Selma Blair says director James Toback threatened to gouge her eyes out with a Bic pen if she ever spoke about his alleged misconduct, remarks she taped before her own mid-flight assault arrest.
The “Cruel Intentions” actress told host Jenny McCarthy that the encounter came early in her career, when she was in her early 20s, and that the fear kept her silent for years.
Fox News Digital reported that Blair’s podcast appearance was filmed before she was arrested earlier this month on a Delta Air Lines flight to New York’s JFK Airport and arraigned on two counts of second-degree assault.
She pleaded not guilty. A judge set bail at $20,000 cash, $60,000 bond, or a $60,000 partially secured bond. She is expected back in court in January 2027.
The assault case and the old Hollywood claim now sit side by side in public view. One is a pending criminal matter. The other is Blair’s account of what she says a powerful filmmaker did when she was young and eager to please.
Blair described an audition-style meeting in which Toback, an Oscar-nominated screenwriter and filmmaker, told her to perform without clothes.
“I took my clothes off,” she said. She added that he instructed her to “do the monologue naked.”
“I was really uncomfortable. It was really traumatic. I was scared, and I was a people pleaser.”
She also said Toback made disparaging remarks about her appearance, including comments about her hips. “How dare you? Like, how are you going to make someone feel bad?” she recalled thinking.
The threat, in her telling, sealed the silence.
“He said, ‘You know, if you ever tell a soul, I’ll gouge your eyes out with a Bic pen.’ And I believed it and I kept quiet.”
“He really put the fear of God in me in my early 20s,” Blair said, calling him “really, really scary.” She summed up the episode in blunt terms: “It was horrifying.”
In 2017, Los Angeles Times reporter Glenn Whipp detailed sexual harassment accusations against Toback from 38 women. Blair was an anonymous source in that investigation.
Subsequent Los Angeles Times reporting said the number of accusers grew to more than 300. Toback denied the allegations at the time. He said he either had not met the women or did not recall their encounters.
Blair said that denial is what pushed her into the open.
“When I found out he called all these women liars... I was like, oh no, I can’t stand for that. I will no longer be anonymous because he’s not going to do that.”
In October 2017, she and fellow actress Rachel McAdams publicly detailed their allegations against Toback in a Vanity Fair interview. “It was all awful. It was so upsetting and awful,” Blair said of the experience. She also offered a message to others: “You don’t have to do it. You don’t have to do it.”
In 2018, Blair publicly revealed she had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. That health battle has been part of her public story ever since, separate from both the Toback claims and the new criminal case.
The fresh legal trouble is unrelated to the decades-old Hollywood allegations. Authorities accused Blair of assaulting a nurse and a police officer after an incident involving crew members on a Delta flight bound for New York City.
She was arraigned on two counts of second-degree assault, entered a not-guilty plea, and left with the bail package described above. The court date is more than a year out, in January 2027.
Fox News Digital’s account does not spell out the precise mid-flight conduct, any claimed injuries, or a full police narrative. What it does establish is the charge count, the plea, the bail figures, and the next appearance.
Blair’s podcast comments, taped before that arrest, put her old accusation against Toback back in circulation at the same moment she faces her own assault case. Toback’s earlier denial still stands on the record he gave when the Los Angeles Times first published the women’s claims.
Hollywood spent years selling moral lectures while protecting its own gatekeepers; victims, jurors, and flight crews still have to live with whatever the powerful and the famous actually do.
