Angelica Huston Defends Accused Predators Tambor, Polanski, Allen

Academy Award winner Angelica Huston has come to the defense of accused sexual predators Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, and Jeffrey Tambor (with whom she worked on Transparent before he was dismissed for alleged sexual misconduct with two trans women including actress Trace Lysette).

During a lengthy interview with Vulture, the Hollywood legend weighed in on topics as far-flung as her 1986 Oscar race, during which she won over Oprah Winfrey, and her affair with Ryan O'Neal.

While much of the interview reads like delicious fodder, Huston's opinions around sexual predators proved out of step with the era of #MeToo.

Huston appeared on Transparent as a love interest for Tambor's Maura, the matriarch of the show's dysfunctional family who transitioned later in life.

Amid the deluge of #MeToo allegations in the fall of 2017, two transgender women associated with the show that offered so much representation on and off screen for trans people accused Tambor of sexual harassment.

In early November of that year, Tambor's former assistant Van Barnes alleged in a private Facebook post that her employer had "behaved inappropriately" with her, although she did not directly name him. She said that she was forced to listen to porn at a high volume as well as endure comments that implied "I should be sleeping with him if I want a Hollywood industry appropriate pay grade."

A few weeks later, Lysette accused Tambor of making lewd and suggestive remarks to her and of pressing his penis against her on set.

"So far as I was concerned, nobody did or said anything inappropriate. I do think in this work we have to feel freedom. We have to feel as though we can say and do things that are not necessarily judged, particularly by the other people in the cast or crew," Huston said of working on Transparent before offering up a defense of Tambor based on her personal experience.

"He certainly never said or did anything inappropriate with me," Huston said.

The actress who famously dated Jack Nicholson was at his house the day Polanski drugged and raped 13-year-old Samantha Geimer, but Huston saw it as just par for the course.

"It's a story that could've happened 10 years before in England or France or Italy or Spain or Portugal, and no one would've heard anything about it. And that's how these guys enjoy their time. It was a whole playboy movement in France. It was de rigueur for most of those guys like Roman who had grown up with the European sensibility," Huston said.

But her defense of the Chinatown director didn't end there.

"My opinion is he's paid his price, and at the time that it happened, it was kind of unprecedented," Huston said of Polanski pleading guilty to "unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor."

"This was not an unusual situation," she added. "But these things happen, that's what I'm saying. These things weren't judged on the same basis that they're judged on now. So you can't compare them."

Regarding Allen, whose adoped daughter Dylan Farrow accused him of raping her when she was 4, Huston said that separate investigations found no proof and that she would work him again "in a second."

"Two states investigated him, and neither of them prosecuted him," said Huston, who starred in his films Crimes and Misdemeanors and Manhattan Murder Mystery.