Sexual Assault Charges Against ‘Atomic Blonde’ Producer David Guillod Dismissed by Judge
Sexual assault charges against David Guillod, the Hollywood producer of films such as “Atomic Blonde” and “Extraction,” have been dismissed by a Santa Barbara judge on Tuesday.
The charges against the producer included an alleged 2012 attack of “Ted” actress Jessica Barth and another incident involving an unnamed waitress from 2018 who claimed she was raped.
But the Santa Barbara district attorney’s office was forced to drop the charges Tuesday after it was unable to show whether the attacks happened within the DA’s jurisdiction. The case will now be referred back to the Los Angeles district attorney’s office.
The Santa Barbara judge, Judge James Voysey had back in May previously authorized the two charges and ordered Guillod to stand trial. But the same judge had dismissed rape and sexual assault charges connected with four other women, who accused him of assault or rape while they were drugged or intoxicated between 2012 and 2020, after determining there was insufficient evidence to try Guillod.
Voysey had also questioned the credibility of the women in the case, in one instance citing text messages between Guillod and the accuser corroborating witness testimony that she had cuddled and flirted with him at the 2014 company retreat where she accused him of raping her. “What she said and what she did are very telling,” Voysey said, according to Santa Barbara local site Noozhawk. “Those behaviors tell the court [she] didn’t think she was raped that night.”
However, people who were at the retreat in Santa Barbara County had a different take when they spoke to TheWrap in 2017 about the incident. One such employee claims to have seen the woman moments after she was alone with Guillod.
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“Consent was not possible. It was beyond that,” the employee said at the time. “She just started bawling and was like, ‘I think I had sex.’ It was so clear that this had not been consensual.”
Guillod, 55, has denied all the accusations and in some cases has said he was dating the women at the time they were assaulted. He was arrested in 2020 after three years of investigations involving Santa Barbara County prosecutors and Los Angeles police.
Guillod attorney Philip K. Cohen and co-counsel Robyn Sax said in a statement that it was a “great relief to finally put an end” to the criminal case and called it a “bittersweet day.”
“It is a tremendous responsibility to be tasked with saving someone’s life, and Ms. Sax and I appreciate the patience and confidence that David entrusted to us,” Cohen said. “The success we achieved at the preliminary hearing leading to this dismissal is a testament to both our strategic decision to present the bulk of our case at this early stage of the proceeding, as well as to a judge who appreciated the significance and ramifications of a preliminary hearing and treated his role as something significantly more than a rubber stamp for probable cause.”
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He continued: “At the same time, nothing I have done or ever could do in this case will erase the irreparable damage that David has sustained to his career, his family and his future. Living for years under the pall of criminal allegations – and under the public’s ever-present presumption of guilt – is difficult to recover from regardless of the ultimate outcome. Though it sounds cliché, if there is anything positive to come from David’s experience it is perhaps a realization that justice demands that judgment be withheld until the facts are actually heard and examined in the only public forum that should matter – a court of law.”
