Maggie Gyllenhaal has spoken out about the sexual assault allegations made against her co-star, James Franco.
Maggie is one of the producers on HBO’s The Deuce and stars alongside James on the show.
The 40-year-old has now spoken out about the multiple sexual assault allegations made against the actor, as she stated that she felt like it was her duty to ensure that the women on-set felt comfortable working with James.
“I felt it was my responsibility to do the opposite of ignore it,” she told Sway Calloway on his SiriusXM radio show.
“At the time that the accusations against James came out in the LA Times, we read them all, we took them very seriously,” the actress continued.
“We spoke to every woman on the crew and in the cast to find out if they felt respected and what their experience of working with James was and everyone said that they had been totally respected by him,” the mother-of-two said.
The actress/producer also stated that she felt that cancelling The Deuce would be a mistake as the sitcom is about misogyny.
“I feel like it would’ve been the wrong consequence to those accusations to shut our show down. It would’ve been, like, the opposite of the right thing to do,” she told the radio host.
In Busy’s upcoming autobiography, This Will Only Hurt a Little, the actress claimed that James assaulted her on-set after a director told her to lightly hit him on the chest during a scene.
“He grabbed both my arms and screamed in my face, ‘DON’T EVER TOUCH ME AGAIN!’ And he threw me to the ground. Flat on my back. Wind knocked out of me,” she claimed.
