Last week, Michael Douglas tried to launch a preemptive strike against a woman he expected would come forward to accuse him of sexual harassment. By telling his story first, he perhaps hoped to seize control of the narrative. Or more sinisterly, he hoped to frighten her out of sharing her story.
The Academy Award-winning star, 73, didn’t silence her, as the woman, journalist and author Susan Braudy, has come forward to allege in the Hollywood Reporter that Douglas masturbated in front of her and engaged in other forms of sexually harassment when she worked for him in the late 1980s.
The masturbation incident occurred during a script meeting that took place in 1989 and in the living room of Douglas’ Manhattan apartment. At the time, Braudy was in her 40s and running Douglas’ film development company.
“I peered at him and saw he’d inserted both hands into his unzipped pants,” she told the Hollywood Reporter. “I realized to my horror that he was rubbing his private parts. Within seconds his voice cracked and it appeared to me he’d had an orgasm.”
She also said he routinely engaged in sexually charged talk in front of her, made lewd comments about her sex life, body and choice of clothes and recounted his affairs with Kathleen Turner and other women.
Now that Braudy’s story is out, in a column published Thursday in the Hollywood Reporter, time and other circumstances will dictate whose version of events will hold sway in the court of public opinion.
Last week, Douglas gave an interview to the website Deadline, in which he said he had become aware that a woman had gone to possibly two other industry publications to pitch her story, including the allegation that he masturbated in front of her. He told Deadline, “I don’t know where to begin. This is a complete lie, fabrication, no truth to it whatsoever.”
Douglas, who has been married to Catherine Zeta-Jones for 17 years, said the allegations are especially “painful” to read, first because his teenage children are “really upset” that he might be labeled a sexual harasser. But he also said he’s always been a supporter of women’s equality and currently backs the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements “with all my heart.”
In an interview with Entertainment Tonight Sunday, Zeta-Jones voiced her support for her husband, especially his decision to speak out ahead of Baudy sharing her story first.
“There was no other way than to be preemptive in a story that had to be watched,” she said, adding that she wouldn’t address any of the specific allegations. “I think it’s very clear the way that he stands. I cannot elaborate on something that’s so very personal to him.”
Braudy’s account of her time working with Douglas was framed in a column by the Hollywood Reporter’s editorial director Matthew Belloni. The editor addressed the process by which his publication vetted the story for publication, especially in light of how the #MeToo movement has shifted the way the media covers stories about sexual misconduct.
He said the Weinstein story has made media outlets more wiling to take women’s accounts seriously than in the past, though he said different outlets apply different standards over what they will publish. He said that Braudy’s story met the Hollywood Reporter’s standards. It involved an alleged abuse of power, and Braudy could provide corroborating evidence, including statements from people who had been told about the alleged harassment around the time it occurred.
Three people were willing to say publicly that Braudy had told them about the alleged harassment. They are author Michael Wolff, former Newsweek journalist Lynn Povich and Joseph Weintraub, a film editor who currently lives with Braudy.
Wolff, the author of the controversial new book “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,” said: “We have discussed the incident many, many times since, as well as Douglas’ relentless, goading, mocking and belittling sexual behavior.”
Braudy said she went to work for Douglas in the late 1980s, when his career was riding high as the star of such blockbusters as “Romancing the Stone,” “Fatal Attraction” and “Wall Street,” for which he won an Academy Award for best actor in 1988.
Braudy mostly worked for Douglas at his Manhattan apartment, where his living room became his production company’s office. Her job, according to the Hollywood Reporter, was to read scripts, hire and supervise screenwriters, and perhaps most important, “babysit Michael in his apartment.”
Braudy said she did her best ” to shrug off the cloud of sexual aggression that Michael reflexively emitted.”
He regularly commented on her body, which prompted her to start wearing long, loose layers of black. Another time, she said, he joked to a group of agents in her presence that he assumed she was “a screamer” in bed. When she asked him to not talk that way, she said he laughed off her complaint.
Perhaps the incident that finally soured their working relationship was when he masturbated in front of her. Braudy said when Douglas was done, she closed her notebook and rushed for the door.
“I was surprised I wasn’t falling to pieces even though I was humiliated,” she said. I realized he thought he could do anything he wanted because he was so much more powerful than I was. Michael ran barefoot after me to the elevator, zipping his fly and buckling his belt. ‘Hey, thank you, you’re good. You helped me, thank you, thank you.'”
Soon after, Braudy said, Douglas asked her to sign a confidentiality agreement, which she took as a sign that he was preparing to fire her. She kept putting him off and never signed such an agreement until she was eventually let go.
In both his Deadline interview and in a statement to the Hollywood Reporter, Douglas acknowledged that he may have talked coarsely but mostly in private conversations with friends that Braudy may have overheard.
“Coarse language or overheard private conversations with my friends that may have troubled her are a far cry from harassment,” he said. “Suggesting so does a true disservice to those who have actually endured sexual harassment and intimidation.”
In his statement to the Hollywood Reporter, he also questioned why Braudy, as an industry veteran, a senior executive, a published novelist and an established member of the women’s movement, had never considered coming forward with these allegations before.
“At no time then did she express or display even the slightest feeling of discomfort working in our environment, or with me personally,” he said. “That is because at no time, and under no circumstance, did I behave inappropriately toward her.”
