Brendan Fraser’s acting career was on the verge of failure in the 2010s. Among the reasons for his disappearance from leading roles in Hollywood are his divorce, the death of his mother and the many surgeries he had to undergo as a result of the dangerous. scenes shot for the trilogy of The mummy.

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Perhaps the situation that most affected his emotional well-being, however, was the alleged abuse he endured at the hands of Phillip Berk, former president of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA), the organization responsible for the Golden Globe Awards.

In an interview with the magazine GQ In 2018, Fraser claimed to have been touched by Berk without his consent after an event at the Beverly Hills Hotel in Los Angeles in 2003. Berk allegedly touched his buttocks and perineum, causing him to panic.

“I felt sick. Like a little boy. I felt like I had a ball in my throat. I thought I was going to cry,” the Jungle George star told the American magazine. He never told because he didn’t want to “face” how it made him feel, or for it to become “part of his story.”

In the same interview, the star of The whale He claimed that the HFPA sent him a letter assuring that Berk would not approach him again.

Berk served as president of the HFPA for 8 terms of one year each and was a member of the organization for 44 years. The South African-born journalist and entertainment executive has served as a film critic for several publications in Malaysia and South Africa, as well as serving as the secretary of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association.

He was expelled from the HFPA in 2021 for emailing a group of association members with an attached article, qualifying the movement Black lives matter as a ‘racist hate movement’. One of the members of the message group leaked the contents of the message and Berk was permanently removed from the association.

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The journalist vehemently denied Fraser’s allegations. In a statement to New York Times, the South African admitted that the actor was lying, and that he sent him a letter anyway, apologizing if he had ever harassed him. Berk admitted that he slapped the Oscar-winning actor on the buttocks in a book about his life published in 2014, but that he did it as a joke.