Hollywood Producer Scott Rudin Outed as an Abusive Jerk

The Hollywood Reporter has come out with a damning expose of uber-producer Scott Rudin, who has been long known by insiders to be a world class asshole.  

The piece opens with an incident from Halloween in 2012, when Rudin went over the deep end after one of his assistants failed to get him a seat on a sold-out flight. In a fit of fury, it is reported that he smashed an Apple computer monitor on the assistant's hand. The screen shattered, leaving the young man bleeding and in need of immediate medical attention. The wounded assistant headed to the emergency room while Rudin called his lawyer.  Everyone else huddled in the conference room, shaken.

"We were all shocked because we didn't know that that sort of thing could happen in that office," says Andrew Coles, a then-assistant and now-manager and producer. "It was a very intense environment, but that just felt different. It was a new level of unhinged — a level of lack of control that I had never seen before in a workplace."

For decades, Rudin's abusive behavior has been chronicled— even celebrated— by a complicit press.  In a 2010 profile, the Hollywood Reporter dubbed him "The Most Feared Man in Town" and called him "dazzlingly charming" one paragraph after describing acts of cruelty and intimidation. In a 2005 Wall Street Journal profile with the headline "Boss-zilla!," Rudin himself pegged the number of assistants he burned through in the previous five years at 119.

But in October 2017, Harvey Weinstein was toppled from power following reports of his sexual predation, ushering in the entertainment industry's #MeToo era. But there has been no reckoning for 62-year-old Rudin, one of the industry's most high profile producers.  Even as others have been canceled or have dialed back their aggression, Rudin's behavior has continued unabated, leaving a trail of splintered objects and traumatized employees in his path.

Caroline Rugo had expected a grueling environment when she joined Scott Rudin Productions as an executive coordinator in the fall of 2018. She accepted that her days began at 5 a.m., fielding emails before reporting to the New York office at 6. Given that she suffers from Type 1 diabetes, Rugo needed to carve out 30 minutes a day for exercise and provided a doctor's note signed off on by Rudin that allowed her to work out from 5:30 a.m. to 6 a.m. Even though she was eager to work for the uber-producer, she didn't anticipate the relentless onslaught of acts of intimidation.

"He threw a laptop at the window in the conference room and then went into the kitchen and we could hear him beating on the napkin dispenser," says Rugo. "Then another time he threw a glass bowl at [a colleague]. The glass bowl hit the wall and smashed everywhere. The HR person left in an ambulance due to a panic attack. That was the environment."

In March of 2019, red-hot writer Jeremy O. Harris called Rudin out on Twitter as "loudly racist." The playwright/screenwriter continued, "He called me on the phone and cussed me out once and said 'you're a baby playwright who has written one good play no one gives a FUCK what you have to say' To which I responded, 'Why did you just pay me to say something in TWO plays?' "

Rudin's tantrums have been well documented going back four decades and are said to have at least partly inspired the 1994 assistant revenge fantasy film Swimming With Sharks. In 2014, Rudin demanded that "Manchester by the Sea" producer Kevin Walsh get out of his car and abandoned him on a highway.

One recent Rudin assistant says the mercurial producer threw a baked potato at his head in 2018 for not knowing why someone from indie distributor A24 was in the lobby.  "I went into the kitchen, and I was like, 'Hey, Scott, A24 is on the way up. I'm not sure what it's concerning,' " he says. "And he flipped out [saying] 'Nobody told me A24 was on my schedule.' He threw it at me, and I dodged a big potato. He was like, 'Well, find out, and get me a new potato.' "  Adding insult to injury, the assistant (who had dropped out of college to work full time) was later fired by Rudin.

Ryan Nelson, who was Rudin's executive assistant in 2019, says he experienced and witnessed extensive mistreatment.  After he witnessed Rudin throwing a stapler at a theater assistant and calling him a "retard," Nelson left the industry altogether.  "Every day was exhausting and horrific," he says. "Not even the way he abused me, but watching the way he abused the people around me who started to become my very close friends. You're spending 14 hours a day with the same people, enduring the same abuse. It became this collective bond with these people."

On Indeed.com, where Rudin posts ads for a constant stream of vacancies, one anonymous reviewer warned prospective applicants to "Please Run Far, Far Away" and claimed to have witnessed the producer "pulling a chair out from under an assistant's seat so he could fall down," carried out in a meeting with industry executives.

Caroline Rugo was eventually fired after six months when Rudin became ensnared in a feud between Nathan Lane and director George C. Wolfe, which he blamed on Rugo.  Rudin demanded that she skip her 5:30 a.m. gym visit or work faster. She refused.  "I got fired for having Type 1 diabetes," says Rugo. "I one hundred percent could have sued him. But I didn't because of the fear of being blacklisted."

Another assistant, who asked not to be named because he fears career retaliation, detailed a kitchen encounter with Rudin in 2018 that devolved quickly. "He asked me to clean the kitchen. I told him I had to do a bunch of other stuff that was urgent . . . And then he flipped out, and he took his teacup, threw it, and it shattered and left a hole in the wall."  

Another staffer says Rudin purposefully disrupted people's careers with lies. In 2012 Rudin became enraged when one of his female employees left to work at The Weinstein Co.  Rudin emailed Harvey Weinstein and insisted that she had stolen from him. Weinstein refused to fired her.  "That was a big, big moment," says another staffer of the mistreatment of his colleague. "It literally changed everyone who was there at the time. All of the employees realized that this is what we had to look forward to, after slaving away, being attacked so much, being maligned in really bizarre ways."

Rudin's wrath wasn't only aimed at employees. He privately clashed with director Sam Mendes and took out an ad in The New York Times to berate a Times theater writer. His emails — which became fodder for the general public following the Sony hack when he called Angelina Jolie a "minimally talented spoiled brat" and made racially insensitive jokes about President Barack Obama, saying he probably liked Kevin Hart. In one exchange with Whoopi Goldberg, Rudin lambasted her because she wanted to play a part in the Broadway production of "To Kill a Mockingbird" instead of another Rudin-produced project. He called her an idiot, said she'd never work again in anything important and wished her luck on The View.

Rudin continues to work with the best in the film business. Bullying claims against Rudin never see the light of day and are settled quietly. Fear of reprisals has kept many from speaking out. Employees are required to sign non-disparagement agreements. Rudin also has been known to change credits, both as incentive and punishment. The victim of the computer monitor incident was compensated with three associate producing credits in addition to a monetary settlement.  In other instances, Rudin retaliates against employees who quit by going on IMDb.com to take away any credits they may have amassed while working for him," according to one producer who hired a traumatized assistant following a Rudin stint and saw the practice play out.

Andrew Coles hopes that fear of Rudin's power will not stymie progress in the industry just at a time when Hollywood appears ready to confront abuses of power.  "Part of the change we want to see in the industry means starting to talk about these things openly, to name names, to talk about the things that actually happened. And you don't get a free pass for abusing people," he says. "I'm not afraid of Scott Rudin."