Hollywood Confessional

Portrait of a Survivor Part 1

• Ninth Way Media • Season 3 • Episode 15

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"These people are never going to have sharp claws and pointed teeth. They're going to look like your good friend. And they're mostly going to act like your good friend. And then every once in a while..."

In this episode of the Hollywood Confessional, two confessors from opposite ends of the Hollywood hierarchy share their stories of working with the same toxic man. Over the course of several years and multiple TV shows, they recall how the man they once admired as a leader revealed the monster within.

"You could see the rage radiating off him. He was a completely different person in that moment."

Our mission on this podcast has always been to make Hollywood a happier place by giving industry professionals a place to share their deepest, darkest secrets. And all too often, those secrets exist because abusers are in positions of power. 

In this two-part oral history, we explore how one particular abuser got into that position through lies, manipulation, and superficial charm. And through the voice of one of his victims, we hear how his abuse was reinforced by the system.

"He called the exec. And then he told me that what he said was, 'You're a nobody. He's not going to ask the showrunner to leave.'"

In part two, we'll see how even exposing an abuser in the media doesn't always fix the problem, and what one victim did after quitting the job to rebuild her life. We also pay homage to her and all the others who have gone through similar situations in the struggle to achieve their dreams.

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Hollywood Confessional is a Ninth Way Media production, produced by Meagan Daine and J.R. Zamora-Thal.

Sound Effects and Music provided by Zapsplat and Pixabay.

Keywords: filmmaking podcast, film podcast, screenwriting podcast, entertainment podcast, Hollywood, filmmaking, writerslife, actorslife, setlife

Speaker 1:

um, so I probably will be like moving around a lot, you know, just like keep my own.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, sorry, this is, this is gonna be a rough one if a story is written up in a newspaper, it's going to portray somebody in a certain light and it's going to be kind of simple to judge. But you're seeing it all in a row, neatly laid out in print. As glad as I am that people do that, reading those stories doesn't make you any better at spotting when this stuff is happening.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so let's talk about so. It's kind of like three chapters. Chapter one is like the early days. Then chapter two is the show when the wheels come off. Then, like chapter three, I become his assistant and his assistant is, you know, when the abuse really ran rampant. So chapter one it was my very first writer's room, one of the like blue sky procedural shows.

Speaker 1:

I had worked in post-production for season one and I had a lot of access to the showrunner and because I had such access to him, I was able to say to him you know, I want to be a writer. So when it looked like the show was coming back for season two, the showrunner asked if I would be interested in interviewing for the writer's assistant. I interviewed and I got the job. I was thrilled. I had my own parking space. I just felt like I did it. I'm doing what I always wanted to do.

Speaker 1:

Even so, my first day I was nervous. Walking into a new writer's room feels very much like the first day of school. You have the nerves and the jitters. I didn't know anyone other than the showrunner who had hired me, so I had some familiarity, but it felt like meeting a whole new team of people that I wanted to impress. I remember walking into the room and just being awed at everything and this one writer I remember he introduced himself. He's like just call me b****. And immediately I'm like, oh, this is a cool guy. He was very handsome and charismatic and a little flirty. I remember as he shook my hand, like having his full attention, not feeling as nervous as meeting other people. He was just that kind of charismatic person that could immediately make you feel at ease.

Speaker 2:

My first sense of f***ing was okay, I can work with this guy. I liked him. He was funny, he had good ideas and when I met him we were in a nightmare of a show. You know like a really, really tough situation, and he made an unbearable situation bearable. We had a showrunner who was not experienced, so on our first day we were just going and going and going in the room like hours passed Two, three, four hours, something like that and finally raised his hand. He's like not to bring us down a few levels on Maslow's hierarchy of needs, but I could use a bathroom break and I bet other people could too. There was a sense that you know there's something wrong with the guy in charge and the next highest guy, if we listen to him, will be okay.

Speaker 1:

Bleep was making the room laugh from get. We didn't know that we had to wait for the maintenance people to move furniture and install the whiteboards. So the big drama the first day was a group of writers hanging up a whiteboard and Bleep took charge. You could see him emerge as the leader. He was just someone that people were naturally attracted to. Later that day he started teaching me all the different roles of the writer's room. You know, because it's confusing You're a producer but you're also a writer how does that work? And he said I'm a co-EP. Do you know what that means? And in my innocence I was like no, and he's like it means I'm not an EP. And the way he said it I wouldn't go so far to say it was a red flag, but it was definitely one of those checkered morning flags. I just felt like, okay, I may have to watch out for this guy.

Speaker 2:

Let's watch and see if this goes away. There was always stuff I'm sure I said stuff in writers' rooms back then that was not appropriate and that I certainly wouldn't say now, but you know a lot of talk about like a particular technique he would use to pick up women that one of the most enticing things is smell, and then he would like mime leaning in and let the woman smell him and stuff like that. He kissed me on the cheek once to make me uncomfortable, which fucking worked, and it was done in a spirit of camaraderie, let's say. But it was also like this is a dude who knows where your buttons are and will show you sometimes that he can push them.

Speaker 1:

The show we were on was very chaotic. The showrunner was a lovely man and an incredible writer, but it was his first time running a show and at times it felt like he was losing control. There were a lot of big personalities, very talented writers, who were very vocal about the fact that they were just taking the job for the paycheck, but B*** was really the one who was like we're a team, I'm not making you guys stay late. It's not fair that we're rewriting outlines that we shouldn't. So it felt like he was defending us, especially the sports staff. It was like we were the Rebel Alliance and he was our Han Solo. It was like we were the Rebel Alliance and he was our Han Solo. Along the way I became really good friends with him. He started calling me his little sister. He would let me write scenes and teach me great writing tips.

Speaker 2:

This was somebody who saw me as a fellow artist and a colleague who I enjoyed breaking story with. We would talk about our lives, things we were going through. You know he was a friend.

Speaker 1:

I had a rough start in entertainment, like my very first job. One of the non-writing producers would come in late at night and Like there was one night that he was telling me he was looking for a new assistant and I was like, oh, what would your new assistant do? And he very casually looked at me and was like, Can you give a good blowjob? This was my very, very first job and this was like a huge production company, a huge producer. So I bring that up because I had already had experiences like that.

Speaker 1:

I knew how to be on guard around people that felt unsafe. I did not feel that way around any of these people. I felt like they were my family and my support system. I would even open up to them about these experiences I was having in Hollywood, wondering if this was normal. I also had some rough things in my childhood and this was the first time I started talking about them in a really open way with people outside of my family. F*** encouraged me to go to therapy and shared some of his childhood trauma, so I felt very bonded to him. He felt like somebody I was close to in a real way.

Speaker 2:

He talked a lot about having a rough childhood, seeing a guy get killed, seeing a dead body in a car you know really good stories, I guess, where it started to turn for me he always talked about. I'm hesitant to tell you guys this, because and it did make me start to wonder how much of the rugged backstory about seeing a kid killed or seeing a dead body, you know, was it true or was it him? Because this is a guy who loves to fucking spin a yarn. He loves to fucking tell a story. That's not true. There's a real delight in deceiving other people.

Speaker 1:

After that season the showrunner got fired and a new showrunner was brought in with an almost new staff. So it's like back to finding a job. I had gone back to being a PA. I think it was about a year later. I got a call from He'd been working on a different show. It was a big hit and he was going to be taking over a showrunner with another writer. They were going to be kosher running and they needed an assistant. He was like you're the first person I called. I was so excited. I was so excited. I really liked the other writer. He and I got along, but I was more excited to be working with on this big show.

Speaker 2:

I said yes as fast as I could was known for coming into tough situations and getting things under control, and the way he would do that is he knows where people's buttons are. Like any workplace, television shows can become pretty cutthroat power struggles. You know where people are stabbing each other in the back and trying to undermine each other and get a leg up. F*** is relatively good at navigating those situations. He didn't well, I was about to say he didn't create them, but that's kind of exactly what he did.

Speaker 1:

It was a stressful show. It was in its third season, it had a huge star that was very cantankerous and it was also B***h's first time showrunning. I think a lot of times, if a co-showrunner is in a situation where they're not in a true partnership, there can be a lot of ego at play. I started to witness some of that ego between the two of them. They would get into petty arguments about who would run the room or who would do the final pass on a script where everything suddenly felt like a competition. A lot of immaturity came out, like they would joke about starting a production company and they wanted to call it and like the symbol that they wanted it to look like was a woman's, you know. So they had me spend an afternoon looking up graphics for this like pagoda tent and making sure it could resemble a woman's vagina. There were a lot of side projects like that and it just didn't feel great. And there was also a lot of side projects like that and it just didn't feel great. And there was also a lot of like. The star of the show, you know, was someone that he's iconic, like he's. I'm just gonna say it. You guys can blur it out or whatever, but it's fucking b****. So I was like starstruck. You know B**** would joke he thinks you're cute. You can take that to your advantage. So you know my 24-year-old brain I'm like f*** thinks I'm cute. This is so flattering. Now in my 30s I'm like that was kind of f***ed up Because there were times when the star would refuse to go to set and f*** would ask me to go talk to him and work my magic.

Speaker 1:

Again. It felt very flattering, I felt like I had this superpower, but it was really putting me in a terrible position. There was one day that I remember in particular. The star would have like special jeans flown in from London and there was one day that the jeans didn't arrive, so wardrobe was just going to give him whatever other kinds of jeans and it was like a whole crisis. The star refused to go to set and was very frustrated and so he was like can you go to set and talk to him and convince him that his pants look good? There was another writer there, a woman. She was like standing by my desk and she's like you can't ever go to set by herself when he's throwing a hissy fit.

Speaker 1:

So I think went with me that time we were standing outside the star's trailer. It was the first time I had ever had a rolled cigarette, because I couldn't say no to offering me one of his own rolled cigarettes and we just like kibitzed and stuff. But I remember being like this is really weird. Like part of my job is to smoke a cigarette with the star and tell him that his pants look good. And the star's trailer was set up like a bar. So he was like come inside, I'll make you guys a drink, and was joking about having the drink and I'm like, aren't we here to get him to set the drink? And I'm like, aren't we here to get him to set? It was very surreal, it was. It was like there was this whole game going on, that.

Speaker 2:

I didn't really understand. On the third season of the show I came in and what started to get disturbing to me was that he was still doing the thing he had done on our previous show of finding a villain and holding people together and it's like, no, that made sense because there was an actual bad guy on that job. This show didn't have to be that way, but he was still kind of fictionalizing and identifying and it reached a point where there was a writer who I guess he felt threatened by. So he was kind of maneuvering and cutting his legs off and I was probably unconsciously a party to that, because that guy we didn't really get along.

Speaker 2:

But Bleep and his co-showrunner made the decision that they're going to fire him. Bleep tells the entire writing staff on the show, one by one, that the guy is going to be fired. But don't tell him but I have to tell you because you can't talk to him about any ideas for next season. We weren't really having serious discussions about a next season at that point. That was basically about B*** wanting everybody to know that this guy was going to be fired and, at a weird fucked up level, wanting to put us all in this stressful situation where we couldn't tell him.

Speaker 1:

The way B*** and his co-show ran around the room was very hierarchical. It was like you were your level and there was a writer who was lower level and there were a lot of problems with him not respecting his boundaries. This all culminated in a day where they were doing a casting session for the writer's episode. B***h would always go into the casting session and he had a rule that he was the one that made the decisions. If you were another writer, even if it was your episode and you had a strong opinion, he didn't want you to talk.

Speaker 1:

So I remember they had gone to their session Then had come in with like a head of steam, like you could hear the noise of him coming down the hallway. He and this other writer had come in and they were shouting at each other, told the writer, get the fuck out. It felt like he was a caged dog, like you could see the rage radiating off of him. He was shaking. He was a completely different person in that moment. I think the thing that scared me the most was, you know was someone who always had a plan and in that moment his rage just felt so out of control.

Speaker 2:

One of his favorite jokes is oh, that's a nice shirt. Does it come in grown-up sizes? Which is, you know, homophobic and shitty? But it was just those convenient go-to things to undermine a little bit. If there was any sort of threat to his standing, he would take that very seriously. Things would get pretty not funny pretty fast. He would tell stories about he was on a double date with another couple. The guy seemed unimpressed with him. So B**** said do you have a problem with me? And the guy responded you're common. And B**** slapped him out of his chair and for all I know, that story is a lie. It's like that thing in the Dark Knight where Heath Ledger's character tells the origin story of the scars on his face and then he tells a different story Suddenly. You have no fucking idea. I'm not saying he's the Joker or anything. There's this sense of I don't know. I don't know what was true of what he told me about his childhood. I don't know what was true of our friendship. I don't really know who he is inside.

Speaker 1:

Eventually that show started winding down. It was very clear it was not going to come back for another season. But he still had an overall deal and he's like, even if the show doesn't come back, I want to keep you on as my assistant. You're going to help me develop shows. He had this really great idea for a show that he would talk to me about in between us working on things. The story was about an abused young girl. I felt like I could see myself in the main character and could kind of speak to some of the experiences. So it wasn't just like it was his idea. I felt like I was a part of it, like I was drawn to the show and could speak to it.

Speaker 2:

So I was very excited about that. By the way, any fucking showrunner who's doing development if you're listening to this if you're having assistants either personal assistants or writer's assistants or script coordinators if you're having people write your outlines and their names aren't on that shit, you're not doing them a favor, you're doing yourself a fucking favor. Cut it the fuck out. That shit makes me furious.

Speaker 1:

I do think there was a feeling like could be uncontrollable, but I still felt very protected by him at that point. So I became his assistant, and that takes us to chapter three. It very quickly became clear that we were not going to just be spending time working on this pilot. We got put on the show, which, if you've heard the rumors about it, they're very true. The show was a nightmare. Wait, actually, hold on, let me think for a second. Here it was, and both of those shows were nightmares for completely different reasons, and so, like this part is going to be very jumbled because this is like where we're going to get into some of the abuse. So at the time I was engaged and I had ended my engagements. So, like, emotionally, I was all over the place and I was working on these shows that were just chaotic, and I think for he was also a new father and I think he was just expecting to work on his pilot and not be put on these chaos shows where it was a lot of work this is where his ego really came out. The pattern of griping about the showrunner, like that was all the time he found faults with all the showrunners. So I could feel his tension and his ego. I'm pretty sure we were on first and that was a chaos show with two big ego showrunners, and then was added into the mix and then it's when we went to that's where the wheels really came off.

Speaker 1:

One of the showrunners on is notorious for not being great around women, to the point that before we took the job was like I just want to let you know there's rumors about this person, just something for us to be aware of. I remember the very first time we met him. I don't think the room had started yet, we were just going into the offices to set everything up. It was downtown, so there's a bridge where you can overlook and see people passing below, and I were meeting him. He's very handsome, charismatic, flirty, but I've been warned about him and my big brother is looking out for me. So we went outside and they were smoking cigarettes and I was just hanging out with them and he looks down at the bridge below and he sees an attractive woman and he turns around and he's like sometimes I look at a woman like that and I just wonder what the inside of her vaginal cavity looks like. I could feel a lurch in my stomach. This is my first time meeting this man and this is the first thing he says. It was like he was actively trying to be gross and I shared a look and I was like, oh, he was right, he's looking out for me. And then we drove home because at this point we would drive everywhere together and he was like you know why he said that, don't you? He was like no, he's like because he has an OBGYN table at his house. That's what he likes to do for foreplay. To this day, I do not know if this is true or just something he said to me, but I remember so clearly being like and we're going to work for this guy.

Speaker 1:

There were moments with that showrunner that were like like like one time before I ended my engagement, I was looking at wedding dresses and office because I didn't have my own office and the showrunner walked in and he was like what are you looking at? And I was frozen because I thought, oh shit, he's going to see me not working. I'm in trouble and he leans over me. I could feel his breath on my neck. I'm in trouble and he leans over me. I could feel his breath on my neck and he was like wow, you would look incredible in any one of those. There were so many moments like that that were definitely red flags and I would let know. And he was like, just stay in my office. I warned you, you know. And so all this culminated.

Speaker 1:

There was one day our kitchen was an open area and it had like a bar where you can lean over it. I was talking to my friend and I was like leaning over the bar and I was wearing a dress it wasn't a short dress where you could see my, you know whatever, but I was leaning over in a dress and walked by and grabbed my ass. There was no mistaking that. He did it. He like laughed afterwards and stuff, and like I looked at my friend and walked into his office and I started crying, came in a couple minutes later. He's like what's up? And I said he grabbed my ass. And you know his response was like he was upset, but it was also like I knew this was going to happen. Don't worry about it, I'll talk to him. And I was like I want to report him and he's like well, we've got to be smart about this. And he kind of talked me down from it, but he was very much like I will take care of this for you. I will take care of this for you.

Speaker 1:

I don't remember the exact timing, if it was the next day or a couple days later, but I came into the office and said I talked to him and he said it was a total accident, like he'll apologize if you want, but he doesn't even remember doing it.

Speaker 1:

And I was like I told you he did and he's like, yeah, but he also said you were leaning over and his hand must've just brushed against you. It just became all these excuses and I still was like I think it's important we reach out to the studio and tell them what happened. So again, he was like I'll take care of it, I'll talk to his exec. So he apparently called him and then he told me that what he had said I'm sorry if I start crying is I'm like he told me that you're a nobody, he's not going to ask the showrunner to leave, but I don't want things to be uncomfortable for you. So maybe the solution is that you just don't come into the office anymore. To this day, I think that comment set my career back in a big way, because I lost my confidence in a way that still affects me, that one comment of being told I was a nobody and you know, I wasn't allowed to work in the office anymore as a result of me being abused.

Speaker 2:

Maybe I should have seen what was going on with his assistant and said, hey, this isn't a good situation, Let me try and help you get out of here. I don't know when you read those stories and some of those guys that got me too'd like Harvey Weinstein. I never worked with him. I saw him outside the big boy once with an assistant, and that assistant a male, is the scaredest person I've ever seen in my life. So some of those guys you know right away you're dealing with a predator. We learn to expect that behavior, we learn to expect the monster, and that makes it harder for people who are friends with a person who's not behaving appropriately to see that behavior for what it is.

Speaker 1:

I remember feeling such animosity towards the exec and the showrunner, but the one I felt the most betrayed by, honestly, was you were supposed to be the one protecting me. This was the best you came up with. That was the day I lost my faith, not only in him, but in Hollywood. That was the day I lost my faith not only in him, but in Hollywood. The really sad part of this is it wasn't until a couple years ago that I really started talking about this in a really open way and someone brought up the point. Do you think? He even called the exec, and that was the first time I realized he probably didn't Like, he probably didn't have a conversation with the showrunner. And that's the part that just devastates me. I feel so fucking stupid.

Speaker 2:

These people are never going to have sharp claws and pointed teeth and wolf ears. They're going to look like your good friend and they're mostly going to act like your good friend, and then, every once in a while, they're going to do something completely inappropriate.

Speaker 1:

And it makes me feel like the nobody they claimed me to be. When you're at the point of feeling like you're dirt, then you accept dirt. So it was then that the abuse really started.

Speaker 3:

This has been part one of Portrait of a Survivor. Thank you for joining us. Part two will be released in two weeks. Until then, Cody Vaughn. Special effects provided by ZapSplat and Pixabay. Hollywood Confessional is a Ninth Way Media production. Follow us on socials at FessUpHollywood.