Mel Gibson is responding to Winona Ryder’s explosive claims that the Oscar-winning actor and director made anti-Semitic and bigoted comments and accused the “Stranger Things” star of lying about their interactions.
“This is 100% false,” a Gibson representative said in a statement to Variety. “She lied about it more than a decade ago, when she spoke to the press, and now she’s lying about it.”
Ryder accused Gibson of making anti-Semitic and anti-gay comments in a recent interview with the Sunday Times. She has told similar stories in the past, including on a 2010 GQ profile.
“We were at a crowded party with one of my good friends,” he told the Telegraph reporter. “And Mel Gibson was smoking a cigarette, and we are all talking and he said to my friend, who is gay, ‘Oh wait, am I going to get AIDS?’ And then something came up about the Jews, and he said, ‘You’re not a furnace evader, are you?’
Ryder went on to say that Gibson then “tried” to apologize to her for her comments. Gibson’s spokesman says that is not true.
“She lied about him trying to apologize to her back then,” said the representative. “He approached her, many years ago, to confront her about her lies and she refused to speak to him.”
Gibson’s career, once red hot, froze in 2006 when he was arrested for a DUI and told police that “Jews are responsible for all wars in the world!” He also used racial slurs on audio recordings of a fight with his ex-girlfriend Oksana Grigorieva, which was published in 2010 by RadarOnline. Despite falling off the A list, Gibson’s professional life has recovered. He was nominated for an Oscar for directing the 2016 war movie “Hacksaw Ridge” and appeared in the hit “Daddy’s Home 2”.
A Ryder spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
