'Nobody Is Going to Believe You'

[Blue_Tires]

The Bohemian Rhapsody director Bryan Singer has been trailed by accusations of sexual misconduct for 20 years. Here, his alleged victims tell their stories.

Over the past two decades, Bryan Singer’s films—The Usual Suspects, Valkyrie, Superman Returns, four of the X-Men movies—have earned more than $3 billion at the box office, putting him in the top tier of Hollywood directors. He’s known for taking risks in his storytelling: It was Singer’s idea, for instance, to open the original X-Men movie with a scene at Auschwitz, where a boy uses his superpowers to bend the metal gates that separate him from his parents. Studio executives were skeptical about starting a comic-book movie in a concentration camp, but the film became a blockbuster and launched a hugely profitable franchise for 20th Century Fox.

Singer’s most recent project debuted in November. Critics gave Bohemian Rhapsody—which chronicles the rise of the rock band Queen—only lukewarm reviews, but it earned more than $50 million in its opening weekend. By the end of December, it had brought in more than $700 million, making it one of the year’s biggest hits.

The film’s success should have been a triumph for Singer, proof of his enduring ability to intuit what audiences want. In January it won two Golden Globes, including the award for best drama. But Singer was conspicuously absent from the ceremony—and his name went unmentioned in the acceptance speeches. He had been fired by 20th Century Fox in December 2017, with less than three weeks of filming left. Reports emerged of a production in chaos: Singer was feuding with his cast and crew, and had disappeared from the set for days at a time.

On December 7, 2017, three days after The Hollywood Reporter broke the news of Singer’s firing, a Seattle man named Cesar Sanchez-Guzman filed a lawsuit against the director, alleging that Singer had raped him in 2003, when Sanchez-Guzman was 17. The day after that, Deadline Hollywood published an interview with a former boyfriend of Singer’s, Bret Tyler Skopek, in which Skopek described a lifestyle of drugs and orgies.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/03/bryan-singers-accusers-speak-out/580462/

[mahatmakanejeeves]

1. Oh, the director of "Apt Pupil."

Apt Pupil lawsuit

In 1997, a 14-year-old extra accused Singer of asking him and other minors to film a shower scene in the nude for the film Apt Pupil. Two other adolescent boys, 16 and 17 years old, later supported the 14-year-old's claim. The boys claimed trauma from the experience and sought charges against the filmmakers including infliction of emotional distress, negligence, and invasion of privacy. The boys alleged that they were filmed for sexual gratification. A lawsuit was filed but dismissed for insufficient evidence.

There are numerous threads at DU from years gone by about Bryan Singer. I don't mean this as a criticism of this thread, but to point out that this is not the first time Bryan Singer has faced these charges.

From the Atlantic article:

‘Nobody Is Going to Believe You’

The Bohemian Rhapsody director Bryan Singer has been trailed by accusations of sexual misconduct for 20 years. Here, his alleged victims tell their stories.

ALEX FRENCH AND MAXIMILLIAN POTTER MARCH 2019 ISSUE

In the spring of 1997, when Victor Valdovinos was in seventh grade, he showed up to school one day to find a big-budget film production under way: All around him were tractor trailers, mobile dressing rooms, and people with walkie-talkies behaving as though they owned the place. The movie was Apt Pupil, Singer’s first project after his breakthrough, The Usual Suspects.

Filming took over Eliot Middle School in Altadena, northeast of Los Angeles. Late one afternoon, after basketball practice, Valdovinos stopped in an empty restroom. While standing at a urinal, he says, he felt a presence behind him. He turned and saw a bespectacled man in his early 30s. It was Bryan Singer. He looked Valdovinos over; Valdovinos remembers him saying, “You’re so good-looking. What are you doing tomorrow? Maybe I could have somebody contact you about putting you in this movie.” (Through his attorney, Singer said that he did not know who Valdovinos was and denied that anything had happened between them.)

The film, which was based on a Stephen King novella, starred Ian McKellen as Kurt Dussander, a former Nazi concentration-camp commandant living in Southern California, decades removed from the war and trying to keep his past a secret. The other lead was a 14-year-old named Brad Renfro—cast as Todd Bowden, Dussander’s neighbor, who discovers the Nazi’s secret and threatens to turn him over to authorities unless the old man tells him in graphic detail about the atrocities he committed. One scene has Todd taking a shower in his school’s gym, which triggers images of Jews in a gas chamber.

That scene would lead to a series of lawsuits against Singer and the production. At least five plaintiffs, all minors between the ages of 14 and 17, were extras in the film and, in essence, claimed that members of the crew had bullied them into stripping naked for the shower scene. The boys and some of their parents said they’d been aware that the job called for partial nudity, which they had been led to believe meant wearing a Speedo or a towel. One of the crew members later said he thought that there had been a screwup the day of the shoot—that only the adult extras were supposed to have been asked to appear naked, and that somehow the minor and adult extras had been mixed together. The Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office declined to press any criminal charges; the suits—which alleged negligence, unlawful sexual harassment, invasion of privacy, and intentional infliction of emotional distress—were settled for an undisclosed sum, and all parties were bound by confidentiality agreements.
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[Blue_Tires]

2. his response:

Link to tweet