The #MeToo scandal for actor Chris Noth got a whole lot bigger on Thursday when a fifth woman accused the Sex and the City star of sexual assault.
Appearing alongside attorney Gloria Allred, singer Lisa Gentile alleged in a video press conference that Noth “forcibly” groped her nearly 20 years ago in 2002 when she invited him up to her apartment.
According to Gentile, she and Noth met in 1998 at the Da Marino restaurant in New York City, a business he regularly attended and where they “became acquaintances,” often having conversations about their careers in show businesses. However, on one Saturday in 2002, their friendly relationship allegedly took a dark turn when she invited him up to her apartment.
“We were all hanging out at Da Marino around midnight, I was getting ready to leave. [Noth] offered me a ride home, and I said, ‘OK,’” Gentile recalled. “When we arrived at my apartment. He asked if he could come up. I told him I had nothing to offer him to drink, and he said, ‘That’s OK.’ He just wanted to see where I lived.”
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Upstairs, Gentile claimed that she and Noth hung out in the kitchen while he insisted on seeing the rest of her apartment, something she says she did not feel comfortable with. When Noth went to the restroom, Gentile says she poured him a glass of old box wine that she found, and as he returned, Noth immediately begin to kiss her, leaning her “against the kitchen countertop,” forcibly pulling her against his body.
“He was slobbering all over me,” Gentile said, adding that he became “more aggressive and put both hands on my breasts and began squeezing them very hard over my shirt.”
“He quickly went under my shirt and began squeezing them even harder over my bra with his fingers grabbing the exposed skin not covered by my bra,” she recalled. “Then he pushed my bra up with both of his hands.”
As Noth struggled to force her hands into pulling off his shirt, Gentile says she managed to spring from his intense grasp as she yelled, “No, I don’t want this!” Noth, she claims, became “extremely angry and started screaming and calling me a tease and a bitch.” When Noth left the apartment, Gentile said she relayed the ordeal to her roommate. The next day, he called her on the roommate’s landline and issued a warning.
“He warned me that if I ever told a soul about what happened the night before that he would ruin my career — that I would never sing again and that he would blacklist me in the business,” she alleged.
On Wednesday, Heather Kristin, who served as a stand-in for Sex and the City over several seasons, also alleged that Noth exhibited “toxic behavior” on set all too frequently that the crew witnessed.
“The first time the ‘alpha male’ actor slid his hand down my back and over my butt, I flinched,” she said. “I was in my mid-20’s and had worked as an extra on movie sets for over a decade; I had never been manhandled. ‘That’s your spot, sweetie,’ Noth said, inching even closer.”
In an article for The Hollywood Reporter last week, two anonymous women – “Zoe” and “Lilly” – claimed Chris Noth sexually assaulted them, once in Los Angeles in 2004 and the other in New York City in 2015.
Shortly after the accusations, Law & Order actor Zoe Lister-Jones also accused Noth of sexually inappropriate behavior while being drunk on set several years ago.
Noth maintains that the accusations against him are categorically false, saying that all his sexual encounters were consensual.
“The accusations against me made by individuals I met years, even decades, ago are categorically false. These stories could’ve been from 30 years ago or 30 days ago — no always means no — that is a line I did not cross,” he said. “The encounters were consensual. It’s difficult not to question the timing of these stories coming out. I don’t know for certain why they are surfacing now, but I do know this: I did not assault these women.”
Chris Noth has since been fired from the CBS crime drama The Equalizer and dropped by his agency, A3 Artists.
When pressed by reporters on Wednesday about the allegations, Noth said: “You have my statement right? My statement is out, I rest by my statement. I’ll now let the chips fall where they may. My statement is my statement, that’s all I can give.”