Dustin Hoffman is addressing allegations of sexual misconduct in his new memoir.
“I’m sure it’s true that in my life, especially 40 years ago, I made some women uncomfortable,” Hoffman, 89, writes in his new book, Look at Me, according to People. “But ‘uncomfortable’ is a subjective emotional state. What is crass and offensive to one person, another individual might find hilarious, or enlivening, or even sort of cozy.”
While Hoffman doesn’t specifically address the 2017 accusations of sexual misconduct from six different women against him, he does explain why he thinks his personality could be misunderstood by some women.
“I love a so-called dirty joke. I am ‘a Borscht Belt flirt,’ as Bill Murray once put it,” the Oscar winner writes. “That’s not the same thing as pressuring someone to do something they didn’t want to do.”
Hoffman claims in the memoir, released on Tuesday, November 10, that when the #MeToo movement began in 2017, he was in full support of victims coming forward and exposing those responsible for misdeeds.
“When a reckoning started making its way around the internet, and tearing through Hollywood, I thought it was a very good thing,” the Rain Man actor writes. “I knew by then that plenty of women had put up with way too much for way too long in my industry. Not for a second did I worry that anything negative would be said about me, because the idea of taking something from someone sexually that they didn’t want to give … it’s just not something I’ve ever done.”
Hoffman was accused by three women in 2017 of sexual harassment. One of the women claimed she was assaulted when she was a 17-year-old production assistant on Death of a Salesman in 1985.
The second woman alleged she was groped and assaulted by Hoffman on the same production. A third woman claimed the actor propositioned her during a pitch meeting.
That same year, Variety spoke with three separate women about their alleged encounters with Hoffman, who accused him of sexual harassment, sexual assault and exposing himself to a minor.
Hoffman issued a public apology to one of his accusers, but his lawyer claimed at the time that the allegations were “defamatory falsehoods.”
No criminal charges or lawsuits were brought against Hoffman.
Hoffman says the accusations changed his reality, going on to compare the experience to the 1950s McCarthy era when Hollywood A-listers and other high-profile figures in America were blacklisted for their perceived communist affiliations.
“There was no ‘innocent until proven guilty.’ There was no ‘proving’ anything at all,” Hoffman claims in his book. “The whole thing was so crazy, I was sort of bewildered by how to defend myself … or if I should even try.”
He reveals, “I didn’t want to be fighting against something that I thought was important. I didn’t want to be on the wrong side of my own values. The only problem was that things were being said about me that just weren’t true.”
Hoffman also notes in his memoir that his marriage to wife Lisa, whom he wed in 1980, has helped him learn a lot about “men and women and the different ways we perceive a given situation.”
He confesses, “It took me years (decades?) to understand that flirting with every woman I met was not OK.”
Hoffman writes that Lisa, 72, has never “doubted my love or my commitment” to her, but admits she has seen him “staring at a pretty woman” more than a time or two, and has said, “Dusty, would you like me to introduce you?”
The Graduate star points out, “She knows who she’s dealing with. She fell in love with a guy with a bawdy sense of humor who is obsessed with sex and is always looking for attention.”
Despite his understanding with Lisa, Hoffman says it took him “an embarrassingly long time to grasp that if I was flirting or my jokes were too dirty, people who were not my wife might think I was being inappropriate.”
He writes, “I know I’m harmless, she knows I’m harmless, but if you’d never met me before, would you know? … I’m not looking to humiliate or offend anybody. I’m not a person who gets off on having power, or pressuring people to do things. To be perfectly honest, I never thought of myself as a person with power in the first place.”
The Tootsie actor asks, “Is it possible that I’ve been guilty of insufficient empathy? That I was too self-involved to correctly perceive what the people around me were feeling all the time? Sure. Of course.”
Hoffman concludes the chapter, writing, “If you don’t feel the same way, then you are different from every other human being I’ve met in this life. Male or female.”
Look at Me is now available for purchase wherever books are sold.
If you or someone you know has been sexually assaulted, contact the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673).
