Molly Shannon was repeatedly and relentlessly sexually harassed by Gary Coleman after their agent left them in a hotel room together, the actress has claimed.
Speaking to Howard Stern on his Sirius show on Tuesday, the 57-year-old recounted the day she met the “Diff’rent Strokes” star for the first time in the late ’80s — and it was not a pleasant encounter.
The “White Lotus” star told the host that she was super excited to have landed the same agent as Coleman, who was a megastar at the time; and when he invited her up to his penthouse suite, she naively didn’t even suspect it was anything sexual.
“I was a virgin, so I wasn’t even thinking about that,” she told Stern. “He held my hand, and I was like, ‘He’s so cute!’ He had a suit on.”
Shannon said Coleman told her she reminded him of Kimberly — his adoptive sister on his sitcom. “And I was like ‘Yes!” My god, if I could only be on Diff’rent Strokes…”
But after reaching the presidential suite, the trio became a duo when the agent — Mark Randall — suddenly left… which Stern suggested was a pre-planned “dark move”. Shannon agreed.
“I think he was like, ‘Sit down [on the bed].’ It was very sweet,” Shannon said. “And then he’s, like, tickling me a little. This and that.”
“I was like Gary stop!” she recalled, laughing. “I was trying to be polite and stuff. I’m a polite Catholic girl, and a virgin. I’m naïve about anything about that.”
But, as Stern quoted from Shannon’s new memoir “Hello Dolly”, Coleman then became “really aggressive, grabbed your ankles” and was “bouncing on the bed and trying to land on top of you.”
“He was relentless,” Shannon said. “Then, he was like trying to kiss me and get on top and I was like, ‘No, Gary. Stop.’ So, I push him off. Then, I would get off the bed. Then, he would bounce on the bed. Jump, jump, jump. And wrap himself around me. Then, I would fling him off. And then he got on top of me.”
“I guess because of his size I didn’t feel physically threatened. But … it was going on and on. Repeating. I would throw him off, he would get back on, throw him off — his dialysis machine was in the room.”
“And then finally, I throw him off. And I’m really getting out of breath because it was athletic and aerobic.”
Shannon said she finally managed to get free, and made a beeline for the bathroom.
“He grabs me onto my leg and I was like [trying to] kick him off,” she recalled. “And then, I go lock myself in the bathroom. And then he sticks his hands under the door. And he’s like, ‘I can see you!'”
She told Stern she eventually managed to sprint out of the bathroom past him — still being very polite — telling Randall as she fled, “you gotta watch that client of yours.”
“I wish I could have stood up for myself more,” she lamented, “but that’s all I said.”
Coleman died in 2010.
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