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Berk thinking about groping men. |
Brendan Frasier told
GQ that he was sexually assaulted by Philip Berk, the South African-born president of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the group behind the Golden Globes.
Berk has lived in the US for years and, disturbingly, used to be a public school teacher in Los Angeles.
From the
article in GQ:
Certain pieces of what he tells me have already been told, it turns
out—but this is the first time he's ever spoken publicly about any of
it. The story he wants to relay took place, he says, in the summer of
2003, in the Beverly Hills Hotel, at a luncheon held by the Hollywood
Foreign Press Association, the organization that hosts the Golden
Globes. On Fraser's way out of the hotel, he was hailed by Philip Berk, a
former president of the HFPA. In the midst of a crowded room, Berk
reached out to shake Fraser's hand. Much of what happened next Berk
recounted in his memoir and was also reported by Sharon Waxman in The New York Times:
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.
Fraser
eventually was able, he says, to remove Berk's hand. “I felt ill. I
felt like a little kid. I felt like there was a ball in my throat. I
thought I was going to cry.” 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. “I felt
like someone had thrown invisible paint on me,” he says now. (In an
e-mail, Berk, who is still an HFPA member, disputed Fraser's account:
“Mr. Fraser's version is a total fabrication.”)
In
the aftermath of the encounter, Fraser thought about making it public.
But ultimately, “I didn't want to contend with how that made me feel, or
it becoming part of my narrative.” But the memory of what had happened,
and the way it made him feel, stuck with him. His reps asked the HFPA
for a written apology. Berk acknowledges that he wrote a letter to
Fraser about the incident but says, “My apology admitted no wrongdoing,
the usual ‘If I've done anything that upset Mr. Fraser, it was not
intended and I apologize.’ ”
According
to Fraser, the HFPA also said it would never allow Berk in a room with
Fraser again. (Berk denies this, and the HFPA declined to comment for
this story.) But still, Fraser says, “I became depressed.” He started
telling himself he deserved what had happened to him. “I was blaming
myself and I was miserable—because I was saying, ‘This is nothing; this
guy reached around and he copped a feel.’ That summer wore on—and I
can't remember what I went on to work on next.”
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.” Fraser says he was rarely invited back to
the Globes after 2003. Berk denies that the HFPA retaliated against
Fraser: “His career declined through no fault of ours.”
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