David Guillod, who made his mark in Hollywood as a talent manager and the executive producer of the movie “Atomic Blonde,” has been charged with sexually assaulting four women — all of them unconscious at the time — over a period of about three years, the Santa Barbara District Attorney’s office in California said on Monday.
Mr. Guillod, 53, faces 11 felony counts, including rape of an unconscious person and kidnapping to commit rape. Mr. Guillod surrendered to the authorities in Santa Barbara on Monday. His bail was set for $3 million, the district attorney’s office said in news release.
In a statement, a spokeswoman for Mr. Guillod said that “for the past eight years, Mr. Guillod has denied these allegations, and for the past eight years Mr. Guillod has fully cooperated with all aspects of law enforcement’s investigation.”
The statement said that an “overwhelming amount of evidence has been collected over the course of this investigation disputing these charges” and that Mr. Guillod looks forward to clearing his name.
None of the women he is charged with assaulting were named in the criminal complaint.
Mr. Guillod has been trailed by accusations of sexual assault since 2017 when the actress Jessica Barth had accused him — at first without naming him, in a blog post, and later online by name — of drugging and sexually assaulting her when he was her manager in 2012.
He stepped down at that point from his position as co-chief executive of Primary Wave Entertainment, a talent agency, and there were reports that other women had also gone to the police with their complaints.
Most recently, Mr. Guillod served as the executive producer of “Extraction,” a thriller that was released by Netflix in April. “Atomic Blonde,” starring Charlize Theron, was released in 2017.
The earliest assault, according to the complaint, took place in 2012 when Mr. Guillod is said to have penetrated a 33-year-old woman with a foreign object while she was intoxicated. In 2014, Mr. Guillod is accused of kidnapping and raping a 23-year-old woman who was prevented from resisting because she was intoxicated, the complaint said.
Mr. Guillod was also charged with raping two women in their 20s, who were unconscious at the time, on the same day in 2015, the district attorney’s office said.
Several of the assaults described in the complaint would have occurred at a time when Mr. Guillod was working as a talent manager, running his own company, Intellectual Artists Management, which announced its merger with Primary Wave in 2015.
If convicted, Mr. Guillod faces a potential sentence of 21 years to life in prison, the office said.
Though prosecutors in Santa Barbara office are handling the prosecution, a spokesman for the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office said that it had been involved in investigating Mr. Guillod since 2018 because two of the cases were reported in their jurisdiction.
Accusations of sexual assaults by Mr. Guillod surfaced last year in a legal dispute he has had with an actress, A.J. Cook, best known for her role in “Criminal Minds,” a police procedural drama on CBS. The lawsuit erupted after Ms. Cook left the agency as the accounts of several women who said they had been assaulted by Mr. Guillod became known. Primary Wave then sued her, seeking more than $300,000 in commission fees it said she owed.
In her countersuit, Ms. Cook, who had hired Mr. Guillod as her manager, accused Primary Wave and Intellectual Artists Management of withholding information about the sexual assault allegations against him. The lawsuit and countersuit are still pending.
Ms. Cook’s suit said the companies did not disclose information about the accusation by Ms. Barth, who, it said, had initially gone to the police but backed off after Mr. Guillod threatened to sue her.
Ms. Barth resumed pursuing criminal charges in 2017 after she heard about accounts of additional women, the lawsuit said.
The lawsuit also listed accusations that Mr. Guillod sexually assaulted his female assistant when she was inebriated at a company retreat in 2014 and that he had drugged and sexually assaulted a female client and her friend in 2015.
After Ms. Cook filed her lawsuit, a spokesman for Mr. Guillod told The Wrap that Ms. Cook’s countersuit was an “attempt to distract from her own financial liability.”
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
