Three more women have accused actor Dustin Hoffman of sexual misconduct, providing detailed allegations of encounters in a recording studio, in a station wagon and in a hotel room decades ago, according to interviews published in Variety. The article Thursday quoted a letter to Variety’s owner Penske Media Corp., from Hoffman’s attorney, Mark Neubauer of Carlton Fields Jordan Burt, calling the accusations against the actor “defamatory falsehoods.” Variety identified two of the women, and the third spoke anonymously about the encounters with the now 80-year-old actor. One of them, Cori Thomas, told Variety that she was a 16-year-old friend of Hoffman’s daughter, Karina, when she met Hoffman in 1980. She said the three of them spent a Sunday walking around Manhattan, then all went to Hoffman’s hotel room to wait for Thomas’ parents to pick her up. After Karina left, Hoffman took a shower and emerged with a towel wrapped around him, “which he dropped,” Thomas told Variety. She said Hoffman eventually put on a robe and asked her to massage his feet. She complied. “I didn’t know what to do in the circumstance,” Thomas told Variety. “I didn’t know that I could say no, so I did it.” Melissa Kester told Variety that she met Hoffman when he was working on the 1987 movie Ishtar. As her boyfriend, who was working on music for the film, and an engineer were busy with technical adjustments, Hoffman said from inside a recording booth: “‘Send Melissa in here. I’m bored,’” she told Variety. He began to hug her while he was singing, she said, visible to the other men through a window only from the chest up. “And as he’s doing that, he literally just stuck his fingers down my pants,” and groped her, Kester said. A third woman said she met Hoffman when she was given a nonspeaking part in Ishtar. Hoffman offered to give her a ride home after a party, and they climbed into the back seat of a full station wagon, where he groped her.
Celebrity chef Mario Batali addressed allegations of sexual assault and harassment in a newsletter that included a recipe for pizza dough cinnamon rolls. “I have made many mistakes and I am so very sorry … My behavior was wrong and there are no excuses. I take full responsibility,” Batali wrote. The chef went on to thank his fans and promised to “work every day to regain your respect and trust.” The clincher then came in the form of a postscript that read, “in case you’re searching for a holiday-inspired breakfast, these Pizza Dough Cinnamon Rolls are a fan favorite.” The apology, which included a link to the recipe on Batali’s website, was met with shock and derision online. Commenter Allison Castellano tweeted, “I didn’t think it was possible for anyone to give a worse apology than Harvey Weinstein, but Mario Batali managed it.”
