Key Takeaways
- Dustin Hoffman denies sexual misconduct in his memoir Look at Me but acknowledges making women uncomfortable, calling himself a “Borscht Belt flirt.”
- Anna Graham Hunter, Kathryn Rossetter and Cori Thomas came forward in 2017 with allegations including groping, harassment and exposing himself to a minor; Hoffman’s lawyers called the claims “defamatory falsehoods.”
- Hoffman compares the public backlash to Hollywood’s 1950s blacklist and describes retreating with his wife to Connecticut, though he has continued acting in films including Megalopolis and Tuner.
Dustin Hoffman is denying any sexual misconduct, but concedes he may have made women “uncomfortable.”
In his newly released memoir Look at Me, the 89-year-old actor confronts the sexual misconduct controversies that surfaced in 2017, acknowledging past insensitivity while denying any non-consensual behavior.
“I’m sure it’s true that in my life, especially forty years ago, I made some women uncomfortable,” Hoffman wrote 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 continued, “I love a so-called dirty joke. I am ‘a Borscht Belt flirt,’ as Bill Murray once put it. That’s not the same thing as pressuring someone to do something they didn’t want to do.”
The accounts published in late 2017 encompassed severe accusations spanning unwanted touching, verbal harassment, and assault.
On November 1, 2017, Anna Graham Hunter wrote a guest essay for The Hollywood Reporter stating that Hoffman repeatedly groped and propositioned her in 1985 while she was working as a 17-year-old production intern on the television adaptation of Death of a Salesman. The following month, his 1984 Broadway co-star Kathryn Rossetter detailed alleged backstage groping in the same magazine.
Around the same time period, playwright Cori Thomas alleged to Variety that Hoffman had exposed himself to her inside a hotel room when she was 16 years old. Although Hoffman's legal team denounced the allegations as "defamatory falsehoods," the matters never escalated to civil litigation or police investigations.
That year, Hoffman initially addressed Hunter's account with a statement of regret.
“I have the utmost respect for women and feel terrible that anything I might have done could have put her in an uncomfortable situation,” he said in a statement, per ABC News. “I am sorry. It is not reflective of who I am.”
In Look at Me, however, he reflects on the personal toll of public denunciation, drawing parallels between modern public cancellations and the 1950s Hollywood blacklist.
"There was no innocent until proven guilty. There was no 'proving' anything at all,” he wrote in the memoir, per People.
"[My wife] Lisa says I went into a state of shock... We hid in our house in Connecticut. The first time we went out to a restaurant there, we were both shaking, imagining that every person we encountered was staring at the pariah and his enabler," he said elsewhere in the book.
Hoffman has remained active in the industry, taking on roles such as Nush Berman in Francis Ford Coppola’s 2024 film Megalopolis and appearing in the drama Tuner, which received a limited U.S. theatrical release in May 2026.
