Eliza Dushku at the 1994 world premiere of “True Lies”/Photo by Ron Galella, Ltd./WireImage(LOS ANGELES) — Director James Cameron and actress Jamie Lee Curtis are responding after actress Eliza Dushku alleged in a Facebook post over the weekend that she was molested by a stunt coordinator on the set of Cameron’s True Lies in 1994 when she was 12.
In the post on Saturday, Dushku charged that stunt coordinator Joel Kramer worked to gain her trust before luring her to a hotel room where he “disappeared in the bathroom and emerged, naked, bearing nothing but a small hand towel held flimsy at his mid-section” and “laid me down on the bed, wrapped me with his gigantic writhing body, and rubbed all over me.” Dushku writes, “When he was ‘finished’, he suggested, ‘I think we should be careful…,’ [about telling anyone] he meant. I was 12, he was 36.”
Dushku said in her post that at the time she told her on-set legal guardian, her parents and a friend about the incident.
Kramer denied the account in an interview with Variety on Saturday saying the allegations were “absolutely not true,” adding that he “never molested her” and was “never nude in front of her.”
Dushku’s legal guardian on the set, Susan Booth-Forbes, told Deadline in a statement, “Eliza Dushku is telling the truth.” Booth-Forbes alleges that she “reported Joel Kramer’s inappropriate sexual behavior towards 12-year-old Eliza to a person in authority. I was met with blank stares and had the sense that I wasn’t telling that person anything they didn’t already know.”
At a Television Critics Association event on Saturday, Cameron told reporters, “Obviously, Eliza is very brave for speaking up,” reports TV Guide. Cameron said he was unaware of any allegation of such behavior on the set.
In an op-ed published by the Huffington Post on Sunday, True Lies co-star Jamie Lee Curtis said Dushku, “shared that story with me privately a few years ago. I was shocked and saddened then and still am today.”
Writes Curtis, “All of us must take some responsibility that the loose and relaxed camaraderie that we share with our young performers has carried with it a misguided assumption that they are adults in an adult world, capable of making adult choices.”
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