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Morgan Spurlock, ‘Super Size Me’ director, admits to sexual misconduct

FILE - Morgan Spurlock speaks during an In Conversation at the 14th annual Dubai International Film Festival on Dec. 11, 2017 in Dubai, UAE. Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images for DIFF

Morgan Spurlock, the man who brought McDonald’s exposé Super Size Me to theatres in 2004, wrote an open letter on Twitter about his past behaviour with women.

Spurlock openly admits sexual misconduct in his lengthy and detailed letter, saying he’s “part of the problem.”

https://twitter.com/MorganSpurlock/status/941101263252545536

In the letter, Spurlock admits to settling a 2009 sexual harassment claim made by a female office assistant, and reveals that he was accused of rape while in college. He also says he’s been “unfaithful to every wife and girlfriend I have ever had.”

“As I sit around watching hero after hero, man after man, fall at the realization of their past indiscretions, I don’t sit by and wonder ‘who will be next?’ I wonder, ‘when will they come for me?'” he wrote.

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He vividly describes the sexual encounter with the woman, and says he misinterpreted her signals.

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“In my mind, we’d been drinking all night and went back to my room. We began fooling around, she pushed me off, then we laid in the bed and talked and laughed some more, and then began fooling around again,” he wrote. “We took off our clothes. She said she didn’t want to have sex, so we laid together, and talked, and kissed, and laughed, and then we started having sex.”

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Then, he wrote, the woman started to cry.

“[I] didn’t know what to do. We stopped having sex and I rolled beside her,” he wrote. “I tried to comfort her. To make her feel better. I thought I was doing ok, I believed she was feeling better. She believed she was raped.”

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As for the sexual harassment claim, Spurlock comes clean about his mistreatment of his female employee.

“I would call my female assistant ‘hot pants’ or ‘sex pants’ when I was yelling to her from the other side of the office,” he wrote. “Something I thought [it] was funny at the time, but then realized I had completely demeaned and belittled her to a place of non-existence. So, when she decided to quit, she came to me and said if I didn’t pay her a settlement, she would tell everyone. Being who I was, it was the last thing I wanted, so of course, I paid. I paid for peace of mind. I paid for her silence and cooperation. Most of all, I paid so I could remain who I was.”
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Towards the end of the letter, Spurlock says he was sexually abused as a child (without delving into too much detail) and currently has a drinking problem. He concludes with the promise to “do better” and says he’s “ready to listen.”

The future of Spurlock’s upcoming 2018 show, Who Run the World?, is unknown.

Over the past several months, multiple Hollywood figures have been accused of sexual harassment and assault, including producers Harvey Weinstein and James Toback and actors Kevin Spacey and Jeffrey Tambor, among many others. Most of the accused men so far deny any allegations of non-consensual sex.

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