Paul Schrader, editor of the taxi driver and director of the American Gigolo, was accused in a trial of having sexually assaulted his former personal assistant, the licensee when she would not accept advances and the René in a regulation which was supposed to keep the allegations confidential.
The former assistant, identified in court documents like Jane Doe, continued the filmmaker and his production company on Thursday. She requests the order of a judge to enforce the agreement after Schrader said he could not pass it. Conditions, including monetary payment, have not been disclosed.
“This is a case of applying open and closed regulations,” wrote the lawyer for Doe, Gregory Chiarello, in court documents accompanying the complaint to the breach of contract.
Schrader’s lawyer, Philip J Kessler, judged the trial “desperate, opportunistic and frivolous” – and said that many allegations are false or deceptive.
“We deny absolutely that there was never a sexual relationship of all kinds between Mr. Schrader and his former assistant, and we were sailing that Mr. Schrader has ever tried to have sex of all kinds with his former assistant,” said Kessler.
The trial, filed before a New York court, highlighted allegations according to which the confidential settlement between Doe, 26, and Schrader, 78, had been intended to stay under the Wraps.
They include his assertion that the filmmaker trapped him in his hotel room, caught his arms and kissed her against his will last year when they promoted his latest film, Oh, Canada, at the Cannes Festival in France.
Two days later, the trial said, Schrader called Doe on several occasions and sent his angry SMS by saying that he was “dying” and could not pack his bags. When Doe arrived to help, said the trial, Schrader explained his genitals to him as he opened the door of his hotel room with nothing other than an open bathrobe.
Doe alleges that Schrader dismissed her last September after she rejected her advances again. Shortly after, said the trial, he sent him an email expressing his fear of becoming “a Harvey Weinstein” in his mind. Weinstein, the film’s magnate that became villain #MeToo, was found guilty of rape in Los Angeles in 2022 and awaits a new trial of April 15 in his case of rape in New York.
According to the trial, Schrader accepted the rules on February 5 but changed his mind after a disease and a “soul search”. Schrader transported through his lawyers in March that he “could not live with the regulations,” said the trial. Kessler challenged it.
“The agreement they are trying to apply against Mr. Schrader, in simple English, forced both parties to sign it before becoming legally effective,” said Kessler. “Mr. Schrader refused to sign it. It’s frankly as simple as that.”
Doe worked for Schrader from 2021 to 2024, according to the trial. Meanwhile, said Kessler, she posted on social networks how much she loved her work and qualified Schrader as an extraordinary mentor and “my man”.
Schrader became famous thanks to his collaborations with the director Martin Scorsese, starting with the taxi driver in 1976. Robert de Niro’s emblematic line “You Talkin ‘to Me?” is seized in the lexicon and classified among the greatest quotes of films of all time in the American Film Institute.
Schrader co-wrote the boxing drama of Scorsese in 1980, Raging Bull, with De Niro and the author of his religious epic of 1988 The Last Tempation of Christ and his paramedical drama of 1999 bringing out the dead.
He also made 23 of his own films, including American Gigolo from the 1980s, which he also wrote. He obtained his only appointment to the Oscars for writing First Reformed, a 2017 thriller on a minister of the small town he also directed.
Schrader told the Associated Press last year that he had made Oh, Canada – the film which said that Doe had brought them to Cannes – when he reconciled his own mortality after a series of hospitalizations for Long Cavid.
In 2016, Schrader told Hollywood Reporter that the police had visited him after placing Facebook about the first presidency of Donald Trump. Schrader wrote that Trump’s election was “a call to violence” and said people should be “prepared to take up arms”.
In 2023, he ransacked the Oscars as a “awakening” break with diversity efforts and more international voters. And in 2021, following #MeToo, he criticized what is called “cancel the culture”, saying on the deadline that it was “so contagious, it’s like the Delta virus”.
“If your friend says:” They say these terrible things about me that are not true “, you are afraid of coming to their defense, because you could also catch this virus,” Schrader told the entertainment media.
