38 Women Accuse ‘Predator’ Filmmaker of Using 12-Step Playbook to Lure and Abuse

Award-winning filmmaker James Toback—who once insisted anyone who had the temerity to accuse him of sexual misconduct was a “lying cocksucker or [a] cunt or both”—has been accused of exactly that by more than three dozen women who say he is a “serial sexual predator.”

For some 40 years, Toback has “used his reputation, power and influence in the entertainment industry” and the pull of his celebrity contacts to “lure” aspiring actresses “into compromising situations where he falsely imprisoned, sexually abused, assaulted, and/or battered them,” according to a lawsuit filed Monday in New York State Supreme Court.

It is believed to be the first such lawsuit filed against Toback, lawyers representing the women told The Daily Beast.

Toback, 78, “prowled the streets of New York City” in search of young women “to abuse who were or wanted to be involved in the entertainment industry,” the 89-page suit alleges, laying out details of what his accusers say was a 12-step playbook Toback used to ensnare them. Once Toback set the hook, he “deceitfully gained their trust and acquiescence to meet with him by touting his influence as a movie director and screenwriter, and friendship and work with famous actors,” according to the lawsuit.

Toback then allegedly assaulted the women, promising them roles in films which rarely, if ever, came through, according to attorneys Ross Leonoudakis and Brad Beckworth.

Leonoudakis and Beckworth, who filed the suit on behalf of 38 women allegedly abused by Toback, told The Daily Beast on Monday that although the auteur’s methods sometimes varied, the overall theme remained constant.

“The lure was that he was going to be their big break,” Leonoudakis said.

According to the suit, Toback, who graduated from Harvard in 1966, “repeatedly used the prestige and privacy” of Midtown Manhattan’s Harvard Club to draw victims to meetings where he would sexually assault them—sometimes in plain sight in the facility’s dining room, or the building’s stairwells, bathrooms, and hotel rooms. The complaint accuses the Harvard Club, named as the only other defendant in the lawsuit, of permitting “Toback’s abuse to continue unchecked.”

Toback “was allowed unfettered access in and around the Harvard Club, including areas intended for employees only,” the lawsuit states, adding that he would “falsely imprison” and assault women. The club “continually catered to Toback’s needs, providing him a safe haven for his reprehensible and criminal acts,” the suit alleges, which says several of the women wrote letters to the Harvard Club, pleading with them to take action to stop Toback, to no avail.

Countless employees would have seen Toback in action “night after night,” but ignored what was happening, Leonoudakis told The Daily Beast. This, he said, led Toback to realize he could use the club as his own “hunting grounds.”

A spokeswoman for the private alumni club told The Daily Beast on Monday that Toback’s membership was terminated in 2017. “Beyond that, the Harvard Club does not comment on pending litigation,” she said.

Toback’s accusers say he also frightened them into compliance through various means, allegedly threatening to derail their careers, boasting of ties to the mob, and claiming he’d murdered multiple people. The lawsuit alleges he told one aspiring actress that “he had killed a therapist at Harvard [University] by bashing her head against a radiator,” and that he told a woman identified in the suit as Jane Doe 8 that he “had killed someone with a fork and that his typist had been murdered.” Two others allege in the lawsuit that Toback boasted of having “bashed a man’s head in with a baseball bat.”

(There is no publicly available evidence to prove Toback has ever actually killed, or attempted to kill, anybody. However, actress Selma Blair has accused Toback of threatening to kill her and gouge her eyes out if she exposed his alleged sexual harassment. And New York Times critic Janet Maslin told The Daily Beast Toback once left her a voicemail that said, “I’m going to fucking kill you,” after she reviewed his debut film. She said the director later invited her to the Harvard Club to mend fences.)

If he couldn’t bribe or scare them into bed, the twice-married Toback, who the lawsuit says claimed to have fathered as many as 99 children, sometimes took a very different tack. In one instance cited in the suit, a woman identified as “Jane Doe 16” claims Toback told her he “had to orgasm 20 times a day or he couldn’t work and that she had to engage sexually with him if she wanted to be a star.” In another, Toback allegedly told “Jane Doe 22” that “he needed to orgasm 8 times a day.” A third accuser says Toback told her he “needed to ejaculate 15 times a day.”

In one 1979 incident at the Harvard Club, Toback allegedly “masturbated in front of Plaintiff Jolene Hayes in the dining room of the Harvard Club, ejaculating onto [her] and the dinner table he had pinned her against.”

As the #MeToo movement highlighted sexual misconduct accusations against Hollywood power players like Harvey Weinstein, a stream of women also came forward with claims against Toback.

In a 2017 interview with The Daily Beast, a former actress named Stephanie Kearns recounted a creepy experience with Toback she said occurred in 2005, saying the director invited her to a “screening” with his crew at Manhattan bar P.J. Clarke’s but that she found him at a table alone when she arrived. After dinner, Kearns said, Toback followed her into Central Park, where she begged him to leave her alone. Toback then allegedly pinned her down to the ground, stopping only when two police officers happened to walk by.

Kearns, who is not one of the women listed by name in the lawsuit filed Monday, said she quit acting because of the incident. “That wasn’t an industry I wanted to be in anymore,” she told The Daily Beast.

As of 2018, nearly 400 women had accused Toback of sexual harassment or assault, including such well-known stars as Julianne Moore, Rachel McAdams, and Blair. But unlike Weinstein, who is now serving 23 years in prison for rape and criminal sexual assault, Toback has never been charged criminally. In April of that year, L.A. County prosecutors declined to charge Toback over allegations brought by five women—from indecent exposure, a misdemeanor, to sexual battery, a felony—saying the statute of limitations had expired.

However, the attorneys behind Monday’s lawsuit say there’s a good reason why many people, such as the women they now represent, sometimes don’t come forward for many years, if at all.

“One of the primary issues involving sexual assault victims is the obstacles that they have to overcome just to talk about it,” Leonoudakis said. “A lot of this went unreported for decades, in no small part due to the direct threats that Toback made. He threatened them with physical violence, he threatened that if they told anybody, he would ruin them. And these are women, often in their young 20s, trying to start a career in the entertainment industry. They couldn’t risk the shame and embarrassment of being an assault victim, much less the threat of violence.”

The women were able to bring the suit against Toback years after the fact thanks to a New York state law that went into effect last month. The Adult Survivor’s Act gives victims a one-year window to bring civil claims against their abusers, even if the statute of limitations has run out.

Toback does not have a lawyer listed in court records, and did not respond to a request for comment on Monday. However, in a 2017 interview with the Los Angeles Times, he repeatedly claimed it would have been “biologically impossible” for him to have engaged in such strenuous sexual activity due to his diabetes and heart problems. (One of the women now suing Toback spoke to the Times that same year about a 2008 incident during which the director allegedly rubbed his groin against her leg.)

Toback has “always viewed himself [as] a pickup artist,” the suit filed Monday states. “So much so that in 1987 he made a movie based on his own exploits with that exact title, The Pick-Up Artist, starring Robert Downey Jr. and Molly Ringwald. In the film, Robert Downey Jr. plays an obsessive womanizer who combs the Upper West Side for young women and justifies his behavior by saying, ‘I have a vested interest in meeting strangers. Every woman that I’ve ever liked or communed with or given great satisfaction to always started off as a stranger.’”

“But,” the suit continues, “James Toback is not a pickup artist. He is a serial sexual predator who used his position of power and influence in the entertainment industry as a movie director and screenwriter to sexually abuse countless young women, including Plaintiffs, for decades.”

Toback’s vile behavior has been an “open secret” in the industry for a long time, according to the filing, which cites a March 1989 article in the now-defunct Spy magazine, titled, “The Pickup Artist’s Guide To Picking Up Women, A Case by Case Look at Movie Director James Toback’s Street Technique.”

In it, two women who claimed they had been victimized by Toback broke down his grooming process, divvying it up into 12 separate categories:

• “The Introduction”
• “The Credentials”
• “Setting the Hook: Flattery”
• “Pitching the Project”
• “Call Me”
• “The Answering Service”
• “The Date”
• “Talking Dirty”
• “A Fascination with Numbers”
• “The Allure of Danger”
• “Trust Me”
• “Last Straws”

The method began with Toback introducing himself to a young woman on the street, explaining that he was a film director with an eye for spotting talent. The lawsuit paints an ugly picture of Toback trawling for women, sometimes following them for several blocks, and at city locations including Grand Central Terminal, the subway, McDonald’s, or a bagel shop. He allegedly targeted one woman while she worked at a Starbucks, and another at a film festival in Toronto.

To prove his Hollywood bona fides, he would then present his Directors Guild of America membership card, a magazine with his picture in it, or a DVD of one his films that he “happened to be carrying,” according to the lawsuit. Next came a deluge of compliments (“Toback told Jane Doe 19 that he had an immediate erection after seeing her,” the lawsuit states), followed by a request the woman audition for a role in an upcoming film Toback had in the works.

After giving the woman his phone number, Toback would set up a “business meeting,” says the suit. But Toback would invariably be waiting for his targets alone, it alleges, with three of the women suing Toback claiming he assaulted them at his mom’s place.

The suit notes that Toback responded to the Spy author’s request for comment thusly: “I hope you know what you are doing when you fuck with me… If you print this piece, I promise it will be the single thing you regret most in your life… Think of your very worst nightmare. It’ll be worse than that.”

In the lawsuit, actress Mary Monahan claims Toback once asked her to participate in a “trust exercise” as part of an audition in December 1998, which involved her getting naked while he remained fully clothed. After about 45 minutes of talking with Toback in a New York City editing suite, he “straddled her right leg… then instructed Mary to look into his eyes while he orgasmed,” according to the lawsuit. “Toback began humping Mary’s leg and ejaculated in his pants.”

Toback then told Monahan he would cast her in the project, the lawsuit states.

The next day, Monahan realized she had forgotten her portfolio at the editing suite and went back to pick it up. As she was leaving, Toback pulled Monahan into a stairwell and pushed her down to the floor, according to the lawsuit. Toback “then humped her leg until he ejaculated, still fully clothed,” it says. The following summer, again at the editing suite, Toback allegedly “charged at [Monahan] aggressively while making grunting sounds,” after which he “forcefully pulled [her] off the couch and threw her onto the floor. He then pulled out his penis and ejaculated all over Mary’s shirt.”

Monahan, now 52, was never given an onscreen role, as Toback promised. Instead, he gave her some off-camera work, according to Leonoudakis and Beckworth.

“The vast majority of them, he just discarded as soon as he got what he wanted,” Leonoudakis told The Daily Beast.

The women’s claims of sexual abuse are disturbing and similar in pattern.

In the complaint, MacKay says Toback sexually assaulted her around 2004 and 2005, when she was about 20 and 21 years old. On one occasion, the lawsuit says, Toback brought MacKay to his mother’s apartment at The Majestic, an elegant pre-war Upper West Side co-op overlooking Central Park, and “pinned her arms to the chair she was sitting in and grinded his penis against her leg until he ejaculated in his pants.”

Another accuser, Nicole Hodges, claims that Toback assaulted her at the Harvard Club in 2007, when she was 22. The lawsuit alleges Toback took her to a room at the club and told her that he “wanted to help her have an illustrious career like the other actresses he slept with.”

“But, he stated he could only help Nicole if she treated him as her ‘God,’ giving him authority over her auditions and jobs, and putting him before anyone else,” the complaint adds. Toback allegedly instructed Hodges to sit in a chair before he jumped her leg and ejaculated in his pants.

Meanwhile, the lawsuit alleges Toback targeted a woman referred to as Jane Doe 9 by inviting her to an audition at his “studio,” which ended up being his residence. “Toback told Jane Doe 9 how special she was and that he could see inside her soul if he looked her in the eye while ejaculating,” the complaint alleges. “Toback also claimed this would inspire writing the part for Jane Doe 9 in his next movie.”

Toback assaulted Jane Doe 9 multiple times between 2004 and 2005, the lawsuit claims, and would call her late at night asking her to masturbate over the phone. The woman’s boyfriend picked up on one occasion and, according to the complaint, Toback told him “that he drugged and then had sex with Jane Doe 9 several times and that he does that with all the girls he meets.”

Years later, Jane Doe 9 ran into Toback again and he apparently didn’t recognize her as he tried to pick her up. “Excuse me, are you an actress? Hi, my name is James Toback and I am a movie director,” he said, according to the suit, before Jane Doe 9 screamed for him to get lost.

Toback’s alleged methods are familiar to Leonoudakis and Beckworth, who said they have handled many abuse cases involving teachers and members of the clergy.

“There’s always a level of secrecy, a level of control and power,” Beckworth said, “and then often, a promise of, I don’t know if I would say a reward, but, ‘If you keep this secret and do what I say, then things are gonna turn out OK for you.’ It’s almost always a slow and methodical thing. It’s just very sad.”

The 38 women who signed onto Monday’s lawsuit are asking for compensatory and punitive damages to be determined by a jury. They are also asking for Toback to pay exemplary damages of an amount high enough “to deter future similar conduct.” The complaint accuses Toback of assault, battery, false imprisonment and intentional infliction of emotional distress, and the Harvard Club of negligence and gross negligence.

The accusers make up just 10 percent of Toback’s public accusers to date, and, Leonoudakis and Beckworth believe, a mere handful of the total number of possible victims still out there.

“You would expect that not everybody’s spoken out,” Leonoudakis told The Daily Beast on Monday. “You’d expect the number to be much greater, just for people not wanting to expose their personal and professional lives.”

He noted that two-thirds of sexual assaults go unreported, and that by that metric, there could be “well over 1,000” women today with claims against Toback.

“This was not a one-off case,” Leonoudakis said. “This happened hundreds of times in New York, and we believe, all over the country.”

“It followed a pattern of grooming and it followed a pattern of, unfortunately, people in a position to do something about it [were] keeping quiet, turning a blind eye.”