Another woman has come forward to accuse Dustin Hoffman of sexual harassment, saying the actor repeatedly groped her during their work together on a Broadway play, with the actor putting his hand up her slip and one night sticking “his fingers inside” her.
In a guest column for The Hollywood Reporter, Kathryn Rossetter said she got the part of Willy Loman’s mistress in the Broadway revival of “Death of a Salesman” starring Hoffman.
Calling him her “hero,” the experience was “overwhelming” until, during the first week of rehearsals, Hoffman said he needed to go back to his hotel room to pick something up and she should join him. There, he asked for a back rub.
“That was the beginning of what was to become a horrific, demoralizing and abusive experience at the hands (literally) of one of my acting idols,” Rossetter wrote.
One night in Chicago, she said she “felt his hand up under my slip on the inside of my thighs. ”
“It then happened almost every show,” she said. “Six to eight shows a week. I couldn’t speak to him in the moment because I was on a live mic. He kept it up and got more and more aggressive. One night he actually started to stick his fingers inside me. Night after night I went home and cried. I withdrew and got depressed and did not have any good interpersonal relationships with the cast.”
Representatives for Hoffman declined to comment. In response, his attorneys put THR in touch with other individuals who worked on “Death of a Salesman,” who claim they do not recall witnessing any of the conduct described. Individuals include Hoffman’s brother-in-law Lee Gottsegen (who was also Hoffman’s assistant at the time), actresses Anne McIntosh, Debra Mooney and Linda Hogan, actors Michael Quinlan and Andrew Bloch, and production stage manager Tom Kelly.
“It just doesn’t ring true,” Kelly told THR. “Given my position, it’s insulting to say this kind of activity would go on to the extent of sexual violation.”
In Rossetter’s account, she said the groping continued — After the shows at parties, when there would be a picture be taken, he would “put his arm around my rib cage and then grab my breast just before they snapped the picture and then remove it. He was very skilled at dropping his hand just as the picture snapped to avoid it being recorded.”
Another time, Hoffman’s dresser allegedly came to her, saying Hoffman wanted to see her in an offstage dressing room. There, he asked for a foot massage, where he “would whisper, ‘higher, higher,’ trying to get me to move up his pants legs toward his genitals.”
He pulled the groping move again as a photographer was apparently near, according to Rossetter, and “without thinking, a knee-jerk response built up over two years, I grabbed his crotch.” The image of her touching Hoffman’s genitals ended up in Playboy magazine with the caption, “Reviving a dead Salesman.”
Hoffman has been accused of sexual harassment and misconduct by multiple women. Hoffman was first accused in a guest column by Anna Graham Hunter for The Hollywood Reporter last month. In her piece, Hunter accused Hoffman of attempting to grope her multiple times when she was just 17.
On another occasion, she said she she went into his dressing room to ask his breakfast order and he told her, “I’ll have a hard-boiled egg … and a soft-boiled clitoris.”
In a statement, 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.”
Television writer and producer Wendy Riss Gatsiounis became the second woman to publicly accuse Dustin Hoffman of sexual harassment, and Meryl Streep recalled in a 1979 Time interview, resurrected by Slate, that the first time she met Hoffman, he touched her breast.
A spokesperson for Hoffman has not yet responded to TheWrap’s request for comment.