Director Paul Haggis Arrested in Italy for Sexual Assault
Haggis had been accused of rape in 2018, with the resulting lawsuit prompting three other women to come forward with their own allegations of misconduct.
The Oscar-winning director and screenwriter Paul Haggis was arrested in the southern Italian city of Ostuni on Sunday after a “foreign woman” claimed he had held her in his hotel room and forced her to have sex over the course of two days, police in the regional capital of Brindisi confirmed to The Daily Beast.
The alleged sexual assault victim is an unidentified, non-Italian woman. According to a local prosecutor, Haggis is charged with having “non-consensual relations” with the woman while he was in Italy for the international music and film festival Allora Fest had had been billed to headline with Oliver Stone, Matt Dillon, Edward Norton, and Marisa Tomei.
The Italian police report indicates that, after assaulting her, Haggis allegedly took the victim to the airport to fly her out of Italy. When she resisted, he abandoned her there despite her alleged compromised physical and psychological states.
A police source told The Daily Beast that the woman may have been working the festival as a sex worker.
At the airport, employees helped the woman to nearby police officers, who then took her to hospital where staff underwent the protocol for rape victims.
Haggis, who wrote Million Dollar Baby and directed Crash, has been accused of assault before—in 2018, he was sued for an accusation of rape, motivating three other women to come forward with sexual misconduct allegations. Haggis has denied all of the allegations as a civil trial has continued.
In a statement written in Italian, the Allora Fest said it "will immediately eliminate any participation of the director from the event. At the same time, we express full solidarity with the woman involved in the matter. The themes chosen for the Festival are those of equality, gender equality, solidarity. As professionals and women we are dismayed and hope that the Festival will be an instrument of information and awareness on such a topical and dramatically increasing theme.”