Dustin Hoffman has opened up in a new memoir about the 2017 sexual misconduct allegations against him.
In Look at Me, published this week, the 89-year-old Rain Man star wrote that he was “obsessed with sex” but “harmless” and that things had been “said about me that just weren’t true”.
In 2017, Hoffman, a two-time Oscar winner considered one of the greatest actors of his generation, was accused of sexual misconduct by seven women.
Writing in his autobiography, he admitted that it “took me years (decades?) to understand that flirting with every woman I met was not okay”.
The actor, who describes himself as a “guy with a bawdy sense of humour who is obsessed with sex and is always looking for attention”, added that “it took me an embarrassingly long time to grasp that if I was flirting or my jokes were too dirty, people who were not my wife might think I was being inappropriate.
“I know I’m harmless, she knows I’m harmless, but if you’d never met me before, would you know?”
He added that he is “not a person who gets off on having power, or pressuring people to do things.”
Hoffman has been married to business executive Lisa Hoffman (née Gottsegen) since 1980.
The Marathon Man star wrote that he had viewed the MeToo movement as a “very good thing”, and hadn’t worried “for a second” that something negative would be said about him.
“The idea of taking something from someone sexually that they didn’t want to give… it’s just not something I’ve ever done. Or been tempted to do,” he wrote.
“The whole thing was so crazy, I was sort of bewildered by how to defend myself… or if I should even try. [...] The only problem was that things were being said about me that just weren’t true.”
He characterised his transgressions as a propensity for telling sexual jokes, claiming: “I’m sure it’s true that in my life, especially 40 years ago, I made some women uncomfortable. [...] But ‘uncomfortable’ is a subjective emotional state. What is crass and offensive to one person, another individual might find hilarious, or enlivening, or even sort of cosy.”
Elsewhere in the book, Hoffman also discusses his early meetings with his future wife, whom he knew as a young child as she was the daughter of a family friend.
“I had known her since she was a kid,” he recalls. I moved to New York when I was 21 and Lisa was three, but once a year when I came home to visit, our two families always got together.”
He recalls a visit when he was 27 years old, and Lisa was 10, which prompted Lisa to tell her grandmother that “when I grow up, I’m going to marry him”.
“When Lisa and I fell in love, it felt preordained,” Hoffman recalls. “It was incredibly grounding at a moment when I was coming unmoored.
“Long before I became famous, when I was a nobody farting at the piano, Lisa had already felt something for me. That meant a lot tome right then.”
Look at Me is out now, published by Gallery Books.
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