EXCLUSIVE: The Sleazy Rise and Billion Dollar Downfall of Hollywood's 'Weinstein 2.0' After He Was Ordered To Pay a Fortune to 40 Women he Sexually Assaulted
Director James Toback faces living out the rest of his life as a penniless outcast.
April 15 2025, Published 11:17 a.m. ET
Fallen movie writer and director James Toback faces living out the rest of his life in destitution after a court ordered him to pay $1.68billion in damages to 40 women.
In a chilling echo of the Harvey Weinstein case, they accused the filmmaker of sexual abuse and other crimes over a span of 35 years, RadarOnline.com can reveal.
A court ordered the sleazeball to pay $1.68billion in damages to 40 women.
The decision stems from a lawsuit filed in Manhattan in 2022 after New York state instituted a one-year window for people to file lawsuits over sexual assault claims even if they took place decades ago.
It marks one of the largest jury awards since the advent of the #MeToo movement, as well as in New York state history, said attorney Brad Beckworth.
The plaintiffs, he said, believe such a large verdict will send a message to powerful individuals "who don't treat women appropriately."
Attorneys for Toback's victims hailed the monster award as 'justice.'
Beckworth said the verdict included $280million in compensatory damages and $1.4billion for punitive damages to the plaintiffs.
"This verdict is about justice," Beckworth said in a statement. "But more importantly, it's about taking power back from the abusers, and their enablers, and returning it to those he tried to control and silence."
Beckworth added the abuse took place between 1979 and 2014.
Toback, 80, was nominated for an Oscar for writing 1991′s Bugsy, and his career in Hollywood has spanned more than 40 years. Accusations that he engaged in years of sexual abuse surfaced in late 2017 as the #MeToo movement gained attention.
Toback graduated from Harvard before finding a career in films.
After graduating from Harvard, where he was friends with Tommy Lee Jones and claimed to have taken the largest single dose of LSD in history, Toback worked briefly as a journalist before he received acclaim for writing the screenplay of Karel Reisz’s loose Dostoyevsky adaptation The Gambler.
That film’s success enabled him to make his first picture as director in 1978, Fingers, which starred Harvey Keitel.
The critic-turned-screenwriter Stephen Schiff scoffed that the film was not "just bad; it’s wildly, extravagantly, even entertainingly bad."
Fingers should have killed his career immediately, but the hugely influential film critic Pauline Kael loved it and was so impressed with Toback that she offered to help him with his next film, 1982’s Love and Money, which also flopped.
By rights, Toback’s career should have fallen apart, but unbelievably, he managed to obtain an $18million budget for his reunion with Keitel, 1983’s Exposed.
Inevitably, Exposed – which he suggested was inspired by his own affair with an airline hostess he met – flopped heavily, but Toback was back a few years later with what was intended to be a bright and breezy romantic comedy, 1987’s The Pick Up Artist, with his regular collaborator Robert Downey Jr in the lead opposite Molly Ringwald.
The film, produced by Warren Beatty, was another stinker.
He was nominated for an Oscar for penning 'Bugsy.'
Never Miss an
Daily updates from the heart of Hollywood, right to your inbox
By entering your email and clicking Sign Up, you’re agreeing to let us send you customized marketing messages about us and our advertising partners. You are also agreeing to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.
Next came the unintentionally hilarious 1990 documentary The Big Bang.
His friendship with Beatty then led to his being asked to write the screenplay for Bugsy, for which he was Oscar-nominated, but already murmurs about his off-screen behaviour were so widespread for Spy magazine to write in 1989 that "he would in rapid-fire fashion tell women that he was a Hollywood director and offer to show them his Director’s Guild of America card."
It added: "His pitch invariably ended up with an invite to meet privately, sometimes at an outlandishly late hour, to talk about appearing in one of his films."
Toback's next film, Two Girls And A Guy, reunited him with Downey Jr – then in the midst of his well-publicized drug addiction – and attracted controversy for an envelope-pushing sex scene between Downey and his co-star Heather Graham, which would have led to the film being rated NC-17, the commercial kiss of death, unless Toback agreed to edit it. It was modestly profitabd.
This allowed Toback to make in 1999 the dismal Black and White, which featured various members of the Wu-Tang Clan along with Downey Jr, Claudia Schiffer and Mike Tyson.
By the time Toback’s 2013 Cannes-set mock-documentary Seduced and Abandoned, which he made with Alec Baldwin, critics had wearied of his work.
Slant magazine’s review, which began was especially damning, as it posited the ridiculousness of the idea of Toback and Baldwin trying to mount a sexually explicit drama starring the actor and Campbell on a $20million budget.
"To enjoy Seduced and Abandoned," read the review, "you’ll have to be able to push a lumbering, hypocritical white elephant out the nearest door."
Now those movie-making days are over.
It seems impossible that Toback will be able to pay the staggering amount that he has been ordered to pay, but his reputation has been ruined forever and his film-making career has ended in the process.
