While Brendan Fraser is making the award-season circuit in support of his new film, The Whale, he won’t be attending the Golden Globes, telling GQ in a new cover story, “No, I will not participate,” because the former head of the Globes’ Hollywood Foreign Press Association allegedly groped him. Fraser first related this purported sexual assault to GQ in 2018, saying that Philip Berk, former president of the HFPA, groped him at the Beverly Hills Hotel in 2003. Berk is no longer an HFPA member, but Fraser’s feelings on the organization haven’t softened. “I have more history with the Hollywood Foreign Press Association than I have respect for the Hollywood Foreign Press Association,” Fraser said. “My mother didn’t raise a hypocrite. You can c...
Harvey Weinstein’s lawyers are arguing during his Los Angeles sexual assault trial that his accusers are unreliable because their accounts failed to mention his abnormal testicles. The topic has already come up several times, Variety reports, and is expected to remain a focus of ensuing testimony. During opening statements to the jury, the prosecutor, deputy D.A. Paul Thompson, spoke about a 1999 surgery that relocated portions of Weinstein’s genitalia. “Because of an infection, his testicles were actually taken from his scrotum and put into his inner thighs,” he said. On October 24th, Jane Doe #1 took the stand. A European model who spoke with the help of a translator, she accused Weinstein of a violent hotel room assault in 2013. She said Weinstein forced her to perform or...
Marcus Mumford’s solo career has been deeply personal in way that Mumford and Sons rarely approached, starting from the very first lines of his debut single, “Cannibal”: ““I can still taste you and I hate it/ That wasn’t a choice in the mind of a child and you knew it.” Now, the folk pop powerhouse has opened up in a new interview with GQ, sharing some details about his path to mental wellness after childhood sexual abuse. “Like lots of people — and I’m learning more and more about this as we go and as I play it to people — I was sexually abused as a child,” Mumford said. “Not by family and not in the church, which might be some people’s assumption. But I hadn’t told anyone about it for 30 years.” Mumford first began dealing with that trauma in 2019, after the release of Mumford and Sons’&...
Last year, Kevin Spacey was ordered to pay MRC, the producer of Netflix’s House of Cards, $31 million in compensatory damages following his termination from the show. He later petitioned to have the order reversed, but at an August 4th hearing, a judge determined the actor’s appeal had no standing. Spacey was fired from House of Cards in 2017 after eight employees of the show accused him of sexual misconduct. After his termination, MRC was forced to rewrite the show’s sixth and final season to exclude Spacey from the plot, and cut the season down from 13 episodes to eight in order to meet streaming deadlines. After an internal investigation and an evidentiary hearing, a neutral arbitrator concluded Spacey had violated the show’s anti-harassment policy and ordered him to...
Kevin Spacey pled not guilty to five sexual assault charges at a court hearing in London today (July 14th), Deadline reports. A trial date has been set for June 6th, 2023. In May, Metropolitan Police charged the Oscar-winning actor with four counts of sexual assault and one of “causing a person to engage in penetrative sexual activity without consent.” The alleged assaults occurred between 2005-2013 in London and nearby Gloucester county against three men who are now aged in their 30s and 40s, and Spacey has repeatedly denied the accusations. The judge in today’s hearing also continued Spacey’s unconditional bail, which was granted last month. Back in 2019 in Massachusetts, Spacey was charged with indecent assault and battery in connection to a July 2016 incident involving an 18-...
A civil court jury has found Bill Cosby guilty of sexually assaulting a 16-year-old girl in 1975, the New York Times reports. The incident occurred when the plaintiff, Judy Huth, accepted the comedian’s invitation to join him at the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles. Huth, to whom a California jury awarded $500,000 in damages Tuesday, first came forward with her accusations against Cosby in 2014. She’s just one of dozens of women who have come forth alleging the Cosby Show star of sexual misconduct, including a woman named Andrea Constand, whose 2017 trial versus Cosby ended in a mistrial after he was charged with three counts of aggravated indecent assault. For many of those victims, the ruling in Huth’s case is a massive step towards justice: “I feel vindicated,” Huth told a repor...
Paul Haggis was arrested in Italy for sexual assaulting an anonymous woman who pressed charges against the Oscar-winning Canadian screenwriter. Variety reports that Haggis — known for his work on films like 2004’s Crash and Million Dollar Baby — was charged with forcing a non-Italian woman to undergo sexual intercourse over the course of two days in Ostuni, Italy. Per an Italian police report, Haggis took the alleged victim to the Papola Casale airport in nearby Brindisi, where she was left early Friday morning despite her “precarious physical and psychological conditions.” The report adds that airport staff and border police assisted the woman by giving her first aid and accompanying her to the offices of the Italian squadra mobile police unit. She was then taken to a hospital in Bri...
Elon Musk’s aerospace company SpaceX paid a flight attendant $250,000 as part of a severance agreement after she accused the founder of sexual misconduct, Business Insider reports. The flight attendant, who worked on a contract basis as a member of the cabin crew SpaceX’s corporate jet fleet, says she was encouraged to get licensed as a masseuse so that she could give Musk massages. In 2016, she was providing the businessman with a massage in a private cabin on his Gulfstream G650ER when he allegedly exposed his erect penis to her, rubbed her leg without consent, and offered to buy her a horse in exchange for performing a sexual favor. She told a friend about the incident, and the friend described it in a signed declaration reviewed by Insider. According to the declaration, when the unname...