‘It couldn’t have been an accident’
Actress testifies Geoffrey Rush groped her during a 2015 stage performance
The actress at SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA the centre of Oscar-winning actor Geoffrey Rush’s defamation trial told a Sydney court on Tuesday that he deliberately touched the side of her breast in a Shakespearean stage scene in which her character lay dead on the ground. Rush is suing the publisher of Sydney’s The Daily Telegraph newspaper in the Federal Court for defamation over articles published in November that accused the 67-year-old Australian actor of behaving inappropriately toward actress Eryn Jean Norvill during the Sydney Theatre Company’s production of King Lear in 2015 and 2016.
Rush denies the claims against him and argues the articles portrayed him as a pervert and a sexual predator.
Norvill never spoke to the newspaper before the articles were published and made her first public allegations against Rush during her testimony in court on Tuesday. The 34-year-old actress testified that she was playing King Lear’s dead daughter Cordelia when Rush, playing the distraught father, stroked his hand across the side of her right breast and on to her hip during a preview performance. She said it hadn’t happened before, with Rush usually touching her face and sometimes her head, shoulder and arm during the scene. “It couldn’t have been an accident because it was slow and pressured,” she told the court. During his testimony last week, Rush denied deliberately touching Norvill’s breast, touching her lower back under her shirt when they were backstage or making lewd gestures and comments toward her. Norville testified that while rehearsing the scene with her eyes closed, she felt shocked, belittled and embarrassed on realizing Rush was making “groping” gestures over her body to the tittering laughter of a “complicit” rehearsal room.
Rush was bulging his eyes, licking his lips and smiling as he made the gestures, Norvill told the court. Norvill, who said she had longed to work with Rush before the production, said his allegedly lewd gestures and sexual innuendo became normalized in rehearsals, but she didn’t complain because “his power was intimidating.” “Everyone else didn’t seem to have a problem about it ... so I was looking at a room that was complicit. My director didn’t seem to have a problem with it, so I felt quashed in terms of my ability to find allies,” she said. Norvill said once when Rush stroked her lower back, her “panic levels shot up.” Under cross-examination by Rush’s lawyer, Bruce McClintock, Norvill denied fabricating parts of her testimony. She said she “100 per cent” disagreed that her claim of sexual harassment by Rush was a “complete lie.” The non-jury trial continues Wednesday.