As reported by Jezebel, No Time To Die director Cary Joji Fukunaga (who also ran the first season of HBO’s True Detective and Netflix’s Maniac) has been accused of sexual harassment, including allegedly “grooming” young women. The allegations initially came from actor Rachelle Vinberg, who felt compelled to go public with her experience with Fukunaga after he posted something on Instagram about the leaked news that the Supreme Court was getting ready to overturn Roe v. Wade.
In a post of her own, Vinberg said that Fukunaga “literally doesn’t care about women” and “only traumatizes them,” adding, “I’ve spoken to many girls. Fuck you Cary.” She also posted a photo of herself with him and the caption: “I spent many years scared of him. Man is a groomer and has been doing this shit for years. Beware women.”
Vinberg subsequently explained that she met Fukunaga while shooting a commercial just after she turned 18, claiming he befriended her and—as Jezebel puts it—“often messaged her via Instagram” to talk about “loneliness and his past romantic history.” She also claims that, when they were in public together, he would tell her to lie about who she was and say she was “his cousin, or niece, or sister.” She says they eventually became “completely fully intimate,” though he allegedly told her to keep their relationship a secret because otherwise “it would look bad for him.”
Since then, Vinberg says she has been diagnosed with PTSD and claims that “there are plenty of people that work for him that know that he’s a predator and they all talk about it amongst themselves behind his back” without doing anything else. She also says that she has tried to reach out to him in the past to get him to acknowledge his “accountability,” but she says he “basically brushed me off.”
Vinberg’s allegations later prompted twins Hannah and Cailin Loesch (who worked with Fukunaga on Maniac) to come forward with allegations of their own, saying they met Fukunaga when they were 20 and that he allegedly “pursued” them for several years after. In their own social media posts, they claimed that Fukunaga invited himself to their family home, and while sitting with them in a hot tub, asked if they’d be interested in a threesome and allegedly said that incest is okay “if all parties are okay with it.”
The sisters say that Fukunaga later invited them to his penthouse to watch No Time To Die before it was released, and after the movie ended he allegedly grabbed one of them and pulled her on top of him. They left, later telling him that they would no longer be speaking to him, and he allegedly responded by asking if they knew “how bad this would look” if they went public with their accusations.
Representatives for Fukunaga have not responded to a request for a comment. A representative for Vinberg declined to comment to The A.V. Club.