Dustin Hoffman Accused of Exposing Himself to A 16-Year-Old and Assaulting Two Women While Making ‘Ishtar’
Zack Sharf
More women have come forward to accuse Dustin Hoffman of sexual harassment and assault in a new report from Variety. One woman, Cori Thomas, alleges Hoffman exposed himself to her when she was only 16 years old. Thomas was a high-school classmate of Hoffman’s daughter Karina. After spending an afternoon with the two, Hoffman invited them to the hotel he was staying at in New York City. Karina was asked to go home, leaving Thomas alone with the actor. Hoffman allegedly proceeded to take a shower.
“He came out of the bathroom with a towel at first wrapped around him, which he dropped,” Thomas tells Variety. “He was standing there naked. I think I almost collapsed, actually. It was the first time I had ever seen a naked man. I was mortified. I didn’t know what to do. And he milked it. He milked the fact that he was naked. He stood there. He took his time.”
According to Thomas, Hoffman put his robe back on and made his way to the bed, where he asked her to give him a foot massage. She says she complied because she “didn’t know what to do in the circumstance.”
“I didn’t know that I could say no, so I did it,” Thomas says. “And he kept telling me, ‘I’m naked. Do you want to see?’ What saved me was that the phone rang, and it was my mother downstairs to pick me up. So I left.”
Thomas is one of two women in the Variety report to come forward with new allegations against Hoffman. A second woman, Melissa Kester, says Hoffman sexually assaulted her while she was in the recording studio for the film “Ishtar.” Kester was in a relationship with a man who was working on the sound for film and joined him one day while Hoffman was in the studio laying down vocals for a song in the movie. The actor allegedly asked for Kester to be in the booth with him. She says he started holding on to her and hugging her and that she felt “awkward” and “weird.” Hoffman then allegedly assaulted her.
“And as he’s doing that, he literally just stuck his fingers down my pants,” she says. “He put his fingers inside me. And the thing I feel most bad about is I didn’t know what to do. I just stood there. I just froze in the situation like ‘Oh my god, what is happening?’ It’s shocking when that happens to you.”
A third woman has chosen to remain anonymous but also says she was assaulted by Hoffman during the making of “Ishtar.” Hoffman asked her if she wanted a ride home from a wrap party and the woman says he assaulted her in the back of a station wagon.
“There are people inches from us,” she said. “And he just took his hand and stuck his fingers right up inside of me. I didn’t know what to do. He’s smiling at me. I was frozen. I was outside of my body. There were people there. What are they going to think of me, that I’m a whore, if a say something? What would I say? He’s Dustin Hoffman.”
The three woman are the latest to make allegations against Hoffman. TV producer Wendy Riss Gatsiounis and former production assistant intern Anna Graham Hunter accused Hoffman in November. Representatives for Hoffman did not make him available to provide comment for the Variety story, but Hoffman’s attorney Mark A. Neubauer says the accusations are “defamatory falsehoods.”
