LOS ANGELES: A former employee has accused Michael Douglas of sexual harassment and misconduct in her presence, charges the Oscar-winning Hollywood megastar has vehemently denied.
Douglas, 73, is the latest big-name celebrity accused of seamy behavior since a sexual harassment watershed began with the downfall of movie mogul Harvey Weinstein in 2017.
The actor “thought he was the king of the world and that he could humiliate me without any repercussion,” writer Susan Braudy told NBC News in an interview.
Braudy has accused the double Oscar-winner of using sexually charged language and commenting on her body during the three years she worked at the actor’s New York office of Stonebridge Productions in the 1980s.
Braudy said his abusive behavior culminated in 1989 during a work session in his apartment at the height of his career, after he starred in hit movies including “Wall Street” and “Fatal Attraction.”
She said he “sort of began to fondle himself, and I was very scared.”
Braudy, the author of two non-fiction books, said that she told several friends about the incident — and they urged her to stay quiet.
“One of my friends said you better not tell people about him. People were frightened for me,” she told NBC.
Douglas got ahead of the allegations before they appeared in public, describing them to The Hollywood Reporter as “an unfortunate and complete fabrication.”
The actor told celebrity website Deadline in a Jan. 9 interview: “I can’t believe that someone would cause someone else pain like this.”
“Maybe she is disgruntled her career didn’t go the way she hoped and she is holding this grudge,” he said.
Douglas said that Braudy had never complained — something she denied, even though she acknowledged never reporting the behavior to the police because she said she did not realize at the time that it could be considered criminal behavior.
Douglas’s second wife, Catherine Zeta-Jones, whom he married in 2000, addressed the allegations in a guest appearance on ABC talk show “The View.”
She said she supported “110 percent” the Time’s Up and #MeToo movements against sexual misconduct.
“Michael came out with that preemptive statement. He was articulate, he said it from the heart, was honest, open and transparent. He now has to take the next step for where he goes from here,” she said.
Ex-employee accuses Michael Douglas of sexual harassment
Ex-employee accuses Michael Douglas of sexual harassment
Filipinos master disaster readiness, one roll of the dice at a time
- In a library in the Philippines, a dice rattles on the surface of a board before coming to a stop, putting one of its players straight into the path of a powerful typhoon
MANILA: In a library in the Philippines, a dice rattles on the surface of a board before coming to a stop, putting one of its players straight into the path of a powerful typhoon.
The teenagers huddled around the table leap into action, shouting instructions and acting out the correct strategies for just one of the potential catastrophes laid out in the board game called Master of Disaster.
With fewer than half of Filipinos estimated to have undertaken disaster drills or to own a first-aid kit, the game aims to boost lagging preparedness in a country ranked the most disaster-prone on earth for four years running.
“(It) features disasters we’ve been experiencing in real life for the past few months and years,” 17-year-old Ansherina Agasen told AFP, noting that flooding routinely upends life in her hometown of Valenzuela, north of Manila.
Sitting in the arc of intense seismic activity called the “Pacific Ring of Fire,” the Philippines endures daily earthquakes and is hit by an average of 20 typhoons each year.
In November, back-to-back typhoons drove flooding that killed nearly 300 people in the archipelago nation, while a 6.9-magnitude quake in late September toppled buildings and killed 79 people around the city of Cebu.
“We realized that a lot of loss of lives and destruction of property could have been avoided if people knew about basic concepts related to disaster preparedness,” Francis Macatulad, one of the game’s developers, told AFP of its inception.
The Asia Society for Social Improvement and Sustainable Transformation (ASSIST), where Macatulad heads business development, first dreamt up the game in 2013, after Super Typhoon Haiyan ravaged the central Philippines and left thousands dead.
Launched six years later, Master of Disaster has been updated this year to address more events exacerbated by human-driven climate change, such as landslides, drought and heatwaves.
More than 10,000 editions of the game, aimed at players as young as nine years old, have been distributed across the archipelago nation.
“The youth are very essential in creating this disaster resiliency mindset,” Macatulad said.
‘Keeps on getting worse’
While the Philippines has introduced disaster readiness training into its K-12 curriculum, Master of Disaster is providing a jolt of innovation, Bianca Canlas of the Department of Science and Technology (DOST) told AFP.
“It’s important that it’s tactile, something that can be touched and can be seen by the eyes of the youth so they can have engagement with each other,” she said of the game.
Players roll a dice to move their pawns across the board, with each landing spot corresponding to cards containing questions or instructions to act out disaster-specific responses.
When a player is unable to fulfil a task, another can “save” them and receive a “hero token” — tallied at the end to determine a winner.
At least 27,500 deaths and economic losses of $35 billion have been attributed to extreme weather events in the past two decades, according to the 2026 Climate Risk Index.
“It just keeps on getting worse,” Canlas said, noting the lives lost in recent months.
The government is now determining if it will throw its weight behind the distribution of the game, with the sessions in Valenzuela City serving as a pilot to assess whether players find it engaging and informative.
While conceding the evidence was so far anecdotal, ASSIST’s Macatulad said he believed the game was bringing a “significant” improvement in its players’ disaster preparedness knowledge.
“Disaster is not picky. It affects from north to south. So we would like to expand this further,” Macatulad said, adding that poor communities “most vulnerable to the effects of climate change” were the priority.
“Disasters can happen to anyone,” Agasen, the teen, told AFP as the game broke up.
“As a young person, I can share the knowledge I’ve gained... with my classmates at school, with people at home, and those I’ll meet in the future.”
