A Third Woman Accuses Jeremy Piven of Sexual Assault: 'I Was Fighting Back Tears'
An advertising executive is alleging that former Entourage star Jeremy Piven sexually assaulted her.
Tiffany Bacon Scourby tells PEOPLE she decided to come forward after reality TV star and Playboy Playmate Ariane Bellamar accused Piven of sexual assault on Oct. 30, accusations that the actor was quick to “unequivocally deny.”
“I 100 percent believe she’s being honest,” Scourby tells PEOPLE of reading Bellamar’s tweets stating Piven groped her on the set of Entourage and at the Playboy Mansion. Following Bellamar’s claims, a second woman, Longmire actress Cassidy Freeman, also spoke out. On Instagram, Freeman posted, “I know what you did and attempted to do to me when I was far too young. THAT I know. And you know it too. Unless there were so many of us, that you can’t remember,” before concluding her post by writing, “I hope from now on, you keep it in your pants and you never get to do it again.”
(Recently, Piven’s pre-taped appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert was canceled on Nov. 3, with CBS releasing a statement to Entertainment Weekly stating, “Jeremy Piven’s interview for Friday’s broadcast was pre-taped earlier this week on Monday, October 30. Since we were unable to address recent developments in that interview, we are replacing that segment with a new guest.”)
Over the course of multiple phone calls over several days, Scourby, who is based in Washington, D.C., shared her recollections of her interactions with Piven, whom she claims to have met in October 2003 when she was in New York City for a work event.
“He was very nice to me,” Scourby, 39, tells PEOPLE of meeting the Wisdom of the Crowd star, 52, out at a club. “He mentioned he was going to [tape an appearance on] Late Night with Conan O’Brien the next day and gave me his number and asked me to go with him as his guest.”
Scourby says “nothing happened” that night and the next morning, after her work meeting, she met him around 11 a.m. at the Trump International Hotel & Tower, where he was staying.
“I remember I was wearing this white ribbed turtle neck and brown slacks — business attire — and I was sitting right next to him on the couch,” Scourby says. “We were talking for about five minutes and he said he was waiting for his [publicist] to come with us.”
Suddenly, “he jumped on top of me. I tried to push him off and he forced me to the ground,” recalls Scourby, who says Piven exposed his genitals and began rubbing them against her body.
She says she remained clothed the entire 15 minutes of her time in his suite but “he held down my hands” and ejaculated “all over my white turtleneck.”
Afterward, “I pushed him off of me and ran down the short hallway to get to the door,” she continues. “I rubbed my chest against the wall to get his [semen] off of my sweater. I ran outside and hailed a cab and I just burst into tears. I cried the entire way back to my hotel.”
Scourby says she called a longtime friend from the cab and recounted what had happened. (The friend has since corroborated this version of events to PEOPLE.) She returned to her hotel to shower before catching a train back home to Washington, D.C.
“I just cried on the train the whole way back,” she says.
In the 14 years since the incident, Scourby got married, became a mother and “never thought about saying anything” about the incident until she saw Piven’s fervent denial of Bellamar’s allegations.
“It couldn’t have just happened to me and couldn’t have just happened to her,” she says.
In a statement to PEOPLE, Piven categorically denies Scourby’s account: “Let me be absolutely clear, this simply did not happen. I would never force myself on a woman, ever. I cannot speak as to why a person would create a story like this.”
A representative for Piven states that if the actor were to take a polygraph test it “would have clearly proven this allegation to be entirely fabricated, a complete lie. He’s now looking at legal options.”
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