According to a lawsuit filed this week in New York, Paul Schrader, a lauded screenwriter and director who rose to fame via his work with Martin Scorsese, admitted to sexually assaulting his personal assistant at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, comparing himself to convicted rapist Harvey Weinstein. But after the 78-year-old director agreed to a confidential settlement to resolve the situation, he reneged, the suit claims, leaving her no option but to take him to court.
The civil suit was filed Thursday, and alleged breach of contract between Paul Schrader and his former assistant, a 26-year-old woman identified in court documents as Jane Doe. According to the legal filing (which you can read in full online), Doe started her job with the Taxi Driver scribe in May of 2021; soon after, the suit claims, the director “used his position of power over Ms. Doe (who is 52 years younger than him) to force her to work in a sexually hostile, intimidating, and humiliating environment on a daily, if not hourly, basis.”
Things reached a tipping point in May 2024, when Doe and Schrader were at the Cannes Film Festival to promote his latest film, Oh, Canada. According to the lawsuit, Schrader “demanded Ms. Doe go to his hotel room, trapped her inside, grabbed her arms, and thrust his face into hers to kiss her against her will, and then further restrained her in an effort to keep her in the room before she managed to free herself and flee the hotel room.”
Days after that incident, the lawsuit claims Doe returned to Schrader’s room “after receiving numerous calls and angry text messages, in which Defendant Schrader claimed that he was ‘dying’ and could not pack his own bags,” but says that when she arrived, he exposed himself to her.
The lawsuit also details emails allegedly sent by Schrader to Doe in which he makes statements such as “I sense you recoil every time I have the impulse to touch you” and “I cringe at the thought you fear I might touch you,” both allegedly sent while Doe was in Schrader’s employ.
In September, the suit claims, she was fired, with Schrader allegedly writing in email “So I fucked up. Big time… If I have become a Harvey Weinstein in your mind then of course you have no choice but to put me in the rear view mirror.”
After the dismissal, Doe retained legal counsel, who worked with Schrader’s legal team to secure a confidential financial settlement over the claims. Though an agreement was allegedly reached, after a period of “soul searching,” Schrader decided not to sign, saying he “could not live with himself” if he complied. “This is an open-and-shut settlement enforcement matter,” Doe attorney Gregory Chiarello writes in the filing, claiming that even unsigned, the agreement was binding. (As of publication time, Doe’s legal representatives have not responded to Vanity Fair’s request for comment.)
Schrader’s attorney Philip Kessler denied Doe’s claims to the Hollywood Reporter, saying the filing is a “desperate, opportunistic and frivolous lawsuit to enforce a settlement that was never signed by Schrader.” (Vanity Fair has reached out to Kessler for comment, but has not received a response as of publication.)
“The agreement that they’re trying to enforce against Mr. Schrader, in plain English, required both parties to sign it before it became legally effective,” Kessler tells the AP. “Mr. Schrader declined to sign it. It’s frankly as simple as that.”
According to Kessler, the allegations in the suit are “in many respects inaccurate, in other respects materially misleading and exaggerated. Mr. Schrader never had sex with his former assistant. He never tried to have sex with his former assistant. The circumstances here will be shown to have been blown very wildly out of proportion to reality…We intend to vigorously defend the case.”
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