PEOPLE IN THE NEWS
Gooding faces new charges, potential parade of accusers
Cuba Gooding Jr. now faces a growing cast of sexual misconduct accusers, with prosecutors Tuesday unveiling new criminal charges against the actor and telling a judge they intend to have up to a dozen women testify that he violated them, too.
Gooding pleaded not guilty in New York City to an indictment that included the new charges, which allege he pinched a woman’s buttocks at a Manhattan nightclub in October 2018.
Gooding, 51, was arrested in June after a 29-year-old woman told police that the “Jerry Maguire” actor squeezed her breast without her consent at another Manhattan night spot.
In 2001, prosecutors said, Gooding approached a woman from behind, rubbed his groin and pelvis against her buttocks and then grabbed her buttocks and breast. The woman said she hadn’t talked to Gooding before that.
Gooding’s attorney, Mark Heller, said overzealous prosecutors are looking to turn “commonplace gestures” into crimes.
Hollywood ‘fixer’ Scotty Bowers, author of tell-all book, dies
Scotty Bowers, a self-described Hollywood “fixer” whose memoir offered sensational accounts of the sex lives of such celebrities as Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, died Sunday at his Los Angeles home. He was 96.
Bowers wrote that he was working at a gas station on Hollywood Boulevard in 1946 when actor Walter Pidgeon drove up in a shiny Lincoln and asked, “What are you doing for the rest of the day?”
“The gas station was the portal that eventually took me into an exclusive world where high-class sex was everything,” Bowers wrote in “Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars.”
Bowers wrote of orgies with Cole Porter, “sexual mischief” with Grant and actor Randolph Scott, and sexual encounters with Vivien Leigh, J. Edgar Hoover and Spencer Tracy. Critics were skeptical, and Tracy biographer James Curtis dismissed Bowers as “full of glib stories and revelations, all cheerfully unverifiable.”