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Hollywood’s sexual harassment scandal just keeps growing

Hollywood agent Adam Venit took a leave of absence from the WME agency Friday after he was identified as being the man who actor Terry Crews said sexually assaulted him at a party, Variety reported.

Crews first went public with his story back in early October, shortly after the New York Times and the New Yorker published bombshell reporters detailing accusations that Harvey Weinstein had sexually harassed or assaulted multiple women.

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A “high level Hollywood executive came over 2 me and groped my privates,” Crews tweeted. The executive, who Crews didn’t name, “called me the next day with an apology but never really explained why he did what he did.”

Venit is only the latest Hollywood resident to get caught up in the wave of sexual violence accusations that have poured out since the reports about Weinstein first broke. On Wednesday, the Los Angeles Times reported that director and producer Brett Ratner had sexually harassed six women; actress Natasha Henstridge, who is among those women, said he forced her to perform oral sex on him. Ratner denied any misconduct.

Los Angeles Times reporter Amy Kaufman tweeted Friday that since the story ran, more than 45 women had come forward with their own allegations against Ratner.

Actor Dustin Hoffman was also caught up in the growing Hollywood scandal, when Los Angeles writer Anna Graham Hunter said Wednesday that Hoffman sexually harassed her when she was 17 years old, working on the set of the 1975 TV movie “Death of a Salesman.” In letters to her sister at the time, published in the Hollywood Reporter, Hunter detailed the time Hoffman “felt [her] ass four times,” asked her repeatedly whether she’d had sex recently, and told another employee he wanted to eat “your left breast” for lunch.

“Today, I realized some things about this business that scare me. First of all, Dustin’s a lech. I’m completely disillusioned,” she wrote on Jan. 31, 1985. “After Tootsie, I thought I wanted to marry him.”

Wendy Riss Gatsiounis, who is now a producer on a National Geographic show, told Variety Wednesday that she’d had a similar experience with Hoffman in 1991. In a meeting supposedly set to discuss turning a play she’d written into a vehicle for Hoffman, Gatsiounis said Hoffman repeatedly tried to get her to visit a hotel with him and asked her, “‘Have you ever been intimate with a man over 40?’”

Hoffman apologized for Hunter’s experience, saying that he “[feels] terrible for anything I might have done that could have put in a an uncomfortable situation, and said he didn’t recall the meetings with Gatsiounis.

Kevin Spacey, who actor Anthony Rapp said Sunday had made a “sexual advance” on him when Rapp was just 14, also faced further repercussions this week. British police are investigating a claim that Spacey sexually assaulted a man in 2008, according to the Guardian, while several past and former coworkers on his show House of Cards told CNN Friday that Spacey harassed people so frequently it created a “toxic” work environment.

Netflix is now reportedly considering writing Spacey out of House of Cards entirely.