Jimmy Bennett says Asia Argento, Weinstein accuser, raped him, paid him off: Report

One of disgraced film mogul Harvey Weinstein’s first accusers, according to a New York Times report Sunday, had herself paid off an actor who had accused her of statutory rape.

Italian actress-director Asia Argento, in the months after accusations by her and other women felled Mr. Weinstein, reportedly agreed to pay actor-musician Jimmy Bennett $380,000 in exchange for his dropping any right to sue her for what characterized as a sexual assault by her in a California hotel in 2013.

At that time, Mr. Bennett was 17 and under the legal age of consent in California. Ms. Argento was 37.

According to the Times, the claim of assault “and the subsequent arrangement for payments are laid out in documents between lawyers for Ms. Argento and Mr. Bennett [that] were sent to The New York Times through encrypted email by an unidentified party.”

That email included a “selfie dated May 9, 2013, of the two lying in bed. As part of the agreement, Mr. Bennett, who is now 22, gave the photograph and its copyright to Ms. Argento, now 42. Three people familiar with the case said the documents were authentic,” The Times wrote.

Mr. Bennett is a former child actor who played Ms. Argento’s son, in the film “The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things,” when he was 7.

According to The Times, Mr. Bennett declined to comment, and repeated efforts to contact Ms. Argento or her representatives failed to get an official reply.

But The Times cited Carrie Goldberg, the attorney who handled the dispute for Ms. Agrento, as having characterized the money as “helping Mr. Bennett.”

“We hope nothing like this ever happens to you again,” Ms. Goldberg wrote in the same April letter to Ms. Argento. “You are a powerful and inspiring creator and it is a miserable condition of life that you live among sh—y individuals who’ve preyed on both your strengths and your weaknesses.”

The previous November, just a month after the Weinstein blockbuster report by The Times and Ms. Argento being one of 13 women accusing him of rape or other sexual abuse, Mr. Bennett had sent a notice of intent to sue to Ms. Argento’s lawyer at that time, Richard Hofstetter.

That letter sought $3.5 million in damages “for the intentional infliction of emotional distress, lost wages, assault and battery,” The Times wrote.

Mr. Bennett’s lawyers attributed the decline in the client’s income — from more than $2.7 million from 2008 to 2013 but an average of $60,000 per year since — to the trauma that followed Ms. Argento’s “sexual battery.”