Director Bryan Singer sued for allegedly sexually assaulting a 17-year-old
Cesar Sanchez-Guzman claims the director assaulted him on a yacht in about 2003.
— -- Director Bryan Singer has been sued for allegedly sexually assaulting a 17-year-old boy more than a decade ago, ABC News has learned.
Cesar Sanchez-Guzman claims in a new court document that in about 2003, during a party on a yacht in Washington State, Singer lured him into a bedroom and demanded sex from him. When he refused, Singer pushed him on the bed and sexually assaulted him, the lawsuit says.
Afterward, Sanchez-Guzman said the director offered to help him get into acting in exchange for his silence, according to the court documents.
"He then told Cesar that no one would believe him if he ever reported the incident, and that he could hire people who are capable of ruining someone's reputation," the lawsuit reads. "The sexual abuse has caused Cesar to experience severe psychological, mental and emotional injuries, shame, humiliation, and loss of enjoyment of life. These injuries are persistent, permanent and debilitating in nature. Cesar did not discover the casual connection between the sexual assault and his injuries for which this claim is brought."
He is seeking unspecified damages.
A representative for Singer, 52, said in a statement, "Bryan categorically denies these allegations and will vehemently defend this lawsuit to the very end.”
Sanchez-Guzman is represented by Jeff Herman, the same attorney who worked with previous Singer accuser Michael Egan. In 2014, Egan sued four men, including Singer, accusing them of sexually assaulting him in 1999 when he was a minor. Egan later dropped that suit, and, according to the Los Angeles Times, in a letter to two of the other defendants in that case, Herman apologized for participating in “making what I now know to be untrue and provably false allegations against you.”
The statement from Singer's representative also addresses Herman: "The attorney behind this lawsuit is the same lawyer who represented Michael Egan, the convicted felon who sued Bryan Singer in 2014. In the end, Egan was forced to dismiss that case once the facts came out and his story completely fell apart."
"Notwithstanding his track record, this same lawyer is coming after Bryan again. We are confident that this case will turn out the same way the Egan case did. And once Bryan prevails, he will pursue his own claims for malicious prosecution," the statement concluded.
