Excerpted from Variety: Hollywood executives Garth Ancier, David Neuman and Gary Goddard have been accused of sexually abusing teenage boys in lawsuits filed Monday in Hawaii federal court.
“I would not wish on my worst enemies what I went through,” declared plaintiff Michael Egan at a Monday news conference at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills.
Ancier is the former president of BBC Worldwide America and also served as head of programming for Fox, NBC and the WB. He’s also the head of year-old Quad Media Partners, formed to launch four fully curated linear TV networks, “each built around a modern decade in broadcast and cable network television.”
Neuman, the former president of Disney TV, previously worked for Digital Entertainment Network, which was headed by Marc Collins-Rector, who was cited as being involved in the sexual activity at the heart of Egan’s original lawsuit against director Bryan Singer.
Goddard heads a design firm in Los Angeles that has created theme park attractions for Universal Studios. He also heads The Goddard Group, which has produced live shows on and off Broadway.
Alan Grodin, an attorney for Goddard and a partner at Weintraub Tobin Chediak Coleman Grodin, issued a statement: “Gary Goddard is out of the country and we have not seen the complaint. Based on what we have heard, the allegations are without merit. Once we have seen the complaint we will respond appropriately.”
Ancier did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
As with the suit against Singer, Egan made four claims against each of the three execs — intentional infliction of emotional distress, assault, battery and invasion of privacy by unreasonable intrusion. Each of the suits recounted in explicit detail the sexual acts that took allegedly place between Egan and each of the men in Hawaii in 1999.
“Somebody has to stand up to these people,” said the 31-year-old Egan.
The filings were unveiled at a news conference Monday at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills by attorney Jeff Herman, Egan and his mother.
“It’s not about money, it’s about disarming these powerful pedophiles,” the alleged victim’s mother, Bonnie Mound, told reporters through tears.
The new lawsuits were filed five days after “X-Men: Days of Future Past” director Singer was accused of sexually abusing a teenage boy in 1999 in a suit filed in the same court. Egan claims he was 15 years old when Singer forcibly sodomized him, among other allegations.
Bryan Singer’s attorney, Marty Singer, has called the lawsuit “absurd and defamatory” and has promised that he will file a countersuit.
Herman is a sexual abuse attorney based in Boca Raton, Fla., who also represented the plaintiffs accusing Elmo puppeteer Kevin Clash of sexual abuse. The three Clash cases were thrown out last July because the claims were made more than six years after each man reasonably should have become aware of Clash’s alleged violations and over three years after each turned 18.
Herman had said last week that he expected to file additional cases against alleged perpetrators by April 24 in Hawaii. That is the cutoff date for old sex abuse cases to be filed under a two-year window established by the state legislature.
Singer’s attorney claims the filmmaker has documents to prove that in late 1999 he was not Hawaii but in Toronto, shooting the first “X-Men” movie, which would disprove Egan’s account of sexual abuse.
“We want to see those documents,” Herman said in response on Monday, adding that he has witnesses to prove that Singer was in Hawaii at the time of the alleged incidents. Keep Reading
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