sexual harassment allegation

Arianne Zucker reaches settlement over sexual harassment allegations

“Days of Our Lives” actor Arianne Zucker has reached a settlement with the producers of the show after her 2024 lawsuit alleging sexual harassment and discrimination on the set of the soap opera.

Notice of the settlement was filed Thursday in Los Angeles County Superior Court. No further details about the settlement were included. Zucker’s attorney could not be immediately reached for comment.

Zucker had starred on “Days of Our Lives” since 1998, playing the character Nicole Walker. In her February 2024 lawsuit, she alleged that now-former executive producer Albert Alarr subjected her and other employees to “severe and pervasive harassment and discrimination, including sexual harassment, based upon their female gender.”

Zucker claimed that Alarr would grab and hug her, “purposely pushing her breasts onto his chest” while moaning sexually, according to the lawsuit. She also alleged that he would make “sexually charged comments” to her.

“Our client continues to deny the allegations set forth in the complaint,” Alarr’s attorney, Robert Barta, said in a statement. “However, in order to bring the litigation to the end, he has agreed to settle. This decision was made solely to end the dispute and move forward.”

Zucker’s lawsuit also named Corday Productions, which oversees the show, and its owner, Ken Corday, as defendants in the lawsuit, alleging retaliation. Zucker alleged that her pay was decreased and her travel stipend revoked after she voiced concerns. In June 2023, she said her character was written off the show after 20 years.

Several months later, Corday Productions offered to renew Zucker’s contract but allegedly did not negotiate with her representatives for higher pay, the lawsuit said.

Attorneys for Corday and Corday Productions did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Corday Productions previously told The Times in a statement that Zucker’s claims “are without merit” and that she was offered a pay increase upon an offer to renew her contract. The company said at the time that complaints about Alarr’s on-set behavior were “promptly investigated” and the company “fully cooperated with the impartial investigation and subsequently terminated Mr. Alarr.”

“Days of Our Lives” aired on Comcast-owned NBC from Nov. 8, 1965, to Sept. 9, 2022, before moving to the Comcast streaming platform Peacock in 2022.

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Jury awards $1.68 billion to 40 women in writer-director James Toback lawsuit

Seven years after a Times investigation into sexual harassment allegations against filmmaker James Toback, a New York State jury has awarded $1.68 billion to 40 women, holding Toback responsible for a pattern of sexual assault, false imprisonment, coercion and psychological abuse.

The jury awarded a total of $280 million in compensatory damages and $1.4 billion for punitive damages to the plaintiffs.

“This will be his legacy, absolutely,” Mary Monahan, one of the plaintiffs, told The Times shortly after the verdict. “It won’t be ‘Bugsy.’ And that is immensely validating. A jury heard us and a jury believed us.”

“We asked the jury very clearly to send a message to the entire industry that the #MeToo movement is unfinished and in some ways forgotten already, and that they needed to hold the line and let everyone from New York to Hollywood to Washington, D.C., and in between, know that this kind of conduct is not OK and will not be accepted, period,” added lead counsel Brad Beckworth in a separate call from his office in New York.

Toback, who earned an Oscar nomination for writing the 1991 crime drama “Bugsy,” did not appear during the weeklong trial in New York state’s supreme court. He twice attempted to have the case dismissed last year. After a judge denied his second request, Toback stopped participating and was not represented in the trial, resulting in a partial default judgment for the plaintiffs.

The lawsuit, filed in December 2022, also originally named the Harvard Club of New York City, a private venue for Harvard University alumni where the suit alleged Toback met several of the women, as a defendant. Subsequently, the social club was voluntarily dismissed from the suit by agreement.

Taking language from The Times’ 2017 investigation, the suit claimed that, for decades, Toback relentlessly coerced women into meetings framed as interviews or auditions that quickly turned sexual.

Twenty women testified in person with another 20 testifying on prerecorded video.

“You feel valued, being able to talk about it,” plaintiff Marianne Hettinger told The Times. “We were all so ashamed. You just don’t talk about it, not even to your family. So to be heard with such humanity and then receive this award … I can’t tell you how healing that feels.”

“The whole week was intense,” Monahan added. “To hear all these women’s stories, it reinforced the feeling of ‘I wasn’t a sucker. I did not ask for this.’ And that is life-changing.”

The lawsuit was filed under New York’s Adult Survivors Act, which, in 2022, opened a one-year window allowing survivors of sexual abuse to file civil claims regardless of how long ago the abuse occurred.

“We had plaintiffs testify the earliest abuse was 1979 and we had plaintiffs who were abused in 2014 so it spanned four decades of people who had kind of been denied that opportunity before the Adult Survivors Act,” said attorney Ross Leonoudakis, a member of the trial team.

The Toback trial is the second notable case to be tried under the law, following author E. Jean Carroll’s 2022 lawsuit against Donald Trump. A jury found Trump liable for sexually abusing and defaming Carroll in 2023, ordering him to pay $5 million in damages. Comedian Bill Cosby, New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and musician Sean “Diddy” Combs have also been sued under the act.

Toback denied the allegations when contacted by The Times in 2017, saying that he had never met any of these women or, if he did, it “was for five minutes and I have no recollection.” He also repeatedly claimed that for the prior 22 years, it had been “biologically impossible” for him to engage in the behavior described by the women, saying he had diabetes and a heart condition that required medication.

In the months following The Times’ investigation, nearly 400 women contacted the news organization with accusations of sexual harassment by him.

Following Wednesday’s verdict, the plaintiffs’ attorneys will now attempt to recover some of the money awarded. But financial restitution wasn’t the primary aim of the lawsuit, Monahan noted.

“It felt really good to be in a courtroom and say, ‘I want James Toback in jail,’” she said. “I realize that the jury cannot do that, but it felt great to be able to say that and be heard. We weren’t doing this for money. We simply wanted justice and now we have it.”

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