Male colleague makes police complaint against Craig McLachlan
Image: Image: Studio 10 / YouTube.
A male crew member has joined the handful of female crew members filing police complaints against Australian actor Craig McLachlan.
Last month, actors Erika Heynatz and Angela Scundi made complaints to police alleging that a number of women in the 2014 production of the Rocky Horror Picture Show were subjected to McLachlan touching their genitals, groping their breasts, and exposing himself to them.
And now, a male crew member on one of his shows has approached police as well, though the nature of the complaint is not yet known, according to Stuff NZ.
McLachlan has said that these allegations were “all made up”, and claimed that the women were lying for financial reasons, or to gain notoriety.
Some of the allegations of inappropriate touching is alleged to have occurred when the women were on stage performing, and McLachlan could not be seen by the audience.
More recently, sources have claimed that McLachlan played jokes on male colleagues.
He would ask them to check to see if there was anything on his shoulder, and when they came closer to look, he took the opportunity to grab their genitals.
Australian Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young called out the government for its inaction over the allegations from both men and women.
“Every worker in every workplace deserves to feel safe at work,” she said.
“The protections put in place by the production company and the business appear to have failed these men and women. Their experience is not a one-off. It’s indicative of a pattern of repeated breach and repeated failure and it’s a pattern that has gone on for too long.
“Not every offender will have a Logie, but every victim must have a voice. If they can’t rely on their industry to investigate itself, then they need to be able to rely on their government to put in place an independent commission that is able to investigate on their behalf.
“What is the Turnbull Government doing?”
In light of the allegations, McLachlan has stood aside from the current production of Rocky Horror, which opened on New Year’s Eve in Adelaide.
Rocky Horror is a scripted musical. Bullying and sexually assaulting cast members is not part of the script. What happened was a gross abuse of power by an individual who, according to his own recollection in Molly Meldrums autobiography, exposed himself and sexually harassed Molly while Molly was on stage, in the narrater’s role.
Of FFS, this is all around the production of the Rocky Horror Show. Seriously? If this behaviour was on the set of just about ANY OTHER show, I would say, sure, speak out but some of these “actors” were complaining that Frankenfurter was behaving inappropriately on stage during the show. This has to be a joke. Did they audition for the wrong show? Did they not know what the Rocky Horror Picture Show was? These people need to make another career choice if they were seriously offended by the antics of the main character that the rest of the world would have expected nothing less from. These people are not doing any favours for the true cause or the real victims of predatory behaviour in the workplace.