The Hollywood Reporter’s Tatiana Siegel is back with a scathing follow up story to her original Scott Rudin expose.
Former Rudin assistant Eric Emauni, who now runs the LAByrinth Theater Company, and is Black, says Rudin called the police to have him removed from the office when he made a mistake connecting phone calls.
“Scott says, ‘Somebody call the police on him. Get him out of here,’ ” Emauni tells Siegel. “And it was that moment for me, as a Black man, that I said, ‘I need to remove myself from this space.’ Because, if you can so cavalierly just shout something out like that to your staff, without any consequence to what that means for me, that’s a huge problem.”
Rudin denies the account through his lawyer but Siegel confirmed it, and it doesn’t seem that far fetched. Another assistant talks about being thrown out of a moving car. Another one says that before the first THR expose he was SWAT-ted at home, with police and helicopters surrounding his house. The SWAT team arrived because a fake murder-suicide claim was called into the police. He believes Rudin called it in to intimidate him.
By coincidence, this assistant is Black, too. He has a Black housemate too. “My housemate was taken out of the house at shotgun point. There was a helicopter circling overhead. There were barricades in front of my street,” he said during a panel discussion. “I do not know what the intention [was] of whoever sent that SWAT team to my house — whether it was to intimidate, to dissuade me from further speaking, to have a chilling effect on anyone else who might speak. I don’t know who’s interested in upholding the status quo of how broken this industry is.”
Rudin denies any involvement.
Siegel also writes about Rudin’s current office set up. I told you many times that Rudin’s office is still intact, that his lieutenant Eli Bush is still running the show. Siegel confirms that Bush will continue producing The Lehman Trilogy, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and West Side Story.
“Everyone is perplexed that Eli Bush is nowhere in this reckoning,” one former employee tells her. “He’s like the [Mike] Pence of the whole operation. He’s shared an office with Scott all day every day for over 10 years.”
And so it goes.
