Amber Tamblyn has even more to say on the subject of James Woods, calling him a “silencer” for denying her accusation that he hit on her when she was only 16.
“Since you’ve now called me a liar, I will now call you a silencer. I see your gaslight and now will raise you a scorched earth,” she wrote.
Gaslighting is a practice in which abusers try to make their targets question their own sanity. (In a widely shared essay last year, Teen Vogue writer Lauren Duca accused President Trump of gaslighting the whole country.) In her open letter, Tamblyn goes into details of her accusation against Woods — to send a signal that her memory is crystal clear.
She says that the incident occurred at Mel’s Diner on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood with her friend Billy — and specifically recalled that she had just gotten her driver’s license. Tamblyn said they had just finished seeing a band perform and that Woods stopped them as they left. After some talk in which she recalled Woods initially seeming “very nice,” she said, Woods suggested they should all go to Las Vegas.
“It will be so much fun, I promise you. Nothing has to happen, we will just have a good time together,” she described him saying.
When she brought up her age, she expected him to be “horrified,” she said, but he replied: “Even better. We’ll have so much fun, I promise.”
Tamblyn’s Twitter exchange with Woods began this week when she responded to a thread between Woods and actor Armie Hammer, who’s starring in the gay coming-of-age film “Call Me By Your Name.” In a tweet Monday, Woods likened the relationship between the film’s two main characters to pedophilia. Hammer replied with, “Didn’t you date a 19 year old when you were 60…….?”
He was referring to Woods’ reported relationship with Kristen Bauguess, who was actually 20 at the time they began dating in 2013. Woods was 66.
Lena Dunham, Don Cheadle and Tamblyn’s husband David Cross, along with masses of people on Twitter, have tweeted in support of Tamblyn and shared their own stories about Woods.
“So it is with hope, Mr. Woods, that I ask you to go inward now and ask yourself the hard stuff. The ominous unconscious stuff. The archetypal masculinity stuff. The power-play stuff. The perversion persuasion stuff. The secretive stuff. The id’s most cherished stuff,” Tamblyn continued in her open letter.
The letter follows a Tamblyn tweet that warned Woods, “Calling me liar, James? This is now far from over. That I can promise.”
You can read the full letter over at Teen Vogue.