Los Angeles County prosecutors charged actor Gabriel Olds with five additional counts of sexual assault Monday, bringing the total number of charges against him to 12 after three more women came forward following media coverage of his initial arrest, officials said.
The new allegations against the 52-year-old actor, who has appeared in TV shows such as Six Feet Under and NCIS and the movie The Eyes of Tammy Faye, involve alleged assaults between 2021 and 2023. He is facing a dozen felony charges involving six victims. The charges include rape, rape of an unconscious person, sodomy, assault with intent to commit rape, and injury to a girlfriend or significant other. Prosecutors say his crimes go back to 2013 and that they are investigating allegations going back to his days as a student at Yale.
He has been in custody in lieu of $3.5-million bail since his initial arrest August 4.
In the new charges, prosecutors allege Olds sodomized a woman in September 2021, raped another woman in May 2022, and sexually assaulted a different woman in May 2023.
Leonard Levine, Olds' attorney, wrote in a statement: "Mr. Olds has pleaded not guilty to all of the allegations. He is adamant that at all times any sexual contact he had with the complaining witnesses was consensual. A fact that the defense intends to establish in a court of law."
The new victims reached out after reading about the case.
LAPD Det. Brent Hopkins said the new victims reached out to investigators after seeing a Los Angeles Times article on Olds' case. The women were all involved in dating situations with the actor when he allegedly assaulted them. Prosecutors say the assaults occurred at his house, at one of the victim's homes, and an LA hotel. Hopkins said none of the women knew one another and that some of his victims were in the entertainment industry.
Police began investigating the actor in January 2023 after a 41-year-old woman reported that he had raped her at her LA home, according to LAPD sex crimes detectives familiar with the case. Detectives later learned of two more women who had made similar allegations dating back to 2013. In each case, the women alleged that dating encounters with Olds descended into violent sexual assaults.
One victim asked for a restraining order.
The woman obtained a restraining order against Olds last year and detailed her encounter with the actor, according to court documents. The Times is not identifying her because it does not name victims of alleged sexual crimes.
In the request for the restraining order, she alleges that Olds filmed and photographed a nonconsensual sexual encounter with her on January 7, 2023.
She also alleged that two weeks later, on January 19, 2023, Olds began to choke her during sex and she "asked [him] to stop."
"I blacked out. I think he slapped me [to] wake up," she said in the court filing.
She said she awoke to find Olds putting on a condom and trying to "open my legs" and alleged that he stopped the assault only after she vomited on him.
Hopkins said the alleged assaults were "very similar" and that those similarities bolster the allegations the victim made last year.
Investigators believe there may be more victims.
"We heard the same story again and again," Hopkins said. "Mr. Olds started off charming, but then used brutal violence."
"Some of these survivors suffered in silence for years before finding the strength to speak up," Hopkins said.
Hopkins said because there is a such a considerable gap between the first two reported assaults in 2013 and the one last year, investigators suspect there are more victims.
"There was a time there wasn't as much understanding about sex assault. … Post #MeToo, there is much more awareness, especially with the Danny Masterson and Harvey Weinstein case," Hopkins said. "People are more aware of what is OK and what's not and are more willing to speak up."
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Authorities say Olds, a New York native with screenwriting credits and numerous acting parts dating to the 1990s, used his status as a Yale-educated actor to entice the women, whom he met on dating apps. Police say Olds lured the women into a false sense of security during their initial encounters before turning sexually violent.
Olds is due back in court September 25. If convicted of the charges, he faces decades in state prison.
-by Richard Winton, Los Angeles Times (TNS)
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