Dustin Hoffman presented at the Hollywood Film Awards on Sunday night after having two accusations of sexual harassment leveled against him amidst the Harvey Weinstein fire that just keeps consuming anything that walks in Tinseltown.
Presenting Adam Sandler with the Hollywood Comedy Award for his work in The Meyerowitz Stories on Sunday night, Hoffman was a welcome guest among Hollywood insiders, according to Los Angeles Times reporter Amy Kaufman, who live-tweeted the event.
Since last week, allegations have surfaced that Hoffman sexually harassed at least two women.
First, there was Anna Graham Hunter, who wrote a guest column for The Hollywood Reporter claiming that Hoffman routinely sexually harassed her and touched her inappropriately when she was just 17 years old while she was interning as a production assistant on the set of the 1985 TV movie Death of a Salesman. Hoffman apologized, saying, “I have the utmost respect for women and feel terrible that anything I might have done could have put her in an uncomfortable situation. I am sorry. It is not reflective of who I am.”
Following that, Hoffman was accused of sexually harassing another woman in the early ’90s: Genius producer Wendy Riss Gatsiounis.
Riss Gatsiounis, who was 20 when Hoffman was 53, said the actor first asked if she had “ever been intimate with a man over 40.”
“I’ll never forget — he moves back, he opens his arms, and he says, ‘It would be a whole new body to explore,’” Riss Gatsiounis said. “I’m trying to go back to my pitch, and I’m trying to talk about my play. Then Dustin Hoffman gets up and he says he has to do some clothing shopping at a nearby hotel, and did I want to come along? He’s like, ‘Come on, come to this nearby hotel.’”