While a guest on The Adam Carolla Show podcast, Kevin Sorbo revealed he’d been sexually harassed by the late Gianni Versace in 1984. The actor, who went from playing Hercules on TV to starring in faith-based films, said the Italian designer initially courted him to appear in his fashion shows: “He wanted to meet me because of my height. At 6-foot, 3-inches, he wanted me to do fashion shows with these 6-foot tall women.”
Versace then invited Sorbo to multiple dinner parties, where the guests included Sophia Loren, Richard Gere, and Luciano Pavarotti. But over time, the guest list shrank until it was just Sorbo and Versace. When the designer proposed casting Sorbo, who was still several years out from Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, in commercials promoting his brand, he followed up his offer by groping the actor. ““All of a sudden, his hand goes up my leg,” Sorbo told Carolla. He immediately told the designer he was straight, but that didn’t seem to matter, as Versace allegedly responded, “This is why I like you. You’re not a girly man. You are a man’s man.”
Sorbo managed to put him off, but not before Versace told him, “in life, you must fuck everything. You must do the dog, and the cat, and the boy, and the girl.” Surprisingly, they ended up friends, with Sorbo appearing in a few fashion shows. Sorbo summed up the harassment by saying, “Casting couches have always been around. I don’t play that game, nor do I care to.”
Sorbo joins the dozens of actors who have shared stories of being sexually harassed on the job and in their personal lives since the New York Times and the New Yorker published in-depth investigations into ousted movie exec Harvey Weinstein’s long history of sexual assault and harassment.