Heather Graham says playwright Israel Horovitz forced a kiss on her decades ago after she dated his son, Beastie Boys star Adam Horovitz.
Graham said on the latest edition of Marc Maron’s “WTF” podcast, which posted Monday, that she dated the younger Horovitz, a.k.a. Ad-Rock, when she was 18 or 19, around the time she appeared in the 1989 Gus Van Sant film “Drugstore Cowboy.”
“After I dated Adam and we broke up, I auditioned for one of [the elder Horovitz’s] plays and after the audition… he was like, ‘Let me walk you out’ and so he gets in the elevator and then he just pushes me against the elevator, sticks his tongue down my throat,” Graham told Maron.
“I feel like he might have said something about, like, ‘What are we going to do about us?’ And I was just like, ‘What are you talking about?’ And then I just got out of the elevator and I just never talked to him again. And then I heard him saying later, like, ‘Heather’s so ungrateful,’” Graham said.
Horowitz, 78, is best known for the plays “The Indian Wants the Bronx” (which starred Al Pacino in 1968) and “Park Your Car in Harvard Yard.”
TheWrap made several unsuccessful attempts to reach Israel Horovitz for comment on Monday. Emails bounced back, and a rep for the talent agency he lists on his website, CAA, said he was not a client.
TheWrap also called two numbers listed for him. A man who answered at the first number declined repeatedly to give his name, listened to a detailed description of Graham’s accusations, and then said it was a wrong number. A subsequent call to another number listed for Horovitz went unanswered.
The New York Times reported in November that nine women had accused Horovitz of sexual misconduct. One, Maddie Corman, said that when she was 16 and performing in one of his plays, he pressed her against a wall and forcefully kissed her just before she went on stage.
Another woman, Jocelyn Meinhardt, told the Times she was 19 and in a summer fellowship at the Gloucester Stage Company in Massachusetts, where Israel Horovitz was artistic director. The woman said Adam Horowitz had been her high school boyfriend. She said that one night the elder Horovitz drove her to his family’s home, locked the door, kissed and fondled her, and then took her to his bedroom and raped her.
Israel Horovitz responded to the Times that he had “a different memory of some of these events.”
“I apologize with all my heart to any woman who has ever felt compromised by my actions, and to my family and friends who have put their trust in me. To hear that I have caused pain is profoundly upsetting, as is the idea that I might have crossed a line with anyone who considered me a mentor,” he said.
His son, Adam Horovitz, said in a statement of the accusations in the Times: “I believe the allegations against my father are true, and I stand behind the women that made them.”
The Boston Phoenix published a story in 1993 in which six women, none of whom were identified by name, said Israel Horovitz had sexually harassed them. One woman who spoke to the Phoenix said he had “a tendency to French-kiss actresses.”
Graham stars in the new comedy “Half Magic,” which deals with workplace sexual harassment.
She also spoke to Maron about sexual harassment by Harvey Weinstein, which she has discussed previously. Graham said that in the early 1990s, Weinstein suggested they worked together, showed her several scripts and said that he and his wife had an arrangement in which he was allowed to have sex with other women when he was away from home.
Graham said she got out of the situation as quickly as she could.