More women accuse Dustin Hoffman of sexual harassment: 'I felt like I'd been raped'

Three more women have accused Dustin Hoffman of sexual harassment and one of them claims that she felt like she had "been raped" by the actor. Melissa Kester, who works as a producer of corporate instructional videos, claims "he put his fingers inside me," in a recording room.

Hoffman's attorney Mark A Neubauer of Carlton Fields Jordan Burt, however, wrote to Variety owner Penske Media Corp calling the accusations against the actor "defamatory falsehoods."

Kester told Variety that the incident took place during the making of the American action-adventure-comedy film Ishtar, which was released in 1987.

After two formal meetings at a Malibu studio, their third encounter apparently turned unpleasant after he flirtatiously asked her to join him in the recording room while doing a vocal track. Since her then-boyfriend was present at the studio, she sportively joined him.

"I'm standing there, and it's kind of a small room, and he grabs me, so we're both facing out so we're both facing the people in the studio. I felt awkward. It's a little weird. He's hugging me while he's singing. But ha ha ha, it's all a joke. My boyfriend is right there," she recalls.

Kester alleges that the Kung Fu Panda voice actor later inserted his fingers inside her. "He literally just stuck his fingers down my pants," Kester said. "He put his fingers inside me. And the thing I feel most bad about is I didn't know what to do. I just stood there. I just froze in the situation like 'Oh my god, what is happening?' It's shocking when that happens to you."

The producer claims that he kept his fingers inside her for 15-20 minutes until he completed the take. The incident left her shattered and she "ran out of there, and I sat in the bathroom crying. I thought, 'Oh my God.' I felt like I'd been raped. There was no warning. I didn't know he would do that."

Another woman, Cori Thomas, told Variety that she met the actor for the first time in 1980 when she was 16 and studying together with his daughter Karina at the United Nations International School in New York.

Recalling that first meeting with the Academy Award-winning actor, she told the news outlet: "This was at first one of the greatest days of my life. One of my idols was spending time with me and talking with me respectfully."

However, things took an awkward turn after he sent his daughter home from their hotel room "because it was a school night and she had homework," and Thomas was "left in the hotel room with him alone".

"I was just sitting there waiting for my parents. He came out of the bathroom with a towel at first wrapped around him, which he dropped," Thomas claimed. She was left "mortified" as Hoffman allegedly told her "'I'm naked. Do you want to see?'"

"He was standing there naked. I think I almost collapsed, actually. It was the first time I had ever seen a naked man. I was mortified. I didn't know what to do. And he milked it. He milked the fact that he was naked. He stood there. He took his time. I didn't know what to do in the circumstance," she added.

She claims she was saved when her mother phoned to say she was waiting to pick her up at the hotel lobby. "What saved me was that the phone rang, and it was my mother downstairs to pick me up. So I left. I was humiliated. My mother always had some instinct that something untoward had happened. She kept asking me, and I was so mortified, I never said anything."

Another woman, who prefers to stay anonymous, accused the actor of assaulting her while working on Ishtar.

Meryl Streep has previously accused Hoffman of groping her breasts during their first meeting when she was auditioning for a play that he was directing.