Less than a week after being fired from his Freddie Mercury biopic Bohemian Rhapsody, director Bryan Singer has once again come under fire for allegations of sexual assault against a teenage boy. According to Deadline, Singer is now being sued by a man named Cesar Sanchez-Guzman, who says the X-Men director raped him during a yacht party in 2003, when Sanchez-Guzman was only 17. The lawsuit alleges that Singer not only violently assaulted Sanchez-Guzman after luring him into a darkened room, but threatened to destroy his reputation if he ever came forward about the event. According to the suit:
Later, Bryan Singer approached Cesar and told him that he was a producer in
Hollywood and that he could help Cesar get into acting as long as Cesar never said anything
about the incident. He then told Cesar that no one would believe him if he ever reported the
incident, and that he could hire people who are capable of ruining someone’s reputation.
As the extraordinarily depressing “again” in this story’s headline suggests, this isn’t the first or even second time that Singer has been accused of behavior of this ilk. Multiple young men have come forward over the years with allegations that the director treated them in a similar manner at parties apparently organized to connect young gay men with older, more powerful men. All of them eventually dropped the charges, while a 1998 lawsuit alleging that Singer forced young extras to strip naked for a shower sequence in his film Apt Pupil was ultimately tossed out by the courts.
You can read Sanchez-Guzman’s full lawsuit here, but please be aware that it contains a series of fairly graphic descriptions of Singer’s alleged behavior.