Brendan Fraser talks about being sexually harassed by Hollywood exec
A few weeks later, Fraser calls me. There's something he wants to tell me that he couldn't quite bring himself to relate in London or New York. He's sorry about that, he says—that he didn't have “the courage to speak up for risk of humiliation, or damage to my career.”
In the summer of 2003, in the Beverly Hills Hotel, at a luncheon held by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association... he was hailed by Philip Berk, a former president of the HFPA... He pinched Fraser's ass—in jest, according to Berk. But Fraser says what Berk did was more than a pinch: “His left hand reaches around, grabs my ass cheek, and one of his fingers touches me in the taint. And he starts moving it around.” Fraser says that in this moment he was overcome with panic and fear.
He rushed out of the room, outside, past a police officer he couldn't quite bring himself to confess to, and then home, where he told his then wife, Afton, what had happened.
He knows now that people wonder what happened to Brendan Fraser, how he went from a highly visible public figure to practically disappearing in the public mind, and he'd already told me most of it. But this, he says, is the final piece. The experience, he says, “made me retreat. It made me feel reclusive.” He wondered if the HFPA had blacklisted him. “I don't know if this curried disfavor with the group, with the HFPA. But the silence was deafening.”
https://www.gq.com/story/what-ever-happened-to-brendan-fraser
