JAWS STAR ‘FLASHED AT FEMALE PAL’
Star Trek legend is also accused
JAWS star Richard Dreyfuss and Star Trek icon George Takei are the latest names to face allegations in the Hollywood sex scandal.
Oscar-winner Dreyfuss, 70, was yesterday accused of harassing and exposing himself to a female writer, which he denies.
But he said in a statement: “I became an asshole. I flirted with all women, be they actresses, producers or 80-year-old grandmothers.”
Takei, 80, best known as Mr Sulu in the original Star Trek TV series, was accused of “groping” a former male model and fellow actor he had invited to his home.
The allegations in both cases date back to the 1980s and those against Dreyfuss came just a week after his own son Harry claimed to have been molested by Kevin Spacey, 58.
Jaws veteran Dreyfuss, who won his Best Actor Academy Award for The Goodbye Girl in 1977, responded after being accused of the “constant” harassment of LA-based screenwriter Jessica Teich over a “two to three year period” in the mid-1980s.
She said: “When I read about his support for his son, I remember thinking, ‘But wait a minute. This guy harassed me for months’.
“He was in a position of power over me and I didn’t feel I could tell anyone about it. It just seemed so hypocritical.”
Ms Teich, who was working with Dreyfuss on a Disney TV special, claims that as well as making “yucky, insinuating suggestions” he also indecently exposed himself to her during a meeting in his trailer on a studio lot. She added: “It was like an out-of-body experience. I just tried swiftly to get out.
“I pretended it hadn’t really happened. I kept moving because it was part of my job and I knew he was, at the time, a very important guy.”
But she said his “continual, overt, lewd comments” did not stop even after she fled his trailer, adding: “He created a very hostile work environment, where I felt sexualised, objectified and unsafe.”
Dreyfuss yesterday denied exposing himself to Ms Teich but said in an astonishingly frank statement: “I value and respect women, and I value and respect honesty. So I want to try to tell you the complicated truth.
“At the height of my fame in the late
1970s I became an asshole – the kind of performative masculine man my father had modelled for me to be. I lived by the motto, ‘If you don’t flirt, you die’.
“And flirt I did. I flirted with all women, be they actresses, producers, or 80-yearold grandmothers.
“I even flirted with those who were out of bounds, like the wives of some of my best friends, which especially revolts me. I disrespected myself, I disrespected them and ignored my own ethics, which I regret more deeply than I can express. But I am not an assaulter. “I emphatically deny ever exposing myself to Jessica Teich, whom I have considered a friend for 30 years.
“It makes me reassess every relationship I have ever thought was playful and mutual.”
Takei has been accused of sexually assaulting Scott Brunton, a former model and actor who was 23 when he claims to have been invited to the star’s LA home after they met in a bar in 1981. Brunton said he “must have passed out” in a giant yellow beanbag chair, but added: “The next thing I remember I was coming to and he had my pants down around my ankles and he was groping my crotch and trying to get my underwear off. “He was feeling me up at the same time, trying to get his hands down my underwear. “I pushed him off. I managed to get my pants up and compose myself and I was just shocked.”
Takei’s agent Julia Buchwald said: “George is travelling in Japan and Australia and not reachable for comment.” Takei has denied the allegation of sexual misconduct on Twitter, saying the account given by Scott Brunton “simply did not occur”.