‘Orange Is The New Black’ Actress Yael Stone Accused Geoffrey Rush of Misconduct

Orange Is the New Black‘s Yael Stone accused Academy Award-winning actor Geoffrey Rush of inappropriate behavior and harassment in a new interview with the New York Times. 

In the piece, Stone recalls working with Rush during the first Australian staging of The Diary of a Madman in 2010 and 2011. She said that while they worked on the production, Rush would sleep next to her uninvited, dance naked in front of her, and once used a mirror to spy on her in the shower. 

Stone said that she did her best to keep from protesting over Rush’s behavior at the time because she was a young actress while Rush was already a titan in the business. She also noted that Australia’s punitive libel laws make it frightening to come forward with an allegation. 

In Australia, the burden of proof in a defamation suit rests with the defendant, who must prove that their published allegations are true. The country also doesn’t have a higher standard for public figures like in the U.S., where a famous plaintiff must prove that a publisher acted with “actual malice” and a “reckless disregard for the truth.” 

“I know I have truth on my side,” Stone told Weiss. “[Y]ou can see in all of my communications with you that there’s an element of terror.”

Stone said the inappropriate behavior began with text messages.

“Gradually the text messages became more sexual in nature, but always encased in this very highfalutin intellectual language,” she said. “I’m embarrassed by the ways I participated…I certainly wouldn’t engage as the person I am now in the way I did when I was 25.”

Stone said that Rush engaged in “strange intimacies in the dressing room” leading up to the incident where he peered in on her in the shower. 

“I remember I looked up to see there was a small shaving mirror over the top of the partition between the showers and he was using it to look down at my naked body,” she recalled. “I believe that it was meant with a playful intention, but the effect was that I felt there was nowhere for me to feel safe and unobserved.”

In a statement to the Times, Rush called the allegations “incorrect” and that they had “been taken completely out of context.” 

“Clearly Yael has been upset on occasion by the spirited enthusiasm I generally bring to my work,” he wrote. “I sincerely and deeply regret if I have caused her any distress. This, most certainly, has never been my intention.”

Rush has already been accused of acting inappropriately with other stage actors. The Daily Telegraph published the accusations of Eryn Norvill, who performed alongside Rush in a 2015 production of King Lear. Norvill made her complaints to the theater company in private and her name was not published in the story. However, she was dragged into the spotlight when Rush sued and the Telegraph‘s parent company, Nationwide News, submitted her name in their defamation defense.

Norvill told a similar story to Stone’s and said that she was afraid to come forward because of Rush’s outsized stature in the Australian theater world.