Was Dustin Hoffman, who's played Hollywood's favourite victims, a sex predator all along? Five women claim the actor abused them when they were as young as 15

• e-mail

No other Hollywood star has proved quite so brilliant at playing vulnerable, hugely sympathetic characters as Dustin Hoffman. Sadly, screen roles can be deceptive.

No other Hollywood star has proved quite so brilliant at playing vulnerable, hugely sympathetic characters as Dustin Hoffman.

Be it the nervous young college graduate snared by the rapacious older woman in The Graduate, the autistic savant in Rain Man or done up in drag and batting off the attentions of lecherous men in Tootsie, he rarely takes a role that doesn’t invite audiences to root for the ‘little guy’.

Sadly, screen roles can be deceptive.

Hoffman is now cast as a predatory monster, submerged under a stream of sordid allegations of sexual misconduct.

In recent days, five women have claimed the Oscar-winning star groped and abused them when they were as young as 15 – adding their voices to previous damning accounts about his behaviour.

Hoffman, 80, has yet personally to respond, although his lawyer has dismissed the allegations as ‘defamatory falsehoods’. The stories have been piling up – and getting increasingly more damaging – since last month, when he was accused of sexually harassing a 17-year-old production assistant.

‘I am sorry,’ the actor, well-known for his liberal views, said at the time, insisting he had the ‘utmost respect for women’ and felt ‘terrible for anything I might have done’. It was not, he added, ‘reflective of who I am’. But since then more women have begged to differ, offering their own ‘reflections’ on his treatment of women.

Cori Thomas, a former classmate of Hoffman’s daughter Karina, was only 16 when, she says, he exposed himself to her in a hotel room.

Miss Thomas, the daughter of the former Liberian ambassador to the UN and now a playwright, recalled how the two girls and the actor spent a pleasant day together in New York in 1980. Karina’s mother was divorced from Hoffman and he was staying in a hotel, where the trio dined before they went to his room for Miss Thomas to wait for her parents to pick her up. Karina had already gone home.

Hoffman is now cast as a predatory monster, submerged under a stream of sordid allegations of sexual misconduct. In recent days, five women have claimed the Oscar-winning star groped and abused them when they were as young as 15 – adding their voices to previous damning accounts about his behaviour.

She related how Hoffman then had a shower. ‘He came out of the bathroom with a towel at first wrapped around him, which he dropped,’ she told Variety. ‘He was standing there naked. I think I almost collapsed. It was the first time I had ever seen a naked man. I was mortified. I didn’t know what to do.’

Hoffman, she claims, ‘milked’ her extreme discomfort. She claimed the actor, then 42, eventually put on a bathrobe, sat on his bed and asked her to massage his feet. Miss Thomas, then an aspiring actress who’d idolised the actor, said she felt disgusted, but too intimidated to refuse.

As she complied, Hoffman even rang another woman and boasted to her that ‘I’ve got a pretty girl massaging my feet’.

She was ‘saved’ by the arrival of her mother, who was suspicious about her daughter being alone with Hoffman in his room.

In any case, nothing was done until seven years later when Miss Thomas confided to friends.

Hoffman, 80, has yet personally to respond, although his lawyer has dismissed the allegations as ‘defamatory falsehoods’. The stories have been piling up – and getting increasingly more damaging – since last month, when he was accused of sexually harassing a 17-year-old production assistant

Another accuser, Melissa Kester, was not much older – just 20 – when she says she was sexually assaulted by Hoffman in a recording studio.

He was working on the musical soundtrack for the 1987 comedy adventure film Ishtar, a box-office flop in which he co-starred with Warren Beatty. Miss Kester’s boyfriend worked in music. Hoffman invited her to join him at the Malibu studio. She was flattered by his offer to help her become a scriptwriter. She told Variety that Hoffman subsequently was sitting in a recording booth and asked her to join him, when he proceeded to assault her.

‘He literally just stuck his fingers down my pants. I just stood there. I just froze in the situation like “Oh my god, what is happening?” ’ Desperate not to react for fear of alerting her boyfriend, she eventually managed to move away.

Cori Thomas, a former classmate of Hoffman’s daughter Karina, was only 16 when, she says, he exposed himself to her in a hotel room

‘He kind of laughed. Then I just ran out of there, and I sat in the bathroom crying. I thought, “Oh my God.” I felt like I’d been raped.’

She says the star called her repeatedly after the incident until she told him to leave her alone.

A third – anonymous – accuser claims she was assaulted in the same way by Hoffman while she was working as an extra on the same film. She claims he invited her to the end-of-filming party in New York and then offered her a lift home with several colleagues.

As they squeezed together in the back, she says Hoffman put his hand up her skirt and assaulted her. As with his other alleged victims, the then 22-year-old says she was frozen with fear and confusion – unable to stop him.

‘He was smiling at me,’ she recalls. ‘There were people there. What are they going to think of me, that I’m a whore, if I say something?’ The woman says Hoffman then gave her $20 and asked her to join him at his flat. When she arrived, they had sex – an encounter which, given the ‘fugue state’ in which he had put her, she says was not fully consensual.

And so the list of accusers goes on. A woman identified only as Pauline told the Hollywood Reporter magazine that she was just 15 and Hoffman aged 36 when he lured her to his New York home in 1973. The bait was to see his pet puppy, she says.

When they got there, he allegedly asked her: ‘Do you want to see something else?’, unzipped his trousers and exposed himself.

‘I didn’t know what to say, what to do,’ she said. She claims Hoffman told her: ‘I’ll be finished soon’ and later walked her to a taxi. ‘I was just crying, it was so embarrassing,’ she says.

Another alleged victim, who used the pseudonym Carolyn, says she was a 21-year-old tour guide in Washington in 1975 when Hoffman, in town to film the Watergate thriller All The President’s Men, asked her to spend the evening with him. When she knocked on his hotel room door, he answered shirtless. After chatting briefly about things such as the fact her father was a doctor, she told him she wanted to go home. She claims he replied: ‘Go home? You don’t think you’re getting out of here without having sex, do you?’

She related how Hoffman then had a shower. ‘He came out of the bathroom with a towel at first wrapped around him, which he dropped,’ she told Variety. ‘He was standing there naked. I think I almost collapsed. It was the first time I had ever seen a naked man. I was mortified. I didn’t know what to do.’

She claims Hoffman blocked the doorway and insisted she choose between two sex acts. Afterwards, he offered her $20 for a taxi home, later calling her mother asking to take her out for dinner.

The most detailed account of Hoffman’s alleged sexual misconduct comes from actress Kathryn Rossetter. She says she caught his eye when she was an inexperienced young actress auditioning for a part in a 1983 Broadway revival of the Arthur Miller play Death Of A Salesman.

She was ‘dumbstruck’ to land the part of the mistress of Hoffman’s character, on stage eight times a week with him. Hoffman took her to his home to meet Lisa Hoffman, his then wife and mother of their four children.

However, she says a campaign of relentless sexual harassment started three days into rehearsals when he asked her to stop at his hotel room after lunch together.

Why he needed a hotel room when he lived only a mile from the theatre quickly became clear, she said, as he pulled off his shirt and requested a back rub on his bed. She initially thought he was ‘method acting’ by recreating their on-stage affair but soon discovered it was ‘the beginning of what was to become a horrific, demoralising and abusive experience at the hands (literally) of one of my acting idols’.

Miss Rossetter, now 66, claims Hoffman would even grope her off stage between their scenes. ‘One night in Chicago, I felt his hand up under my slip on the inside of my thighs,’ she says. ‘I was completely surprised and tried to bat him away.’

His hands, on occasions, went even further and she recalls how ‘night after night’ she went home and cried. She says he also enjoyed groping her breasts when they posed for photos together, taking his hand away at the last minute, except on one occasion – a photo of which has now been published – when he was too slow and was caught in the act.

Making matters worse, she says, their colleagues on the production were not just turning a blind eye but actively colluding with his behaviour. She recalled how in a ‘sickening’ incident backstage, Hoffman once pulled her slip over her head to expose her breasts in front of a group of male crew members who, she later discovered, had been promised a ‘surprise’ by the actor.

Another alleged victim, who used the pseudonym Carolyn, says she was a 21-year-old tour guide in Washington in 1975 when Hoffman, in town to film the Watergate thriller All The President’s Men, asked her to spend the evening with him

She also said Hoffman’s dresser repeatedly summoned her to his dressing room to massage the star’s feet, standing guard outside the door to ensure they weren’t disturbed.

When Miss Rossetter explained what had happened to ‘theatre professionals’, they warned her she risked ruining her career if she spoke out against such a powerful actor.

Although Hoffman has not responded directly to Miss Rossetter’s claims, he has produced half a dozen people in the production who questioned her account. Her claims were published in an essay after another accuser, Anna Graham Hunter, set the ball rolling. She described how she was a 17-year-old production assistant on the film version of Death Of A Salesman when the ‘openly flirtatious’ Hoffman consistently behaved inappropriately towards her – asking for foot massages, grabbing her buttocks and making lewd, aggressive jokes. Although she concluded that ‘he was a predator, I was a child’, she admitted she had liked him.

Next, Wendy Riss Gatsiounis, a TV writer and producer, claimed that, when she was in her 20s, Hoffman rejected her script when she refused to go to a hotel with him. She said the experience was ‘a source of torment’ and added: ‘He had been my hero.’

Many will surely be experiencing the same feeling as Hollywood’s latest sex scandal envelops its unlikeliest star suspect yet.