Steven Seagal responded to sexual misconduct accusations against him by saying women have “lied and been paid to lie about me without any evidence, any proof, any witnesses.”
“This is just a complete tragedy,” the action star told “InfoWars” host Alex Jones on Monday. “This isn’t just me but hundreds of people around the world,” he said, adding that “many of those people are completely innocent.”
“I can tell you that 40 percent of these claims are false,” he added, without elaborating on how he arrived at that particular figure.
“There is a whole force of people gathering around the world now putting in lots of money and lots of time investigation people who are coming are coming after us,” Seagal added in a remote interview from Japan. “The people who are being paid to lie and the people who are paying them to lie are going to be exposed.”
Seagal did not respond to attempts to contact him last week when TheWrap reported the account of Regina Simons, a woman who said Seagal raped her in 1993 while she was an extra on his film “On Deadly Ground.” Her mother, a bishop at her church and a therapist, among others, corroborated that Simons had shared her story with them.
Seagal chose Jones’ conspiracy-minded “InfoWars” to break his silence. In a lengthy interview, which covered everything from Vladimir Putin to the “deep state” to the so-called “gay-mafia,” Jones claimed that he was contacted by “former high-level people in the CIA and others, saying, ‘Hey Steven Seagal wants to talk to you and we need to get him on to counter the narrative.’”
TheWrap first reported Thursday that the Los Angeles Police Department has opened an investigation into Seagal on a separate sexual misconduct case from 2005. The department declined further comment.
Simons and another women recently filed complaints against the actor with the LAPD. Simons said Seagal invited her to his home in Beverly Hills in 1993 after she appeared as an extra in his movie “On Deadly Ground.”
“He took me into this room and then just closed the door and started kissing me,” she told TheWrap. “He then took my clothes off and before I knew it he was on top of me, raping me… I wasn’t sexually active yet. People always talk about fight-or-flight. But no one talks about the freeze.”
Simons is one of more than a dozen women who have accused Seagal of sexual misconduct, but she appears to be the first to publicly accuse him of rape. Dutch former model Faviola Dadis told TheWrap she filed a report about Seagal with the LAPD in the last month. Dadis said he groped her during an audition in 2002.
The LAPD detective who Seagal and Dadis said they spoke to declined to comment, citing confidentiality.
On Monday, ex-Bond girl Rachel Grant accused the actor of sexual assault in 2002 during a film rehearsal in Bulgaria.
Through his lawyers, who spoke with the BBC, the action movie star has denied Grant’s assault accusation as well as another claim by the actress that he tried to expose himself.”I want to share what happened to me, so people will hear it and others might come forward,” Grant told the BBC.
You can watch the full interview with Seagal above.