TV star ‘held stylist hostage and raped her in his mansion’
BRITISH actor Ed Westwick has been accused of holding a woman captive and raping her repeatedly for two days at his Hollywood mansion.
Stylist Haley Camille Freedman, who was 20 at the time, is the fourth woman to claim that the 30-year-old raped or sexually assaulted her.
Allegations against the actor forced the BBC to shelve its Christmas Agatha Christie blockbuster Ordeal by Innocence. Filming has also been halted on his BBC Two comedy White Gold.
In a lawsuit filed by Miss Freedman, the former art director of fashion magazine Kat & Bare, Westwick is called ‘monstrous’, a ‘serial rapist’ and an ‘abusive, crazed alcoholic’.
She claimed to have met him at a party in August 2014, where he ‘displayed an immediate attraction’ to her. The pair went back to his rented Hollywood Hills home, where they ‘went to Westwick’s bedroom and proceeded to have what began as consensual sexual intercourse’, according to court papers seen by Mail Online. It then says Westwick became ‘violent and aggressive’, demanding that Miss Freedman ‘strangle him or slap his face’.
The papers say that when she refused, he ‘put his hands around her neck and slapped her and strangled her against her will’.
Miss Freedman, now 23, named Westwick in the documents filed in a federal court in Los Angeles.
She is suing her ex-partners at magazine Kat & Bare for breach of contract and fraud, accusing them of shunning her and cutting her out of the business after she decided to go public with her ‘nightmare’ sexual encounter.
She claimed the morning after meeting Westwick, she asked the actor – who played serial womaniser Chuck Bass in US teen drama Gossip Girl – to take her home.
‘He assured her that he would drive her back to her car – eventually,’ the court documents say. Instead he approached her in the shower and used objects to sexually assault her. It then claimed she tried to leave, but the actor became ‘disturbing and angry’.
She said she wanted to leave but he ‘ignored her, removing her clothing and taking her sexually anyway’, the court papers said. Her phone was out of battery and the actor wouldn’t allow her to use another phone or charge her own. The papers stated the star used ‘fear and intimidation’ to keep her captive. He eventually drove her to her friend’s home two days later.
In November last year, Westwick was accused of raping two women in 2013 in the Los Angeles area. Later, a third woman came forward to accuse him of sexual assault.
Westwick denies all the various allegations against him. His girlfriend, model Jessica Serfaty, has stood by him. His lawyer and agent were contacted for comment.