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Michael Chabon ‘Ashamed’ He Didn’t Speak Up About Scott

Pulitzer-winning creator and screenwriter Michael Chabon has damaged his silence on Scott Rudin, saying that he’s “ashamed” for not talking up about Rudin’s “abusive behavior” towards staffers after 20 years of working with the EGOT winner.

Though Chabon mentioned he didn’t witness most of the tales which have been described within the current Hollywood Reporter exposé and elsewhere, writing that he by no means noticed Rudin use “vulgar or demeaning epithets” or trigger bodily harm. But he mentioned he usually witnessed Rudin’s outbursts and anger and acted as if nothing had occurred. He acknowledges that it doesn’t exonerate him for not talking out, and that he “knew enough.”

“Reading the accounts of Scott Rudin’s present and former employees, of the abuse they suffered and were expected to endure at Scott Rudin Productions, has broken my heart,” Chabon wrote in a weblog put up Friday. “In the roughly twenty years that I regularly collaborated with Scott, I worked with and got to know many of his employees – a generation of them – from the VPs, to the researchers, to the assistants who worked the phones. I remember Kevin Graham-Caso – he was a sweetheart – and it was a gut-punch to learn, from his brother David’s recent video, about his suicide, following years of struggle with PTSD.”

TheWrap has reached out to a rep for Rudin for a request for remark.

Chabon had labored with Rudin courting again to the 2000 movie adaptation of considered one of his novels “Wonder Boys.” He additionally collaborated with him on “The Mysteries of Pittsburgh,” and Rudin as soon as held the rights to “Yiddish Policemen” and Chabon’s greatest work, “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay,” for which Chabon gained the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Rudin additionally optioned Chabon’s first screenplay way back to 1994.

Chabon’s assertion comes after an April 7 THR article through which former assistants and staffers accused Rudin of bodily and psychological abuse, together with smashing a pc monitor on an assistant’s hand and throwing objects. Since then, Rudin has introduced that he could be stepping again from his Broadway productions and movie and streaming initiatives, which embrace the revival of “The Music Man” and 5 completely different A24 movies.

Chabon says he at one level witnessed Rudin berate an worker and throw a pencil that struck the again of the staffer’s head, however that Rudin shortly after referred to as Chabon into his workplace and behaved as if nothing had occurred.

“I saw him throw the pencil, I’m certain, only because he didn’t know I was out there in the waiting area,” he wrote. “In my presence, Scott’s behavior was relatively controlled, his criticisms and castigations were offered in a tone that could pass for ‘bantering.’ Sometimes when he didn’t like what he was hearing – a party couldn’t be reached, a restaurant had closed early – his face would flush with anger and I could see him working hard to keep a lid on himself.”

Chabon mentioned he additionally seen the demeanor of Rudin’s LA places of work change as soon as the producer took up residence in New York towards the latter a part of the ’90s.

“‘You seem good,’ I remember saying to one of his LA development guys in that era, resuming work with him after an interruption of several months,” Chabon wrote. “‘That’s because I’m here,’ he replied brightly, ‘and Scott isn’t.’”

Chabon added that even within the early days of working with Rudin, he took as a right his habits and by no means used his affect to guard any of the younger staff or ask Rudin to cease. He additionally addressed the video through which Rudin was accused of bullying a former assistant, Kevin Graham-Casio, who later took his personal life.