Director and producer Bryan Singer is being sued for allegedly raping a 17-year-old boy.
Singer, best known for directing several X-Men films, is accused of raping the boy at a party in 2003. The alleged victim, Cesar Sanchez-Guzman, filed a lawsuit against the director on Thursday. Singer has denied the accusations.
Sanchez-Guzman said in the lawsuit that he met Singer at a yacht party in Seattle more than ten years ago. While giving Sanchez-Guzman a tour of the yacht, Singer reportedly “lured” him into a room, “shut the door and demanded that [Sanchez-Guzman] perform oral sex.” When Sanchez-Guzman refused, Singer “forced him into acts of oral and anal sex.”
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Following the incident, Singer reportedly told Sanchez-Guzman 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.” The lawsuit says that Singer warned him not to report the incident, since Singer could “hire people who are capable of ruining someone’s reputation.”
Singer’s attorney says that the director he will “vehemently defend this lawsuit to the very end,” and that Singer plans to “pursue his own claims for malicious prosecution.”
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This is not the first time Singer has been accused of sexual assault. The Los Angeles Times notes that Singer was accused in separate lawsuits to have “raped and sexually assaulted boys” in Hawaii and London in 2014. Singer denied these claims at the time and the lawsuits were voluntarily dismissed.
Earlier this week, Singer was fired from directing Bohemian Rhapsody, a biopic about the band Queen, after failing to return to set after Thanksgiving. Singer was reportedly dealing with a “personal health matter.”