Actor Chris Noth. (Mark Sagliocco/FilmMagic)
Sex and the City star Chris Noth has been accused of sexual assault by two women – with one alleged victim requiring stitches after being raped.
Noth, who played Mr Big, the towering on-again-off-again love interest of Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker), took on the role once more for the HBO show’s reboot, And Just Like That….
Seeing Noth, 67, speak to the press while promoting the spin-off stirred painful memories for Zoe, 40, and Lily, 31. Using pseudonyms, the two separately told The Hollywood Reporter that Noth sexually assaulted them in 2004 and 2015 respectively.
Noth has vehemently denied any wrongdoing.
“It was very painful and I yelled ‘Stop!’” Zoe told the publication of the incident, which she claimed took place in Los Angeles, California. “And he didn’t.
“I said: ‘Can you at least get a condom?’ And he laughed at me.”
Zoe, who works in the entertainment industry, said she had “buried” the experience but decided to “try to go public with who he is”.
In her early 20s, Zoe, a freshly graduated from college, worked at a top firm where Noth and other celebrities regularly had business. Then he spotted her.
“He would walk by my desk and flirt with me,” she alleged. “He somehow got my phone number from the directory and was leaving messages on my work phone.
“My boss was like: ‘Mr Big’s leaving messages on your voicemail.’”
“This was peak Sex and the City,” Zoe’s former boss told The Hollywood Reporter. “He was like a god to us.”
Zoe alleged that Noth, who lived in New York at the time, invited her to dip in the pool in the apartment complex he had a place at in West Hollywood.
Taking her best friend along with her, the three are said to have sat in a hot tub. Noth later ducked out to take a telephone call – but he left a book behind that he was thinking of doing a project around, Zoe recalled.
That’s when he asked her to come into his apartment and return it. Opening the door, Noth immediately kissed her, she alleged.
He forced her towards his bed, yanked her shorts off and allegedly raped her.
“I realised there was blood on my shirt,” she said. “I got out of there. I went to my friend’s apartment [in the same building].”
She was later treated at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, requiring stitches. Deeply shaken by the experience, she refused to tell anyone what had allegedly happened.
“I was 25 at the time,” Zoe said. “It was a lot. I didn’t know what to do.”
Chris Noth: ‘I did not assault these women’
The second alleged incident took place at a New York nightclub in 2015. Lily, a journalist and then 26, was asked out to dinner by Noth, then 60.
He is said to have asked her to go to a restaurant that Sex and the City fans would know all too well – where Carrie celebrated her 35th birthday in season four.
After dinner, he allegedly took her back to his apartment to see his whiskey collection. Inside, Lily alleged, Noth began to kiss her before forcing her trousers down.
“He was having sex with me from the back in a chair,” she said. “We were in front of a mirror. I was kind of crying as it happened.”
In text messages seen by The Hollywood Reporter, Noth reportedly wrote to Lily: “By the way, I have to ask, did you enjoy our show last week. I thought it was a lot of fun but I wasn’t quite sure how you felt.”
Noth said in a statement: “The accusations against me made by individuals I met years, even decades, ago are categorically false.
“These stories could’ve been from 30 years ago or 30 days ago – no always means no – that is a line I did not cross.
“The encounters were consensual. It’s difficult not to question the timing of these stories coming out.
“I don’t know for certain why they are surfacing now, but I do know this: I did not assault these women.”