Alien: Covenant and Pet Sematary 's Amy Seimetz Accuses Director Ex of Mental, Physical Abuse
Tim Mosenfelder/Getty; Phillip Faraone/Getty Amy Seimetz, Shane Carruth
Alien: Covenant actress Amy Seimetz has been granted a temporary restraining order against her ex, director Shane Carruth, after accusing him of domestic violence.
In a request for a domestic violence restraining order obtained by PEOPLE, Seimetz, 38, accused Carruth, 48, of being abusive during the course of their relationship, which began in December 2011 and ended in early 2018. She claims the abuse has continued years after their separation.
Seimetz said in the filed request that after the two became engaged in late 2013, “Carruth became possessive and extremely jealous” and had “fits of rage and angry outbursts that led to him becoming emotionally, mentally and physically abusive toward me.”
Carruth said to PEOPLE in response to the filed request: "I'll tell the story eventually, not because I want to because I don't, but I am pressed now."
“Over the next approximately four years, I attempted on several occasions to leave my relationship with Mr. Carruth when he was abusive toward me,” Seimetz said in her filing. “When I would leave Mr. Carruth, he would inundate me with emails and text messages pleading for me to get back together with him. In these communications, Mr. Carruth led me to believe that he was in a state of despair and possibly suicidal. These manipulative communications caused me to feel a sense of responsibility to return to the relationship.”
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The Pet Sematary actress also described one incident of physical abuse toward her taking place in October 2016 while she was working on a film in New York City.
Kerry Hayes/Paramount/Kobal/Shutterstock Jeté Laurence and Amy Seimetz in 2019's Pet Sematary
The actress said Carruth “locked me out of my hotel room” after she’d gone to dinner with her coworkers. Once the director let her back inside, she described him as “out of control,” calling her “a whore and using other profanities while following me around the hotel room.”
When Seimetz laid on the bed and received a phone call from her mother, she said Carruth “threw my cell phone across the room, breaking it” and “then jumped on top of me and began strangling me with his hands.”
“I feared that Mr. Carruth would kill me and tried to tell Mr. Carruth to stop,” she said in her filing. “As I began struggling to breathe, Mr. Carruth finally stopped strangling me.”
Seimetz said the abuse continued for years and included “numerous abusive and harassing text messages and emails” that she described as “belittling and repulsive.”
The actress said she left the relationship in January 2018, and that despite her attempts at creating distance between herself and Carruth, he continued to harass her including one instance in which he arrived unexpectedly at her home in August 2018.
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She said the harassment by Carruth continued into 2020, with the director allegedly sending her a text message in March saying, “You deserve pain for eternity. You deserve death. You are a monster. You are a ball of white-hot nothing and you need to be killed.”
Seimetz added Carruth’s recent attempts to contact her have caused her “extreme anxiety and emotional distress,” leaving her “terrified for my safety.”
The two met on the set of his independent 2013 film Upstream Color.
The restraining order against Carruth came to light on July 10 when the director tweeted a photo of a vinyl album for the film’s soundtrack with a paper copy of Seimetz’s restraining order in the lower right background.
Seimetz has previously obtained a temporary restraining order against Carruth in 2018. At the time, Carruth denied any physical abuse toward Seimetz and a judge chose not to make the order permanent.
If you are experiencing domestic violence, call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233, or go to thehotline.org. All calls are toll-free and confidential. The hotline is available 24/7 in more than 170 languages.
