“Eliza Dushku would have to be a sociopath or utterly delusional to be making this up…either ED is a blatant liar trying to destroy a random man she worked with twenty-five years ago, or she’s telling the truth”
In every story, there are lots of possibilities besides (1) it happened just as she said and (2) she’s making it up. I don’t think Jackie from UVA necessarily “made it up.” All we know is that she described events that didn’t happen. Under the best of circumstances, human memory is a lot more like Play-Doh than it is like videotape. Remembering a childhood experience, about a trauma, decades later, is not the best of circumstances. You might remember a real event but get the place or time or participants wrong. Or you might get every detail right. There’s a spectrum of possibilities, not two poles.
Hanna, I generally agree with you, and certainly details might be off in any account, but this is a case where I do think either the allegation has to be substantially true or substantially false, given how wildly inappropriate the behavior described would be. In cases involving two adults, there are a lot of relatively small details that would make a huge difference in how we judged the person’s behavior. In a case involving a 12 year old, short of a full-blown false memory syndrome, there’s way less gray area, because there are no circumstances in which any level of sexual contact with a child would have been appropriate.
Unless the family and friends she says she told about it at the time say differently, then this isn’t a story made up or falsely remembered decades later.
Sue Booth-Forbes who was Eliza’s’s legal guardian on the set for 3 weeks has already gone on record to confirm that she reported what she believed to be inappropriate behavior by Joel Kramer towards Eliza. She stated she reported it to “someone with authority.”
Eliza’s claim is a pretty easy one to verify I think. There will be the report to the supervisor, the healthcare record from her injury, the other people who were at the swim and dinner and whether they were along for the ride back to her family.
Hanna is right. We imagine that our memory is something like a video camera, where remembering is like looking at the record of the event as it happened. That’s not how memory works. We construct our memories by repeatedly re-remembering. That is why, for example, people with the best intentions in the world swear to eyewitness identifications that are wrong. That is why honest, well-intentioned witnesses differ in their recollections of events.
I can’t imagine why these claims of 25 years ago would be easy to verify. Paper records would likely be gone, and swims, dinners and driving a child actor back home are not events that uninvolved people would remember. Anyway, none of those events, if they happened, do much to verify the essential claim that the director molested Dushku.
Moreover, more importantly, if Dushku was molested, that doesn’t mean her 25-year-old memory of other events during the filming would be accurate.
She confirms the story of the injury, and says she went to the hospital with Dushku. She says “[Kramer] creeped me out and sexualized everything; in fact that was the atmosphere of the set the entire time I was there. I did the only thing I knew to do then — report his behavior to someone with some clout, and that went nowhere.” She calls out “the misogyny, sexual language and attitudes of the crowd of immature white men who made up the vast majority of the crew.”
Odd that she did not say who she reported it to and then to brush it off if she was the legal guardian alittle appalling and goes to credibility in my book. I have no idea who this actor is as I didn’t watch tv in the 80s because I didn’t own a tv, but it sounds like she will have emotional support from Hollywood these days. Regardless, trust but verify is my mantra and not likely to change.
If this woman was her legal guardian on the set, she had a duty to protect her. She says she knows the then 12 year old was sexually assaulted but did not report it to the police or remove the child from the set. Doesn’t sound like this woman did a very good job of protecting her charge .
@momofthreeboys - True Lies was a movie, not a TV show, and it was quite a blockbuster. Directed by James Cameron (Titanic, etc.), and also starring Jaime Lee Curtis (who stole the show) and Bill Paxton.
I saw it when it came out and I don’t remember any 12 year-old characters. Was she playing the daughter of Arnold and Jaime? In any case, it was full of stunts so a stunt person being attached to each actor is quite believable.
She doesn’t say she knew Dushku was sexually assaulted. She says that the entire set was sexualized, and while on set Kramer directed inappropriate sexual behavior toward Dushku. It sounds to me like she is saying that Kramer, and other members of the crew, directed inappropriate sexualized remarks to this child. She hints that Kramer, who as part of his job had to handle Dushku physically, may have taken sexual liberties while doing so.
She further confirms that Dushku received medical treatment in a hospital for injuries occurring on the set.
Booth-Forbes was only present on the set for 3 weeks. We do not know whether the alleged assault occurred during those 3 weeks. What is clear is that she perceived something inappropriate on the set between Joel Kramer and Eliza. She reported that specific behavior. It is also clear from her statement that she believes Eliza. Her contemporaneous report is important in my mind in weighing the truth of the allegations.
She says she reported his sexually inappropriate behavior but does not say who she reported it to. Eliza has stated that Hollywood did not protect her as a child actress. Hopefully,there are more safeguards in place these days for children on sets. Both female and male child actors have reported abuse.
Sounds like several people knew about this, and tried to stop it, but their complaints were brushed off. As @sevmom’s article points out, people knew what happened to people who made waves: their careers were destroyed.
And what is sad is that some women in power also brushed off these concerns. You can’t , or at least couldn’t, necessarily assume a woman was going to help you .
The women in power were also vulnerable to having their careers destroyed if they made waves. They had some power, but not enough to protect themselves from men with more power destroying them. Not that it’s a defense; adults should protect children. But it’s true.
I think you are (intentionally, possibly) misunderstanding the fact that women didn’t have much power in the 90s, and sexual harassment was considered a normal part of business by the men in charge. A woman who complained was labeled and forced out in pretty much EVERY industry at that time. Women had not been welcomed in the workplace for long, and it was part of the culture that you had to take the harassment or leave in many workplaces. It sure was in most of the companies I worked with at the time. I’m thrilled that women as a group (mostly) are standing up to that and seeking to change the culture. But to pretend that it was easy (and would even work) to complain higher up in a company or even to the police then would be effective is just willfully ignoring the culture of the time.
Agree but it is heartening albeit late that some are corroborating that they heard the story or suspected something was going on during production. It is s shame it is decades later.