This is not James Woods’s best week ever. Two days ago, actress Amber Tamblyn told the world that Woods had attempted to pursue a romantic encounter with her when she was a teenager and he was in his 40s. Now she’s providing details.
Read Amber Tamblyn’s powerful open letter to “predatory man” James Woods
Photo by Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images for Vulture Festival
Constance Grady is a senior correspondent on the Culture team for Vox, where since 2016 she has covered books, publishing, gender, celebrity analysis, and theater.
The whole thing began when Woods — once best known for playing the villain in movies you watched on cable as a child, now best known for making controversial and confrontational statements about the “vile #left” on Twitter, and inspiring absurdist memes — took issue with Armie Hammer’s upcoming film Call Me by Your Name, about a romantic relationship between a 24-year-old man and a 17-year-old boy. “#NAMBLA,” Woods tweeted disgustedly, evoking the pedophilia advocacy organization North American Man/Boy Love Association.
Coming from Woods, who has a history of dating much younger women — he dated 19-year-old Ashley Madison when he was 59, and 20-year-old Kristen Bauguess when he was 66 — that statement seemed a bit blinkered, as Hammer pointed out on Twitter. Then Tamblyn joined the thread to back him up, and then some, adding her own personal experience to the exchange.
Woods denied Tamblyn’s claims on Twitter, but she isn’t backing down: On Wednesday, she published an open letter to James Woods in Teen Vogue, in which she elaborates on her experience with him.
According to Tamblyn’s letter, Woods approached her and a friend in a restaurant parking lot on Sunset Boulevard when she was 16 years old:
At one point you suggested we should all go to Las Vegas together. “It’s such a great place, have you ever been?” You tried to make it sound innocent. This is something predatory men like to do, I’ve noticed. Make it sound innocent. Just a dollop of insinuation. Just a hair of persuasion. Just a pinch of suggestion. “It will be so much fun, I promise you. Nothing has to happen, we will just have a good time together.” I told you my age, kindly and with no judgment or aggression. I told you my age because I thought you would be immediately horrified and take back your offer. You laughed and said, “Even better. We’ll have so much fun, I promise.”
At the time, Tamblyn says, she hadn’t done any acting beyond a few years on a soap opera, so she assumes Woods had no idea who she was when he approached her. (Tamblyn was 20 when her TV show Joan of Arcadia premiered.) “I was just a girl,” she writes. “And I’m going to wager that there have been many girls who were just girls or women who were just women who you’ve done this to because you can get away with it.”
“I see your gaslight and now will raise you a scorched earth,” she writes.
You can read Tamblyn’s full letter to Woods here.
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