Actors Arnold Schwarzenegger and Tom Arnold said they would have “done something” to protect castmate Eliza Dushku had they known about her alleged sexual assault during the filming of “True Lies.”
Dushku, who played Schwarzenegger’s young daughter in the 1994 action thriller, posted details of the alleged assault on Facebook over the weekend. The actress said Joel Kramer, a top Hollywood stunt coordinator and a longtime personal stunt double for Schwarzenegger, “sexually molested” her in his Miami hotel room during the filming of the movie:
In a tweet, Arnold expressed his support for Dushku, and said director James Cameron and his fellow co-stars would’ve protected the then-child star had they been aware:
Schwarzenegger later responded to Arnold’s tweet, saying: “You bet your ass all of us would have done something.”
Actress Jamie Lee Curtis, who played Dushku’s mother in the film, published an essay in HuffPost this week about the incident.
“What allegedly happened to Eliza, away from the safety net of all of us and our purview is a terrible, terrible thing to learn about and have to reconcile,” Curtis wrote. “The truth will set us all free.”
Speaking at the Television Critics Association’s winter press tour on Saturday, Cameron said Dushku was “very brave for speaking up.”
“I think all the women are that are speaking up and calling for a reckoning now,” he said, according to The Hollywood Reporter. “I think this has been endemic throughout human systems, not just Hollywood.”
Kramer has denied Dushku’s allegations, calling them “entirely untrue.”
On Monday, two other women ― both of them veteran stuntwomen ― also accused Kramer of sexual misconduct. One told Deadline that the stuntman had forced her to perform oral sex on him in his car; another claimed Kramer “lured” her sister’s 16-year-old friend to his hotel room in 1997 and had sex with her.
Kramer denied wrongdoing in both cases and told Deadline the allegations amounted to a “witch hunt” against him.