Michael Douglas denies harassing former employee
Michael Douglas is taking pre-emptive action, asserting he has never harassed anyone he has employed after being contacted by a reporter with allegations that he sexually harassed and blackballed a former employee.
Calling the accounts a “fabrication” in an interview with Deadline published Wednesday, Douglas says he was notified by The Hollywood Reporter in December that the magazine was planning a story about accusations of a history of misconduct featuring a former employee’s accounts of him using foul language, masturbating in front of her and eventually blackballing her from the industry.
Instead of waiting for the news story to surface, Douglas says, he decided to grant an interview so he could get out in front of the allegations.
“I remembered this woman: sophisticated intelligent, good sense of humor. A novelist, who has written books and published novels and was an active feminist, and proud of it,” he says of his accuser.
Douglas acknowledged that he used possibly inappropriate language in front of the woman: “I talked to the reporter and said, ‘Listen, as far as using colorful language in front her, I apologize. None of it was directed at her; she didn’t say it was. It was my office, and that was the tone that I set as far as conversations with friends.’ ”
As for the charges of masturbating in front of her, firing her and then blackballing her, “that was completely untrue. She was a lady who was involved in development at my company, and we just didn’t have a good development record in the time she was there, so I just moved on.
“I never blackballed her. If people from the industry called me to ask about her, I would have been honest, but I never blackballed her.”
Douglas says that the experience has left him “fearful” and that while he supports harassment victims and assault survivors coming forward, he sees his accusations as something different.
“I’d confess to anything I thought I was responsible for,” Douglas says. “And it was most certainly not masturbating in front of this woman. This reeks. I would have respected if she had reached out to me any time over these years, to share her pain or concerns, and I would have been the first one to respond. But this, going directly to the newspapers or whatever you want to call them, it just reeks of something else.”