Two more women have come forward with accusations that comedian Chris D’Elia sexually harassed them, exactly two months after the first round of allegations against him surfaced in June.
Actress Megan Drust and an anonymous woman said D’Elia exposed himself to them without their consent. Laura Vitarelli, who also alleges D’Elia exposed himself to her, first shared her account with the Los Angeles Times in June.
Drust said the alleged sexual harassment happened in 2011 when D’Elia asked her for a ride home. When they got into the car, he allegedly exposed himself to her.
“He was friends with some of my friends, I had met him before,” Drust told CNN. “That’s what you do, at least that’s what I did, you mark certain people as safe.”
Once they were inside the car, she said he started with “flirty small talk,” leaving her “confused.”
D’Elia then allegedly unzipped his pants and asked her to touch him.
“I said, ‘What are you doing? No.’” she recalled. “And because I wouldn’t touch him, he started to masturbate. I couldn’t believe it.”
D’Elia allegedly came inside her car, and Durst got out. She said she didn’t want to express how mad she was at the time because she was in “survival mode.”
D’Elia eventually got out of her car, but she said he continued to make her feel uneasy.
Two other women also shared their accounts with CNN. One hotel manager in Cleveland, Ohio, allegedly fell victim to his harassment while he was staying at the hotel for a show. She was 24 at that time of the alleged incident.
She said that one night, around midnight, D’Elia complained that the air conditioning in his room wasn’t working. Since no electrician was available, she said that she had to go to check it out herself. Once he opened the door, he was allegedly completely naked.
“I was surprised, and I was annoyed that I just came all the way up just so he could expose himself to me,” the woman, whose identity wasn’t revealed in the report, told CNN.
She said that she immediately left but eventually got another call from D’Elia with the same complaint, but she told him he was going to have to wait for an electrician.
Another woman, Laura Vitarelli, was 19 years old when he allegedly sexually harassed her in 2015.
D’Elia reportedly invited Vitarelli and her friend to a party. The “party” turned out to be in his hotel room, and he was the only guest present.
He allegedly offered the women drinks and began groping them with each of his hands. When the women, who recall being scared, got up to leave, he exposed his “fully erect” penis, and asked, “Are you sure you want to leave?”
A lawyer for D’Elia denied the accusations in a statement to EW. “D’Elia denies these allegations and emphatically states that he has never engaged in any sexual conduct with any woman without her consent,” the statement read.
Bill Dawes, a fellow comedian who has in the past been on tour with D’Elia also told CNN that D’Elia has a habit of exposing himself to both men and women.
Dawes said he was not surprised when allegations against D’Elia surfaced.
“There’s a lot of people who will say when the MeToo stuff happened, we were all thinking, ‘What about D’Elia?’” Dawes added. “He just seemed really profligate with the way he would go after women, sleep with women, expose himself to women.”
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H/T Jezebel
