UTA is no longer representing Danny Masterson, who has been accused of rape by four women, The Hollywood Reporter has confirmed.
The accusations have been publicly known since March 2017, when news surfaced that the Los Angeles Police Department was investigating the reports of three women who said they were sexually assaulted by the actor in the early 2000s. That investigation later added a fourth accuser, according to a Huffington Post report by Yashar Ali. Masterson has denied all rape allegations and said that any sexual encounters were consensual.
Whereas Netflix fired Kevin Spacey from House of Cards five days after Anthony Rapp accused him of sexual assault, the streaming platform had Masterson and his The Ranch co-star Ashton Kutcher announce Oct. 17 that the fourth installment of the comedy would be released Dec. 15, and there had been relatively little activity and few headlines around Masterson amid the sexual-assault reckoning that has exposed and quickly toppled industry figures including Spacey, Louis C.K. and Jeffrey Tambor over the past three months.
That changed Dec. 4, when Ali reported that one of Masterson’s accusers approached a Netflix executive at a soccer match between their children and asked why the company had not acted in light of the LAPD investigation. The exec, director of global kids content Andy Yeatman, did not realize the woman was one of the four accusers and told her that the company did not believe the accusations. The story gained traction and Netflix announced the next morning that it had fired Masterson from The Ranch.
In October, UTA informed Bill O’Reilly that it would not continue to represent him in television after The New York Times reported that one of his many settlements of sexual harassment claims included a $32 million payment. WME also dropped the former Fox News host for literary projects. Spacey was dropped by Polaris PR and CAA, which also parted ways with journalist Mark Halperin after he was accused of sexual harassment. And C.K. lost his agency (APA), management (3 Arts) and publicist (Kovert Creative’s Lewis Kay) a day after The New York Times published multiple on-the-record sexual-misconduct allegations against him.
