Dustin Hoffman accusers conduct joint interview, call the actor 'abusive' and a 'bully'

Dustin Hoffman accusers conduct joint interview

For Monday’s NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt, three of the women who have accused Dustin Hoffman of sexual misconduct sat down for a joint interview to discuss their alleged experiences with the Oscar-winning actor, whom they describe as “abusive” and “a bully.”

In their first television appearance since they came forward, Anna Graham Hunter, Cori Thomas, and Kathryn Rossetter shared their stories with Cynthia McFadden.

“It eroded my self-confidence and my dignity, and it was humiliating and demeaning,” Rossetter said of her time working with Hoffman on Broadway’s Death of a Salesman. “And he did, he robbed me of the joy of that experience. And so I’ve been lying for 34 years. People go, ‘How is it to work with Dustin?’ And I tell the half-truth which is, as an actor working with him, I owe him everything. I learned so much. And then I would stop and there would always be a knot in my stomach about what the real truth was which is that he was abusive, and he was a bully.”

Earlier this month, Rossetter wrote an essay published by The Hollywood Reporter alleging Hoffman would grope her during nearly every performance of the 1983 production, in which she played the mistress of his character.

“He kept it up and got more and more aggressive,” she shared. “One night he actually started to stick his fingers inside me. Night after night I went home and cried. I withdrew and got depressed and did not have any good interpersonal relationships with the cast.”

Representatives for Hoffman did not immediately respond to EW’s request for comment. Hoffman has not previously commented on the claims, though his attorney called the accusations “defamatory falsehoods” in a letter to Variety.