Oscar-Winning Actor Timothy Hutton Raped Me When I Was 14, Says Canadian Ex-Model
Sera Johnston says she’s a survivor who just wants to speak her truth. His representatives say she’s a liar who just wants money.
www.buzzfeednews.com
Hutton and his legal team's response:The trio of junior high girls had only been chatting with Timothy Hutton for a little while when he suggested they join him and his friends at his hotel. It was 1983 in Vancouver, and for Sera Johnston, 14 years old and already a working actor, it was a dream, a chance to hang out with her Oscar-winning idol, who was in town to shoot the movie Iceman. As for what guys in their twenties might want out of girls her age, she didn't give it much thought.
"It was like we were entertaining them — cute. We were funny, you know what I mean?" Johnston told BuzzFeed News.
But when they got to Hutton's room, she said, the situation didn't seem so innocent anymore. Johnston recalled Hutton and his friends offering the girls drinks. She nervously took a seat near the television.
Hutton sat down next to her.
"He was getting very close to me, like, you know, really kind of sidling up to me, and petting my legs and stuff," she said. "I was just, like: I think this is going to be bad. I was really wrong about this."
Johnston doesn't remember how she was led to Hutton's bedroom, but said he asked whether she had ever had sex. Another man, Hutton's friend, came into the room.
Johnston said she told them things like "I don't think this is a good idea" and "I don't think my mother would be too happy about this." She said she wanted to leave. "To everything I would say, it was, 'It'll be OK, it'll be OK. It won't last long, and you'll be fine.'" Hutton was kissing her neck, Johnston said. She felt frozen in fear.
Johnston, who late last year filed a criminal complaint against Hutton with the Vancouver Police Department, remembers the two men talking her through what they were going to do to her in an "almost ritualistic" way as they undressed her "like a doll."
Corroboration of her recollection of events by key people.Hutton "completely and unequivocally denies" Johnston's allegations. In a statement, his lawyer said the actor, whose series Almost Family concluded its first season on Fox in February, has never met Johnston at all and "will not spend one more minute dignifying these allegations as they are patently false and designed only to extort money from him." As for her story, he says she has "provided salacious, heinous, and graphic details of this made-up sexual encounter that supposedly occurred 36 years ago. Although these were disgusting details any smut fiction writer could conjure up," there is no evidence to support them. Hutton's attorney further said Johnston's story is "fabricated" and contains "patently false, scurrilous, and defamatory statements."
To counter her claims, Hutton has enlisted two law firms and three spokespeople. The actor's representatives have provided BuzzFeed News with an extensive array of information, including a 91-page letter (which they said may not be quoted), meant to discredit Johnston and halt this article.
The substance of their argument: Johnston is a liar who's trying to shake Hutton down.
As proof, they cite the fact that she didn't raise the issue until 2017, 34 years after she claims the incident took place — and when she did raise it, she hired a lawyer to pursue a financial settlement rather than going to the police. They point to the fact that she has no eyewitness to the alleged assault itself. Most damning of all, they said, is the fact that last March, an ex-boyfriend of hers reached out to the man she said assaulted her alongside Hutton and offered to personally broker some sort of deal.
Johnston agreed that her friend's actions look bad. "It put me in a very difficult situation," she said.
But as for seeking a financial settlement, Johnston points out that Hutton did in fact agree to a payment, albeit for $135,000 — far less than the $1.5 million her lawyer proposed.
After signing the initial documents, however, she walked away from the deal. She said she couldn't stomach the terms of the agreement, which includes Hutton's denial that anything happened at all.
Hutton's representatives said she was just mad she wasn't getting more money.
She knows people will judge her for her decisions. And with so many stories in the media about celebrities and sexual assault, she worries that hers may not be dramatic enough to make strangers care.
"As weird as this sounds," the former child actor said, "you feel like you have to audition your rape: Do you like this?"
In a separate interview, one of the two friends whom Johnston said she was with that night broke down in tears as she shared her recollection. Decades had passed since the two were last in touch, but when first asked about Johnston, she replied, "Would this have to do with the actor from Iceman?"
The woman asked that BuzzFeed News refer to her only by her initials, C.B., to spare her the angry reprisals that women have experienced after accusing prominent men of assault. But she used her full name to sign an affidavit attesting to her recollections under penalty of perjury.
She corroborated Johnston's account of the three girls hanging out together, then eventually hopping on a bus to go to Hutton's hotel room.
The two women's recollections differ in some details — whether there was music playing, whether the room was divided with full or partial walls — but C.B. said she saw Johnston go off with Hutton and another man for what C.B. thought at the time was voluntary sex.
Her legal efforts, stymied by a bad legal team and a terrible decision by a friendThroughout the years, however, she did tell several people in her life.
BuzzFeed News spoke with five of them: a friend she told only a few days after the night in question, Johnston's mother, and three more friends. They all, separately, confirmed that she told them Timothy Hutton had raped her in his hotel room. And when Johnston initiated legal action, her ex-stepfather gave a statement that many years prior, he too had heard Johnston's account of the events in the hotel room.
The lawyer who represented Johnston in the resulting mediation had access to a summary of an interview with an actor named Réal Andrews. The one-page document states that though Andrews had no knowledge of the alleged rape, he did see Johnston and her friends in the hotel room.
Andrews did not respond to multiple inquiries for this article. But when BuzzFeed News contacted Hutton's representatives to discuss the allegations, something unusual happened: A law firm sent over a sworn statement from Andrews that starkly refuted those remarks.
Andrews' new statement said he was "not aware that Ms. Johnston was ever in Mr. Hutton's hotel room with Mr. Hutton" or that Hutton "ever had sex with her or did anything inappropriate to her." As for the private investigator, "I told him that I do not remember Ms. Johnston being in Mr. Hutton's hotel room."
After being informed that BuzzFeed News was reporting this story, Hutton spoke with the FBI — according to his spokesperson, to report Johnston for attempted extortion. (The FBI said it cannot confirm or deny the existence of any investigations. Johnston said she has not been contacted.)
In October, a representative of Hutton's, who stipulated that they could not be identified by name or directly quoted, met with BuzzFeed News to deliver what they said was important information about Johnston. The representative wrapped up the conversation with a question: What good does it do the public to publish a story about something from 36 years ago?
Johnston said that although she had been assaulted by two men at the same time, her lawyer told her they would focus on Hutton, who in the mid-2010s had appeared in three seasons of the acclaimed TV drama American Crime and the movie All the Money in the World.
"I was asked initially what I wanted to do, what I was looking for, in terms of reparations," she said. "Or did I even want reparations — did I want just an apology? Did I want him to donate some money to something that I cared about? I was asked to think about all that. And I felt for the first time in a long time, that's refreshing — what do I want?" But before she had offered a response, she said, she was informed "'Jeff is going for $1.5 million and there's going to be a mediation.' And that was it." (Herman declined to speak with BuzzFeed News about Johnston's case.)
Hutton's legal team regarded Herman's proposal as "little more than an extortive threat." But they set a date for mediation, a few months later, in Los Angeles.
At first, Johnston said, the mediation was cordial, with the two sides sitting in separate conference rooms, and a retired judge shuttling between them. But then she said she agreed to permit Hutton's attorneys to question her directly.
She said the first question was, What color panties were you wearing that night in 1983 — if you were wearing any at all? and that Hutton's lawyer went on to ask a series of leading questions: Did you have a gun to your head? Was anyone physically restraining you? Could you see the door?
The lawyer who represented Hutton in those negotiations said, "we and Mr. Hutton completely deny Ms. Johnston's characterization of what occurred at the mediation."
After a lunch break, Johnston said, Herman announced that their case had hit a major snag: Hutton's lawyers had informed him that in 1983, the age of consent in Canada was 14. (It has since risen to 16.)
Johnston said that in light of the age-of-consent issue, her attorney advised her to take the money. But she was bewildered: Rape is rape, she thought, regardless of age. And if Herman saw things differently, why didn't he check the law beforehand?
Herman declined to comment on the proceedings, as did the retired judge who oversaw them.
Hutton's representatives have said the $135,000 was "a nuisance settlement and should be a strong indicator of how the credibility of Ms. Johnston and her fictitious claim was perceived at the mediation by all in attendance."
A separate representative for Hutton pressed his case even further, stating that, during the mediation, Johnston brandished her phone and threatened to call the press if she didn't get a bigger settlement, and that Johnston acknowledged she had not, in fact, been raped.
Johnston said those are lies. She spoke only briefly, and only to her lawyer, about going public with her story. As for the suggestion that she consented to sex with Hutton and his friend?
"Oh my god, no," she said. "I'm getting angry about this, I'm sorry."
Johnston still had the option of going to the police and reporting a crime — there is no statute of limitations in Canada for rape. She thought that Hutton would be grateful to her for choosing a more discreet option. But the settlement offer felt less like gratitude than contempt. And she felt pressure to sign right away.
Distressed and anxious to get out of the mediation chambers, Johnston said she decided, "'Fine, fuck it.'" She signed the initial agreements and went home.
But by the time the final papers arrived, with their carefully worded denial of wrongdoing, she had changed her mind. She wanted no part of it.
"It was the indignance and the attitude that I was so angry about," she said. "That tells me that you don't even realize what you've done. You don't care. It doesn't matter."
Her lawyer called a number of times to ask her to sign the papers. But she ignored him.
After weighing her options — and inspired by the women who told their stories in the documentary about R. Kelly and the Atlantic article about the director Bryan Singer — she decided to go public.
As she was working out how to tell her story, however, something happened that, she readily acknowledges, hurts her credibility: McKinley Hlady, a friend of hers whom she'd once dated, took it upon himself to try to broker some sort of meeting — not with Hutton himself, but with the second man who Johnston said raped her that night in the hotel room.
In a series of meandering emails, Hlady seems to suggest that he could help Hutton's friend avoid unpleasant publicity, telling him, "I can help avoid it all as she is still questioning whether she wants to be a part of a media storm."
"I intend to just state facts," Hlady also wrote, "as a guy to a guy what the situation is as I currently see it, ahead of things snowballing heavily."
Hlady now says he was just trying to help Johnston, by finding out if the man felt any remorse.
Hutton's representatives attributed a different motive. In a July letter, they said they'd hired an investigator to help them "navigate what, in our opinion, was the latest extortion attempt by Ms. Johnston."
Johnston said she reluctantly joined in on phone calls to discuss reaching out to Hutton's friend, and only belatedly became aware of the extent of Hlady's outreach over email. Mortified, she said she told him to terminate the communication, which he did.
"I was pissed off," she said. "It put me in a shitty position."
