The sexual misconduct story that Michael Douglas pre-emptively denied last week is now public. Journalist and author Susan Braudy tells the Hollywood Reporter that the actor subjected her to incessant sexual harassment when she ran the New York office of his Stonebridge Productions company in the late 1980s, including so many remarks about her body that she started wearing "long, loose layers of black." She says that after one script meeting in his apartment, she vowed to never be alone in a room with Douglas again. Braudy says that while they were brainstorming an idea, she looked at Douglas "and saw he'd inserted both hands into his unzipped pants." She says: "I realized to my horror that he was rubbing his private parts. Within seconds his voice cracked and it appeared to me he'd had an orgasm."
Braudy says she fled, humiliated—and was fired months later after she refused to sign a confidentiality agreement. Friends, including Fire and Fury author and Newser co-founder Michael Wolff, say Braudy told them about the incident many years ago. "I was told in the immediate aftermath—that day or the next," Wolff tells the Reporter. "We have discussed the incident many, many times since, as well as Douglas' relentless, goading, mocking, and belittling sexual behavior." He says Braudy was "shaken, bewildered, frightened, angry" after the incident. Douglas, who went public with his denial when he was contacted by the Reporter about the story, has called the account a "complete lie" and suggested Braudy is "disgruntled" because "her career didn't go the way she hoped," the Guardian reports. (More Michael Douglas stories.)
,
uBlock 
,
and
Ghostery 
)
