Natalie's sister Lana spoke of the rape on a podcast and daughter Natasha Gregson Warner was thought to have confided in Robert Downey Junior.
Wiki has been editing Natalie's entry today.
Suzanne Finstad's 2001 biography of Wood alleges that she was raped by a powerful actor when she was 16. Through the recollection of Wood's close friends, which included late actors Scott Marlowe and Dennis Hopper, Finstad summarizes:
Though her five close friends' memories of some details or timing differ after forty-five years, the essence of what each recalls Natalie confiding to them is the same: that the same married film star lured or tricked Natalie, raped her so brutally she was physically injured, and she was too frightened or intimidated to report it to the police. Natalie "hated" her former screen idol afterwards, "shuddering" if she heard his name. She would keep the horrible secret, and behave as if nothing happened whenever their paths intersected, too schooled by Mud [her mother] in the politics of Hollywood to cross a powerful movie star.
In 2018, Lana Wood said during a 12-part podcast about Wood's life that the attack occurred inside the Chateau Marmont during an audition and went on "for hours". According to professor Cynthia Lucia who studied the attack, Wood's rape was quite brutal and violent.
So some entitled old white dude reaches the ripe age of 103 without ever being investigated for alleged crimes of his youth while being lauded as a legend ary rapist
I'll pass. And the Oscars would do well to mention him on the list of departed but not give him his own special fanfare if they have any sense.
It is Kobe Bryant all over again - adulation and eulogies all over whilst passing over reporting well established allegations from their past because we are schooled not to speak ill of the dead. Kirk's autobiography shows how how he treated women.
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As I said when I posted about Kobe Bryant - who had also been a philanthropist and later championed women's sport as well as being an alleged rapist for which he apologised to the victim - you can be both things.
So yes Kirk Douglas might have been a good actor and broken the blacklist by having Trumbo credited for Sparticus but neither prevent him from also being a shit.
Simon Armitage puts it beautifully in Poem, the idea of a person being both good and bad and being measured accordingly. If you believe in St.Peter and all that you believe in a reckoning. If you don't then you live on in how people remember you. Some will remember KD as a Hollywood great, others as a disgusting individual...or both.
And if it snowed and snow covered the drive
he took a spade and tossed it to one side.
And always tucked his daughter up at night
And slippered her the one time that she lied.
And every week he tipped up half his wage.
And what he didn't spend each week he saved.
And praised his wife for every meal she made.
And once, for laughing, punched her in the face.
And for his mum he hired a private nurse.
And every Sunday taxied her to church.
And he blubbed when she went from bad to worse.
And twice he lifted ten quid from her purse.
Here's how they rated him when they looked back:
sometimes he did this, sometimes he did that.
Simon Armitage