Nearly a decade after a wave of allegations derailed his public image, Dustin Hoffman is using his new memoir to argue that discomfort is in the eye of the beholder.
In Look at Me, which hit shelves November 10, the 89-year-old two-time Oscar winner admits he may have crossed some lines socially, but insists he never crossed into coercion.
“I’m sure it’s true that in my life, especially forty years ago, I made some women uncomfortable,” Hoffman writes, in an excerpt shared by People. “But ‘uncomfortable’ is a subjective emotional state. What is crass and offensive to one person, another individual might find hilarious, or enlivening, or even sort of cozy.”
He leans on his reputation as a joker to draw the distinction. “I love a so-called dirty joke. I am ‘a Borscht Belt flirt,’ as Bill Murray once put it,” he writes. “That’s not the same thing as pressuring someone to do something they didn’t want to do.”
The book doesn’t respond to individual accusers by name. The claims against him emerged in late 2017 and ranged from verbal harassment to groping and assault. That November, Anna Graham Hunter wrote in The Hollywood Reporter that Hoffman groped and propositioned her in 1985, when she was a 17-year-old intern on the TV film Death of a Salesman.
