents allegedly occurred in hotel rooms, on movie sets and in
offices.
Toback
was a notorious name in Hollywood circles, even though he never
achieved widespread household fame. In 1991, he received an Oscar
nomination for writing the Warren Beatty gangster movie “Bugsy.” Many of
his films, including “Fingers,” “The Pick-Up Artist,” “Two Girls and a
Guy” and “Harvard Man,” revolve around womanizers, the mafia or both.
“The idea is not to have a separation between my life and my movies,”
Toback said in a 2002 Salon interview.
HuffPost
contacted Toback’s agent, Jeff Berg, for comment on Sunday. “Best to
speak directly to him,” Berg said in an email, providing
Toback’s “mobile” number. When reached, Toback said he is “writing
something” in response and declined to comment further.
Toback’s
accusers include Louise Post, the guitarist and vocalist for the rock
band Veruca Salt. “He told me he’d love nothing more than to masturbate
while looking into my eyes,” she said.
Actress
Chantal Cousineau said, while rehearsing a monologue for “Harvard Man”
in 2001, she heard Toback masturbating. Another woman, whom the Times
called a “well-known actress,” said Toback ignored her protestations and
would not let her leave his hotel room until she pinched his nipples
and stared into his eyes as he ejaculated in his pants.
Mere
days before the Times’ report, onetime aspiring actress Sari Kamin
recounted the harassment she suffered at the hands of Toback. “With
sauce on his face and pieces of pasta dangling from his goatee, Toback
told me he needed to masturbate seven times a day to feel steady in the
world,” Kamin wrote in a blog post on Medium.
The director allegedly accompanied her to a hotel room, where he asked
her to remove her clothes to prove she could handle filming a nude
scene.
Toback denied the allegations in a statement provided to Variety:
“All I can tell you is I’ve never heard of this woman, and it’s totally
defamatory on her part to invent them. This is totally distressing to
me. I’m 72 years old, but I’m not even close to having Alzheimer’s, and I
don’t have trouble remembering things in great detail.”
Actress Melissa Sagemiller, who told HuffPost
that Weinstein made innuendoes or harassed her on three separate
occasions, said, when asked whether she’d interacted with other
predatory men in the business, “Well, my first movie was a James Toback
movie, and he was blackballed out of Hollywood for indecent activity, so
that’s no surprise.”
Toback
wasn’t fully blackballed, despite the years of reports about his
behavior. In 2008, he directed a sympathetic documentary about boxer
Mike Tyson. In 2013, Toback and friend Alec Baldwin made “Seduced and
Abandoned,” a documentary about trying to secure financing for an
updated version of the classic erotic film “Last Tango in Paris.” (A
representative for Baldwin declined to comment to HuffPost.)
Toback’s
most recent project, “The Private Life of a Modern Woman,” starring
Sienna Miller and Baldwin, premiered at this year’s Venice Film
Festival.
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