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Brendan Fraser says he won’t attend next year’s Golden Globes, even if he’s nominated for his acclaimed performance in The Whale, after having alleged that he was sexually assaulted by the former president of the organisation that runs the awards.
In 2018, Fraser publicly alleged that Philip Berk, a longtime Hollywood Foreign Press Association member and a former president of the organisation behind the Globes, once groped him at a lunch in Beverly Hills, in 2003.
Fraser has said that the alleged incident was a factor in why he disappeared from Hollywood for so long: “I was blaming myself and I was miserable – because I was saying, ‘This is nothing; this guy reached around and he copped a feel.’ … it made me feel reclusive.”
In 2018, Berk called Fraser’s account “a total fabrication”, but acknowledged he had written an apology to Fraser over the incident at the time. After an internal investigation, conducted when Fraser went public, the HFPA concluded in that Berk had “inappropriately touched” Fraser, but said Berk’s action “was intended to be taken as a joke and not as a sexual advance.
