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Eliza Dushku has posted a powerful and detailed account of how she was groomed and abused at age 12 by a stunt coordinator on her film True Lies, a man named Joel Kramer. It’s a heart-wrenching story of a young girl targeted by a predator. Dushku says that, after a friend of hers confronted Kramer about the abuse, she not-so-coincidentally suffered an accident on set, breaking her ribs. It was Kramer’s job to ensure her safety and the very day her friend told him to stop she had an “accident.” It’s a difficult story to read and it may be triggering to some. I’m just excerpting the first part of it here. You can click through to Eliza’s Facebook page to read the whole story.
Kramer has issued a response to Dushku and he’s despicable, just know that. If you want to stop reading now I wouldn’t blame you, I have a hard time re-reading Eliza’s story and it got worse for me when I saw this garbage person’s response.
“This is all vile lies,” Kramer, 60, told Us, denying that he was alone in a hotel room or taxi with her, as she alleged. “I never molested this young woman, ever. Who in their right mind would do that and then still work with someone another six months or seven months or however long we had left to work together, wouldn’t that be a little weird?”
“I talked to the stunt people on the [film] and asked did Eliza get hurt, because I don’t remember her getting hurt. When you harness someone you can get bumps and bruises, but I don’t remember her breaking any ribs and all of a sudden she is viciously attacking me,” he said. “We all treated Eliza like family. I just don’t get the vicious outright lies…”
Kramer told Us that a woman who worked with Dushku, 37, as a teacher or a manager on the set told him that the pre-teen was infatuated with him.
“She said, ‘Look, Eliza has a big crush on you, she is always asking me, ‘Oh, I bet Joel is dating all the women,’ ‘I bet Joel is screwing a lot of women,’ so I said then we have to be careful with this one,” he told Us. “At that age they are impressionable and my job as a stunt coordinator was to get Eliza to trust us, because she has to do stunts, she has to be in harnesses. Stunt doubles did all the big stunts, Eliza did close-ups on camera, we wanted her trust and we treated her like family. I just don’t know what is going through her mind.”
Kramer said he is now considering legal action.
“I probably have to. I am angry, I am just hurt,” he told Us. “This is just out of nowhere and she has put out what she is going to say, so it is a he said, she said.”
“My career is done,” he added. “She just ruined me.”
This man is a total piece of sh-t. I completely believe every word of Eliza’s account without this, but his retort against Eliza, along with his disgusting claim that she had a crush on him, just vindicates her that much more. This abuser is painting himself as a victim and is showing his true colors. Kramer’s agency, WPA, has announced that they’ve dropped him. I hope this man is blacklisted from his industry and while I don’t want him to have other victims, I hope that if they are out there (they’re out there) they will have the courage to speak up. This entire story makes my stomach churn and goes to show how predators operate, how they justify their behavior, and how they blame the innocent children they abuse. I’m so sorry to Eliza that this happened to her, and I’m so sorry to all the victims. We hear you and we are here for you.
Meanwhile the director of True Lies, James Cameron, and Eliza’s costar, Jamie Lee Curtis, have responded to this story. First here’s what Cameron said, in part, At a Television Critics Association event:
“Directors are historically pretty oblivious to the inter-personal things that are happening on the set, because they’re focused on what they’re doing creatively, but had I known about [it] there would have been no mercy. I have daughters. There really would be no mercy now.
“Eliza is very brave for speaking up. It’s just heartbreaking that it happened to her.”
He also warned predators that “there will be consequences.” In Jamie Lee Curtis’s essay, available on Huffington Post, she wrote that Eliza told her that story “years ago” and she echoed Cameron’s sentiment that she hopes “all abusers will be held accountable.”
Eliza’s mother has also responded to this, particularly to internet complaints that she didn’t protect her daughter. She wrote on Facebook (via People) “I accept your condemnation as Eliza’s mother,” adding that Eliza didn’t tell her the whole story at the time and that it wasn’t until “years later that I finally understood fully what really happened.” This whole story is just devastating. Incidentally last year Eliza revealed that she’s been sober for almost nine years after battling drug and alcohol addiction since the age of 14.
