Maggie Gyllenhaal Has Revealed How She Handled Co-Star James Franco’s Sexual Assault Allegations

The world is back talking about James Franco following Busy Philipps allegations that he physically assaulted her on the set of Freaks and Geeks.

James was previously accused of sexual assault by five women, and now his co-star/producer of HBO show The Deuce has spoken out about how she handled the allegations.

The 40-year-old actress opened up about James to Sway Calloway while on his SiriusXM show Sway in the Morning on Tuesday.

Sway asked Maggie how the allegations against James affected their relationship and the show.

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“Do you talk to him about it? Do you ignore it? What do you, what do you do under those circumstances?” he asked her.

Maggie answered that as a producer, she felt it was her responsibility to do the opposite of ignore it.

“You know, we at the time that the accusations against James came out in the LA Times we read them all, we took them very seriously,” she said. “We spoke to every woman on the crew and in the cast to find out if they felt respected and what their experience of working with James was and everyone said that they had been totally respected by him.”

The Deuce follows the beginning of the sex trade industry in New York City in the early 1970s. Maggie also spoke about what their show was about when it came to addressing the allegations against James.

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“For me, I would say another thing that was really important was our show is about, like I said, it’s about misogyny,” Maggie said. “It’s about transactional sex. It’s about inequality in the entertainment business. You couldn’t be more at the centre of that conversation than The Deuce.”

“To me, I thought I want to keep telling this story, I want to keep playing Candy and going deep into, like, really what it’s like from a woman’s perspective to be dealing with all the stuff that is on everybody’s minds right now,” she continued.

“I feel like it would’ve been the wrong consequence to those accusations to shut our show down. It would’ve been like actually the opposite of the right thing to do,” Maggie added. “And yet, you know, look, I believe that there should be consequences for disrespecting or assaulting women. Of course, I do.”

James Franco has denied the allegations made against him.

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• James Franco
• Maggie Gyllenhaal