Busy Philipps has claimed that her Freaks and Geeks co-star James Franco assaulted when they were shooting the 1999-2000 series. Radar Online ran the excerpt from Philipps's upcoming memoir This Will Only Hurt a Little where the alleged incident was detailed, which Yahoo! independently verified.
Philipps wrote that Franco was a "f*cking bully" who attacked her when he got upset while they were shooting one scene on the show. The scene called for her character to "gently hit Franco in the chest while delivering a line," per Yahoo!. Franco took offense to this and allegedly broke character.
“He grabbed both my arms and screamed in my face, ‘DON’T EVER TOUCH ME AGAIN!’” she wrote, per Yahoo!. “And he threw me to the ground. Flat on my back. Wind knocked out of me.”
The people on set were shaken, and Philipps was advised to call her manager by her co-star Linda Cardellini, the actress recalled. Franco apologized the next day, reportedly because the show's director and producers ordered him to. He faced no further consequences, per Philipps's memoir.
The report comes after Franco was accused of sexual misconduct by five women both on and off movie sets in a Los Angeles Times article published this January. Franco denied the allegations through a lawyer then.
