Dustin Hoffman denies sexual misconduct in memoir, says ‘uncomfortable’ is subjective
Hoffman’s attorney called the assault allegations 'defamatory falsehoods'
Nearly a decade after a wave of allegations derailed his public image, Dustin Hoffman is using his new memoir to argue that discomfort is in the eye of the beholder.
In Look at Me, which hit shelves November 10, the 89-year-old two-time Oscar winner admits he may have crossed some lines socially, but insists he never crossed into coercion.
“I’m sure it’s true that in my life, especially forty years ago, I made some women uncomfortable,” Hoffman writes, in an excerpt shared by People. “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 cozy.”
He leans on his reputation as a joker to draw the distinction. “I love a so-called dirty joke. I am ‘a Borscht Belt flirt,’ as Bill Murray once put it,” he writes. “That’s not the same thing as pressuring someone to do something they didn’t want to do.”
The book doesn’t respond to individual accusers by name. The claims against him emerged in late 2017 and ranged from verbal harassment to groping and assault. That November, Anna Graham Hunter wrote in The Hollywood Reporter that Hoffman groped and propositioned her in 1985, when she was a 17-year-old intern on the TV film Death of a Salesman. Weeks later, Kathryn Rossetter, his co-star in the 1984 Broadway run of the play, alleged in the same outlet that he had repeatedly groped her backstage. Playwright Cori Thomas told Variety that Hoffman exposed himself to her in a hotel room when she was 16.
Hoffman’s attorney called the assault allegations “defamatory falsehoods.” None of the claims led to a lawsuit or criminal charges.
His tone has shifted since then. Responding to Hunter’s account in 2017, Hoffman said he felt “terrible that anything I might have done could have put her in an uncomfortable situation,” according to ABC News. “I am sorry. It is not reflective of who I am.”
In the memoir, he says he initially welcomed the #MeToo movement. “When a reckoning started making its way around the internet, and tearing through Hollywood, I thought it was a very good thing,” he writes. “Not for a second did I worry that anything negative would be said about me, because the idea of taking something from someone sexually that they didn’t want to give... it’s just not something I’ve ever done.”
Instead, he says, his “entire life changed.” Comparing the moment to the McCarthy-era blacklist of the 1950s, he writes: “There was no innocent until proven guilty. There was no ‘proving’ anything at all.”
Hoffman also describes the personal toll. “Lisa says I went into a state of shock,” he writes of his wife, recalling that the couple retreated to their Connecticut home. On their first restaurant outing afterward, we were both shaking, imagining that every person we encountered was staring at the pariah and his enabler.”
He says he wrestled with whether to fight back at all. “I didn’t want to be fighting against something that I thought was important,” he writes. “The only problem was that things were being said about me that just weren’t true.”
Hoffman has kept working since the allegations surfaced, appearing as Nush Berman in Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis (2024) and in the drama Tuner, which opened in limited U.S. release in May 2026.
