Richard Dreyfuss. Photo: Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images for Turner 
 
 Six days ago, the actor and writer Harry Dreyfuss gave a detailed account to BuzzFeed News, alleging that Kevin Spacey groped his crotch when he was 18, while his father, Richard Dreyfuss, was in the room. Richard confirmed to BuzzFeed that he didn’t see the groping and didn’t know about it until his son told him years later, but was present the night Harry says it occurred. “[Spacey] knew he could fondle me in a room with my father and that I wouldn’t say a word,” wrote Harry. “He knew I wouldn’t have had the guts. And I didn’t.” A few hours after the story was published, Richard tweeted a statement in support of his son: 
 
 I love my son @harrydreyfuss more than I could explain with all the words in the world. And I am so incredibly proud of him right now. https://t.co/iLOxTxPe4n — Richard Dreyfuss (@RichardDreyfuss) November 5, 2017 
 
 It was a response that many applauded. But as Los Angeles–based writer Jessica Teich read the elder Dreyfuss’s tweet, she grew “bothered,” she says. “When I read about his support for his son, which I would never question, I remember thinking, But wait a minute, this guy harassed me for months,” Teich told me in an interview. “He was in a position of so much power over me, and I didn’t feel I could tell anyone about it. It just seemed so hypocritical.” She began drafting a Facebook post that she shared with her friends, one of whom is a New York staff member, who gave Teich my number. The harassment, Teich says, was constant over a two- to three-year period in the mid-1980s when she worked as a researcher and junior writer on a TV passion-project of Dreyfuss’s — and included an incident where she says that he exposed himself to her. 
 
 The project was an ABC comedy special called Funny, You Don’t Look 200: A Constitutional Vaudeville, which Dreyfuss dreamed up, hosted, co-wrote, and produced to mark the bicentennial of the American Constitution. When Teich and Dreyfuss began working together in 1984 — first at the Mark Taper Forum theater in Los Angeles, where they met, and then on 200 — Teich was in her mid-20s and in an entry-level job, fresh out of grad school. Dreyfuss was 12 years older, married with a child, and starring in a play at the Taper, where Teich was a dramaturg. At the time, he held the record for becoming the youngest Best Actor Academy Award winner ever. “He wasn’t that much older than I was, but in every possible way his position in life couldn’t have been less comparable to mine,” says Teich. “That’s how vast the power differential was. He was famous, he was rich, he had an Oscar.” And, as she pointed out to me emphatically, “He was my boss. There was no question about it.” 
 
 While they were both at the Taper, Dreyfuss had asked Teich to work on developing 200 with him, first on an informal basis over lunches, and then with the formal backing of the Disney Channel, where they had a tiny production office. Over the next several years, they spent countless hours together developing the script. One day, deep into the development process, with the TV special set to air in October 1987, Teich says Dreyfuss asked her to meet him in his trailer on the Los Angeles studio lot of a movie he was starring in at the time. As with all her script meetings with Dreyfuss, this one was set up by his female secretary. (The secretary could not be reached for comment.) 
 
 “I remember walking up the steps into the trailer and turning towards my left,” says Teich, “and he was at the back of the trailer, and just — his penis was out, and he sort of tried to draw me close to it.” Dreyfuss never asked for her to fellate him or jerk him off, Teich says, but she remembers the situation being unambiguous. “He was hard. I remember my face being brought close to his penis,” she continues. “I can’t remember how my face got close to his penis, but I do remember that the idea was that I was going to give him a blow job. I didn’t, and I left.” 
 
 How she extricated herself, she can’t recall. “It was like an out-of-body experience. I just tried to swiftly get out of the room. I pretended it hadn’t really happened,” she says. “I kept moving because it was part of my job, and I knew he was, at the time, a very important guy, and certainly important to me. I trusted him. That’s what’s always so weird. I liked him. That’s part of why it’s so painful, because of the level of innocence one brings to these things. I felt responsible, that I must have indicated in some way that I was available for this.” 
 
 Teich says that, at the time, she told no one about the exposure incident, or what she claims were years of continual, overt, lewd comments and invitations from Dreyfuss. “He created a very hostile work environment, where I felt sexualized, objectified, and unsafe,” says Teich. The exposure in the trailer, she says, was the most shocking Dreyfuss’s behavior got, but perhaps more pernicious, she contends, was that she couldn’t do her job without him coming on to her. She’s referring to moments when Dreyfuss tried to kiss her in professional settings, slip her “I love you” notes during meetings, and his unsubtle verbal sneak attacks. “He has that way of sidling up to you and saying things like, ‘I want to fuck you,’” Teich says. “That was said all the time. He would constantly steer conversations to this yucky, insinuating thing, and I would sort of try to pull us back to a place where we could actually get some work done.” Throughout the research process, Teich says, Dreyfuss set up multiple trips where it was just the two of them, to Yale, Stanford, and Washington, D.C. One morning, when they were going to meet with Ronald Reagan, Teich recalls, Dreyfuss “told me he’d spent the night with his ear next to the wall, listening to my movements in my hotel room.” 
 
 Jessica Teich (right) with Ronald Reagan, during a trip to interview the president with Richard Dreyfuss in 1986. Photo: Courtesy of Jessica Tetch 
 
 Despite how unequivocal Teich is about her experience, she believes “Richard would be very surprised if 30-odd years later he heard that I felt completely coerced and disenfranchised. I think he’d be like, ‘Oh no, I thought you really liked me.’ I don’t think he had any idea.” 
 
 Dreyfuss, who’s now 70, responded swiftly to my request for comment, through representation, and asked for a limited deadline extension so he could write something thoughtful. Here are the first, most pertinent, paragraphs of his statement: 
 
 I value and respect women, and I value and respect honesty. So I want to try to tell you the complicated truth. At the height of my fame in the late 1970s I became an asshole–the kind of performative masculine man my father had modeled for me to be. I lived by the motto, “If you don’t flirt, you die.” And flirt I did. I flirted with all women, be they actresses, producers, or 80-year-old grandmothers. I even flirted with those who were out of bounds, like the wives of some of my best friends, which especially revolts me. I disrespected myself, and I disrespected them, and ignored my own ethics, which I regret more deeply than I can express. During those years I was swept up in a world of celebrity and drugs – which are not excuses, just truths. Since then I have had to redefine what it means to be a man, and an ethical man. I think every man on Earth has or will have to grapple with this question. But I am not an assaulter. 
 
 I emphatically deny ever “exposing” myself to Jessica Teich, whom I have considered a friend for 30 years. I did flirt with her, and I remember trying to kiss Jessica as part of what I thought was a consensual seduction ritual that went on and on for many years. I am horrified and bewildered to discover that it wasn’t consensual. I didn’t get it. It makes me reassess every relationship I have ever thought was playful and mutual. 
 
 
 
 “Wow, I don’t quite know what to make of that,” Teich said, when I read the statement to her aloud. She paused for a long time before speaking again. “I respect that he’s trying to grapple with it, and I regret that he’s not being totally honest. Sadly, what I regret even more is I’ll never forget the sight of his penis because I was so surprised to see it there. The fact that he can’t quite acknowledge all of it is understandable. But he certainly acknowledges that something happened, and he certainly acknowledges that it might have been inappropriate now that he looks back on it.” 
 
 In the last 30 years, Teich, who is 58, says she confided in three people about Dreyfuss: a family member and a close confidante, who both asked to remain anonymous, and her therapist. The family member confirmed that Teich had discussed Dreyfuss’s alleged misconduct decades ago, including the exposure incident. The confidante provided a statement recalling that Teich long ago talked about her discomfort with Dreyfuss hitting on her. Her therapist declined to comment due to doctor-patient confidentiality. 
 
 Teich’s memoir, The Future Tense of Joy, released in 2016, details a year of sexual molestation and horrific beatings she endured when she was 16, at the hands of a man who was 12 years her senior, and whom she’d also met in a professional setting at an Orlando ballet company they were both in. “When I wouldn’t do some of the things that he wanted me to do, sexually, he would beat the shit out of me,” she tells me. She believes this prior experience with abuse, plus the power imbalance between her and Dreyfuss and the culture surrounding allegations of sexual assault 30 years ago, contributed to why she kept silent. “I knew it was incredibly unpleasant,” she says. “I knew I felt awful about it and during it, but it wasn’t of such greater horribleness than a lot of other things that happened. And because I had been abused as a 16-year-old, and that was my introduction to any kind of intimacy, I thought, Oh, is this okay? I just didn’t have any perspective on it because no one was talking about it.” She’d worried about going public because Dreyfuss has grown children, and his son’s story of abuse is what prompted her post. “But then I thought, ‘I have children, too’” — daughters, 16 and 21 — “and I don’t want them to live in a world where people can’t tell the truth about these things.” 
 
 In his statement, Dreyfuss concluded with a broader acknowledgment of the conversations currently happening around sexual harassment and assault: 
 
 There is a sea-change happening right now, which we can look upon as a problem or an opportunity. We all of us are awakening to the reality that how men have behaved toward women for eons is not OK. The rules are changing invisibly underneath our feet. I am playing catch up. Maybe we all are. 
 
 I hope people can join me in honestly looking at our behavior and trying to make it right. We have to relearn every rule we thought we knew about how men and women interact, because after all getting together is the most fundamental human compulsion. And if we don’t succeed in that, what do we have? I hope this is the beginning of a larger conversation we can have as a culture. 
 
 After I read Teich the statement, I asked if she felt like this was a dialogue she would ever have with Dreyfuss. “Yeah, I think if I did it in a context where there were other people involved,” she says. “Because I’m not confronting him, I’m not suing him for damages of any kind. And his statement to you is more than I thought anyone would get from him.” Still, she did take issue with certain words he’d used that she found to be “loaded.” “‘Flirt’ is absolutely not the right word,” Teich says. “It suggests something mutual, and that was not the case.” She also thought he was stretching when he called her someone “whom I have considered a friend for 30 years.” The word “friend” was problematic in this context. “The suggestion is that if I were a true colleague I never would’ve been public about this, that it should’ve all been kept among friends,” she says. “I’m not that guy’s friend. I haven’t seen that guy or spoken to him in 25 years. But as a person, I respond to the sense of hurt that underlies his words, and something in me feels compassion for him, even though he made my life hell. And that’s part of the complexity of the whole thing, I think.” ||||| The 'Star Trek' icon denies a claim by Scott R. Brunton, who says he was groped at the actor's Los Angeles condo. 
 
 A former model and actor is accusing Star Trek icon George Takei of sexual assault in 1981. The accuser, Scott R. Brunton, who was 23 at the time of the alleged incident, claims that Takei took advantage of him when he was most vulnerable. 
 
 "This happened a long time ago, but I have never forgotten it," Brunton tells The Hollywood Reporter in an interview. "It is one of those stories you tell with a group of people when people are recounting bizarre instances in their lives, this always comes up. I have been telling it for years, but I am suddenly very nervous telling it." 
 
 Brunton says he was living in Hollywood in 1981, working as a waiter and beginning a career as a commercial actor and model when he met a 43- or 44-year-old Takei one evening at Greg's Blue Dot bar. The men exchanged numbers and would call one another from time to time as well as run into each other at clubs, Brunton says. When Brunton broke up with his then-boyfriend, he spoke with Takei. "He said, 'Let me know what your new number is' and I did. And not long after we broke up and I moved out, George called me," Brunton recalls. 
 
 Takei, as Brunton tells it, invited him to dinner and the theater. "He was very good at consoling me and understanding that I was upset and still in love with my boyfriend," Brunton says. "He was a great ear. He was very good about me spilling my heart on my sleeve." 
 
 The two men went back to the actor's condo for a drink the same night. "We have the drink and he asks if I would like another," Brunton recalls. "And I said sure. So, I have the second one, and then all of a sudden, I begin feeling very disoriented and dizzy, and I thought I was going to pass out. I said I need to sit down and he said sit over here and he had the giant yellow beanbag chair. So I sat down in that and leaned my head back and I must have passed out." 
 
 "The next thing I remember I was coming to and he had my pants down around my ankles and he was groping my crotch and trying to get my underwear off and feeling me up at the same time, trying to get his hands down my underwear," Brunton says. "I came to and said, 'What are you doing?!' I said, 'I don't want to do this.' He goes, 'You need to relax. I am just trying to make you comfortable. Get comfortable.' And I said, 'No. I don't want to do this.' And I pushed him off and he said, 'OK, fine.' And I said I am going to go and he said, 'If you feel you must. You're in no condition to drive.' I said, 'I don't care I want to go.' So I managed to get my pants up and compose myself and I was just shocked. I walked out and went to my car until I felt well enough to drive home, and that was that." 
 
 THR spoke to four longtime friends of Brunton — Norah Roadman, Rob Donovan, Stephen Blackshear and Jan Steward — who said that he had confided in them about the Takei encounter years ago. 
 
 Takei's rep, Julia Buchwald, told THR, "George is traveling in Japan and Australia and not reachable for comment." Takei, now 80, rose to fame playing Hikaru Sulu on the original Star Trek television series. He is also an author and activist and has been an outspoken advocate for LGBTQ rights. 
 
 In a series of tweets and in a Facebook post Saturday morning, Takei denied the allegations. 
 
 "The events he describes back in the 1980s simply did not occur, and I do not know why he has claimed them now. I have wracked my brain to ask if I remember Mr. Brunton, and I cannot say I do," he said. "Right now it is a he said / he said situation, over alleged events nearly 40 years ago. But those that know me understand that non-consensual acts are so antithetical to my values and my practices, the very idea that someone would accuse me of this is quite personally painful." 
 
 Brunton claims that he met up with Takei years after the incident in Portland, Brunton's current home, while the actor was there on a book tour. "I wanted to see him," Brunton says. "I always wanted to ask him — I just felt really betrayed. I thought I was a friend and here I am later, just another piece of meat. So I called him up at the hotel — I figured out which hotel he was at — and he said 'Hi, Scott. I remember you.' I wanted to ask him why. We met for coffee, and I just couldn't bring myself to do it. It was just too uncomfortable." 
 
 Brunton says he considered going to the media with the story for years, but he assumed no one would take him seriously. "Who's going to believe me? It's my word against his," he says. 
 
 Brunton's reasoning changed after the Harvey Weinstein scandal, and specifically when Takei spoke out regarding allegations leveled against Kevin Spacey. 
 
 On Oct. 29, Anthony Rapp, an actor starring in the latest Star Trek series, claimed to BuzzFeed News that Spacey sexually assaulted him while he was a minor in 1986. Spacey later apologized and came out as gay in response. "When power is used in a non-consensual situation, it is a wrong," Takei said of the Spacey claim in a statement to THR on Oct. 30. "For Anthony Rapp, he has had to live with the memory of this experience of decades ago. For Kevin Spacey, who claims not to remember the incident, he was the older, dominant one who had his way. Men who improperly harass or assault do not do so because they are gay or straight — that is a deflection. They do so because they have the power, and they chose to abuse it." 
 
 Brunton says he found Takei's response infuriating. "I don't want anything from him but an apology," he says. "I am sure he'll disown all this, I don't know, maybe not." 
 
 Friends, 
 
 
 
 I'm writing to respond to the accusations made by Scott R. Bruton. I want to assure you all that I am as shocked and bewildered at these claims as you must feel reading them. /1 — George Takei (@GeorgeTakei) November 11, 2017 
 
 The events he describes back in the 1980s simply did not occur, and I do not know why he has claimed them now. I have wracked my brain to ask if I remember Mr. Brunton, and I cannot say I do. /2 — George Takei (@GeorgeTakei) November 11, 2017 
 
 But I do take these claims very seriously, and I wanted to provide my response thoughtfully and not out of the moment. /3 — George Takei (@GeorgeTakei) November 11, 2017 
 
 Right now it is a he said / he said situation, over alleged events nearly 40 years ago. But those that know me understand that non-consensual acts are so antithetical to my values and my practices, the very idea that someone would accuse me of this is quite personally painful. /4 — George Takei (@GeorgeTakei) November 11, 2017 
 
 Brad, who is 100 percent beside me on this, as my life partner of more than 30 years and now my husband, stands fully by my side. I cannot tell you how vital it has been to have his unwavering support and love in these difficult times. /5 — George Takei (@GeorgeTakei) November 11, 2017 
 
 Thanks to many of you for all the kind words and trust. It means so much to us. 
 
 
 
 Yours in gratitude, 
 
 
 
 George /end — George Takei (@GeorgeTakei) November 11, 2017 
 
 Updates: 
 
 Nov. 11, 7 a.m.: This story has been updated with remarks from Takei denying the allegations.
– George Takei and Richard Dreyfuss are the latest stars to be accused in Hollywood's sexual harassment scandal: Scott R. Brunton, a former model and actor, says when he was 23 and living in Hollywood in 1981 he met Takei at a bar. They exchanged numbers and spoke here and there, and Takei eventually invited him to dinner and a show after Brunton and his boyfriend broke up. Brunton and Takei went back to Takei's condo for drinks, and after the second one, Brunton says he felt "very disoriented and dizzy" and soon passed out. "The next thing I remember I was coming to and he had my pants down around my ankles and he was groping my crotch and trying to get my underwear off and feeling me up at the same time, trying to get his hands down my underwear," Brunton tells the Hollywood Reporter. He says he told Takei to stop and left. Four of Brunton's friends confirm he told them the story after it happened. Takei's rep said the Star Trek actor was not available for comment. LA-based writer Jessica Teich says she was a researcher and junior writer on one of Dreyfuss's projects in the mid-1980s, when she was in her 20s. Dreyfuss, 12 years her senior and married with a child, asked her to meet him in his trailer one day and she arrived to find him with his penis out and erect, "and he sort of tried to draw me close to it," she tells Vulture. She left, and over the next few years, "he created a very hostile work environment, where I felt sexualized, objectified, and unsafe." She says he made lewd comments and tried to kiss her, among other things; once, during a work trip to DC, she says he "told me he’d spent the night with his ear next to the wall, listening to my movements in my hotel room." Dreyfuss responded to Teich's story, saying he was "an asshole" back then and "flirted with all women," but he "emphatically" denies exposing himself to Teich. He says he believed they were engaging in a "consensual seduction ritual that went on and on for many years" and is "horrified" to learn otherwise. Dreyfuss's son, Harry, is one of the Kevin Spacey accusers.