Danny Elfman is denying claims from a woman who says he sexually abused her during a period from 1997 to 2002. The woman, known only as Jane Doe, was 21 when she met the then-47-year-old Nightmare Before Christmas composer. While she says she initially sought a professional, mentorship-style relationship with Elfman, her suit alleges that he took advantage of that to frequently appear naked around her as a part of his creative “process” and masturbate near her, which he apparently told her in 2002 he had done “every time you have ever slept next to me.”
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These allegations line up with a previous suit from composer Nomi Abadi, which was originally settled in 2018 but brought to light earlier this summer due to Elfman’s failure to pay the whole of his $830,000 settlement. Abadi also alleged that Elfman exposed himself to her and masturbated in front of her. When the news of Abadi’s suit broke, Elfman’s reps claimed he only signed the initial settlement out of a desire to “protect his family” during the height of #MeToo. The Oingo Boingo frontman issued a statement denying those allegations in July.
Elfman is now denying the second Jane Doe’s allegations as well. Per The Hollywood Reporter, Elfman is staunchly claiming he “committed no sexual abuse, made no inappropriate advances and never inappropriately touched” his accuser. According to him and his team (via Rolling Stone), Jane Doe’s suit “was maliciously filed by Plaintiff and her attorneys, without any valid basis in fact or law, for the improper purpose of embarrassing Mr. Elfman and extorting settlement money.”
“Recognizing that her absurd allegations would carry no weight in a court of law, Plaintiff and her attorneys chose to embark on a disinformation campaign, providing her dishonest Complaint to the media days before it was filed with the Court or became publicly available on the Court’s docket,” Elfman’s lawyer Camille Vasquez (who previously represented Johnny Depp during his trial against Amber Heard) continued.
The team is also denying that the events within Jane Doe’s complaint occurred at all. “The Complaint [does not] allege a single instance of Mr. Elfman touching Plaintiff in an unlawful or inappropriate manner, because he never did so,” Elfman’s legal team wrote. “The Complaint fails to allege conduct that constitutes a sexual assault, and no sexual assault ever occurred.”