Jamie Lee Curtis: Eliza Dushku’s ‘True Lies’ Sexual Assault ‘Has Awakened Us to a Horrific Reality’
Zack Sharf
Jamie Lee Curtis has broken her silence on Eliza Dushku‘s allegation that stunt coordinator Joel Kramer sexually assaulted her when she was 12 years old on the set of James Cameron’s action thriller “True Lies.” Dushku described the assault in a Facebook post published January 13 and says she was physically injured during a stunt gone wrong after her friend confronted Kramer about the incident.
Curtis has written a first-person response to Dushku’s allegation for The Huffington Post in which she reveals Dushku told her about the assault a few years ago. Lee played Dushku’s mother in the movie and says she is as “shocked and saddened” today as she was when Dushku first told her about the assault.
“We have all started to awaken to the fact that the terrible abuses now commonplace in daily news reports have been going on for a very long time,” Curtis writes. “Unconscionably, those reports frequently come along with claims by the perpetrators that, as adults, those perpetrated against had some part in it. Eliza’s story has now awakened us from our denial slumber to a new, horrific reality. The abuse of children.”
Curtis goes on to write that she has often been tasked with playing “mother” on film sets to her young co-stars and admits the rules for keeping children safe from harm on movie sets is “broken.”
“All of us must take some responsibility that the loose and relaxed camaraderie that we share with our young performers has carried with it a misguided assumption that they are adults in an adult world, capable of making adult choices,” Curtis writes. “Many of us involved in ‘True Lies’ were parents. Jim, Arnold and myself. Parents of daughters. What allegedly happened to Eliza, away from the safety net of all of us and our purview is a terrible, terrible thing to learn about and have to reconcile.”
Curtis’ first-person essay follows statements made by Cameron at the Television Critics Association press tour. The director says he was never told about the assault during production, but claimed that there “would have been no mercy” had he known.
“Eliza is very brave for speaking up,” Cameron added. “I think this has been endemic throughout human systems — it’s just heartbreaking that it happened to her.”
Head over to The Huffington Post to read Curtis’ essay in its entirety.
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