Hollywood is built on a graveyard of indiscretions that either went unreported or ignored. This was never more clear to me than when researching the notorious Hollywood producer Jon Peters, who has been sued several times for sexual harassment and who’s credited as a producer on Bradley Cooper’s 2018 remake of A Star is Born (Peters, a former boyfriend of Barbra Streisand, also produced the 1976 version). The Producers Guild of America can kick out Harvey Weinstein in the wake of #MeToo and it can deny Peters a p.g.a. mark but the powers that be cannot keep an alleged serial harasser from profiting off a movie in the #MeToo era (Peters was either paid upfront for rights or stands to make residual money from Star’s gross). That suggests it’s going to take a while before Hollywood can fully untangle its past from its supposedly enlightened present.
In a 1996 Los Angeles magazine piece on a lawsuit filed against Tracy Barone, the then-president of Peters’s company, Peters Entertainment, Rachel Abramowitz wrote:
Historically, Hollywood has been tolerant of sexualized abusive behavior on the job—almost anything is permitted as long as the abuser continues to make money. Recently, however, the Industry has been besieged by sexual harassment suits, although most of these cases are settled privately because the accused choose to limit negative publicity and hefty legal fees.
Hollywood history is and will continue to be a book with missing pages. But for the sake of preserving what can be filled in, we’ve gone back and looked at some high-profile entertainment-industry sexual harassment allegations of the ’80s and ’90s, when they were less common. There was a dearth in the ’80s; weirdly, TV Guide was one of the few entertainment outlets to report on sexual harassment in a relatively extensive report titled “Sexual Harassment in Hollywood” in its March 29, 1986 issue.
The “vulnerable starlets” who were interviewed and named in the piece—Falcon Crest’s Ana-Alicia, and Magnum P.I.’s Tracy Scoggins, among them—declined to name names, though. Hollywood stuntwoman Jean Coulter, however, did and filed a lawsuit against Spelling-Goldberg Productions. To TV Guide, Coulter alleged that her job was reduced after she rebuffed the advances of stunt coordinator Roy Harrison (who, like most of the men mentioned in this post, denied the allegations against him). Coulter said she went on to be blacklisted, telling TV Guide: “I went from working 199 days a year to working 12.” TV Guide reported that her lawsuit was turned down because she filed it after the expiration of the statute of limitations. The last listed gig on Coulter’s IMDb is 1987’s Survival Game.
By the ’90s, the Clarence Thomas hearing brought sexual harassment into the mainstream, and accusations of sexual misdeeds against politicians like Sen. Bob Packwood, Sen. Brock Adams, and President Bill Clinton kept them there. The discussion of sexual harassment in Hollywood grew. When asked by Parade magazine in 1992 if she’d ever been sexually harassed, Holly Hunter said, “Of course. I know very few women who haven’t been, and it’s a very confusing thing to be confronted with. It’s rampant, man. It’s rampant… I felt great despair for Anita (Hill) and for the ignorance exposed by the Judicial Committee—their inability to create some sort of narrative out of her story… It will make a woman think a million times before crying, ‘Sexual harassment!’ I was in despair.”
At a symposium on harassment in Los Angeles also in 1992, Christine Lahti (who’d go on to star on Chicago Hope), told the crowd, “I always accepted sexual harassment as a part of life.” Rambling Rose director Martha Coolidge told of a studio head, who early in her career, “ended a meeting in his office by grabbing her, mauling her and sticking his tongue down her throat,” according to USA Today.
Per a 1992 report in People, Kathie Lee Gifford discussed her own experiences with sexual harassment:
Once, she writes, while riding in the car of a man she describes only as a well-known Hollywood player, “he suddenly grabbed my hand and forced it on his lap. He had subjected me to an unspeakably humiliating and disgusting violation.” Asked now win she won’t name the culprit, Kathie Lee responds simply, “It’s not my job to. It’s God’s job.”
But there were powerful men named during the ’80s and ’90s, though few sustained demonstrable career damage and most settled out of court after legal action was taken against them (if the cases got even far enough to settle). Below is a by no means comprehensive list of the boldfaced names accused of harassment in the aforementioned decades, the details of the allegations, and the aftermath.
Bob Barker
Year accused: 1994
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