Baywatch star Nicole Eggert spoke out against the “MAGA fans” who “stalked” her when she accused Donald Trump-supporting actor Scott Baio of sexual abuse when she was a minor.
Eggert accused Baio publicly in 2018 during an interview on Megyn Kelly Today, in which she said that Baio, with whom she co-starred with in the 80s sitcom Charles in Charge, began molesting and assaulting her when she was 14 years old.
The “timing,” of her accusations, she said in a new interview on the Still Here Hollywood podcast, drew the ire of Trump’s fans, as Baio had become one of them.
“The only time I’ve had stalkers or anything scary happened was after I spoke out against Scott Baio,” she said on the podcast, “and a lot of people—oddly, it happened as Trump was running for office—and [Baio] came out as a huge Trump supporter and it was all in that same timing. And so a lot of people were convinced that it was a political move on my behalf,” she explained.
Eggert told Kelly on air that the alleged abuse continued for three years until she was 17 years old, and that the first incident had taken place in the actor’s car. Eggert filed a police report in 2018, but no charges were filed as the incidents were beyond the statute of limitations. Baio has consistently denied her allegations.
The Happy Days actor is still a vocal supporter of the president. He spoke at the Republican National Convention in 2016 and has continued to voice his conservative political opinions ever since. Eggert said his political stance intensified the blowback from her claims.
“He had some very strong MAGA fans that would start showing up at my house” after she came forward, she said, and she received “a lot of death threats.” One such fan went so far as to try to press charges against her for sexual assault, she also revealed on the podcast. “They called my local police department. My police department, they came and knocked on my door and said, ‘You need to be careful. This woman said that you sexually assaulted her.’ And by the end of the report, they realized she admitted that her and I have never even been in the same room or even at the same state, that we know of, at the same time.”
Stranger threat tactics were used, Eggert added, like people “having pizzas and sodas delivered to my home over and over and over.” She said, “And that’s when I got scared” because “it was just for them to let me know that they knew where I was, and my daughter was little at the time, so we had to leave the home for a while.”
Baio denied Eggert’s claims right away in 2018, saying through his representative that his co-star’s “false claims are part of a regular pattern of making outrageous and untrue statements” and that she had made the same claims against him in previous years as she promoted her reality shows. He maintained they had a consensual sexual relationship that began when Eggert was 17.
Eggert said then that she never came forward before because “I wasn’t ready to tell my story…And for me it was always protecting the show and protecting the legacy that nothing happened there.”
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