GROPE OFA SALESMAN
Dustin Hoffman pawed me nightly on B’way
A WOMAN who once worked with Dustin Hoffman on Broadway claims in startling detail that the actor groped her almost nightly — devolving from her hero to an A-list sexual pariah.
Kathryn Rossetter, who starred in “Death of a Salesman” alongside Hoffman in the 1980s, recalled in a first-person piece for The Hollywood Reporter that Hoffman would slip his hands under her clothing nearly every time they acted out a particular scene when she was in the wings of the stage.
“He kept it up and got more and more aggressive,” Rossetter wrote. “One night he actually started to stick his fingers inside me. Night after night I went home and cried. I withdrew and got depressed and did not have any good interpersonal relationships with the cast.”
Rossetter also accused Hoffman inviting her to a hotel room during the first week of rehearsal. She thought it was odd that he even had the room since he lived only about a mile away. She says Hoffman claimed he used the hotel room to take naps, relax or rehearse his lines.
Once she stepped into the room things took a harrowing turn, she wrote. He took off his shirt — only 15 minutes before they had to be at rehearsal.
“Give me a back rub,” he told her, according to Rossetter. “Just a quickie.”
She says she gave him a “lame” back rub before a maid walked into the room.
Rossetter claims Hoffman lifted up her outfit one night backstage, exposing her breasts to crew members. It was humiliating, she wrote.
“Dustin had spread the word to the crew to come backstage at that time for a surprise,” Rossetter wrote. “What a jokester. Mr. Fun. It was sickening.”
A rep for Hoffman, 80, did not respond to the allegations. But his attorney Reporter did put in the touch The Hollywood with other members of the “Death of Salesman” cast and crew — none of whom could confirm Rossetter’s allegations. Tom Kelly, the production stage manager who worked on that show, told the Reporter that Rossetter’s ring true.” story “just doesn’t
“Given my position, it’s insulting
to say this kind of activity would go on to the extent of sexual violation,” Kelly said. Rossetter is the third woman to accuse Hoffman of sexual misconduct. The first, Anna Graham Hunter, claimed in a Hollywood Reporter guest column last month that Hoffman grabbed her backside and requested a foot massage from her when she was a 17-year-old intern on the TV movie version of “Death of a Salesman” in 1985. Hoffman issued an apology in response to those accusations. women “I have and the feel utmost terrible respect that anything for I might have done could
have put her in an uncomfortable situation,” he said in a statement. “I am sorry. It is not reflective of who I am.”
Producer Wendy Riss Gatsiounis, then came forward to Variety shortly after to accuse Hoffman of making an unwanted sexual advance toward her during what she believed was supposed to be a business meeting. A rep for Hoffman denied those allegations.
As for Rossetter, securing an audition for “Death of a Salesman” was a dream come true. It was 1983. She was a 23-year-old aspiring actress with a chance to work with Hoffman. Once she got the job, she says the “Tootsie” star took her to his home to have dinner with his wife. It was there that Hoffman called Rossetter’s mother to let her know her that her daughter was going to be on Broadway.
“The whole experience was overwhelming,” she wrote. “He was my hero.”
The hotel harassment, she says, began just three days later.
“That was the beginning of what was to become a horrific, demoralizing and abusive experience at the hands (literally) of one of my acting idols.”
Rossetter claims Hoffman groped her at parties. She would try to bat his hands away.
Hoffman asked her to rub his feet in a dressing room, whispering “higher, higher” in an effort to get her to “move up his pants toward his genitals.”
She stopped at his calves, she wrote.
After the close of the play, Rossetter shot for three days on the TV movie of “Death of a Salesman,” again in the role of Willy Loman’s mistress. After a screening of the film in 1985, a photographer asked for a photo of her, another actress and Hoffman. He was standing between the two women.
“On cue, he grabbed our breasts,” she wrote.
Rossetter says she grabbed Hoffman’s crotch in anger. Three months later, the photo appeared in Playboy magazine and the caption made it seem like a moment of levity.
“Reviving a dead Salesman,” it read.
The actress explained the photo to her mother.
“Good for you,” the mom told her. “But don’t tell your father.”