Former child actor Raquel Lee Bolleau has filed a lawsuit against the Walt Disney Company for allegedly failing to protect her from being repeatedly sexually assaulted on the set of the 2001 Disney Channel movie The Poof Point.
As reported by The Los Angeles Times, Bolleau filed the lawsuit in Los Angeles Superior Court on Friday (Aug. 21), alleging that she was supplied “with alcohol and pressured… to consume it” and was repeatedly raped during the production of The Poof Point by a middle-aged male Disney employee. During the time she worked on the movie, she was 14. She alleged that the employee, who is not directly identified in the lawsuit, told her, “You’re old enough. You can handle it.”
In the complaint, she alleged that the man’s abusive behavior “was apparent to the adults on Disney’s set,” and the company ultimately “failed to protect [her] from Mr. John Doe’s repeated rapes, sexual assault, sexual abuse, and sexual harassment.” She has accused the company of violating child labor laws multiple times throughout the production of the movie, and described the set as “not safe for children.”
Dolleau, who also featured on Nickelodeon’s The Amanda Show and Double Dare 2000, said that she was told to “build a relationship and spend time with” the unidentified man by the movie’s director, Neal Israel. The complaint alleged that the man “regularly fondled and excessively touched Ms. Bolleau, often rubbing his genitals on Ms. Bolleau” on set and “made sexually explicit comments about Ms. Bolleau’s body.”
He allegedly continued to sexually assault her after filming wrapped when he “demanded” that she sit next to him in first class during a flight and “reached under her pants and sexually assaulted” her. She said that experience left her “devastated, unwell physically and mentally, and forever changed.” As a result of the alleged abuse she suffered, she “has struggled with the severe trauma, pain, and distress” for the last 25 years.
While he isn’t named in the lawsuit, Lee reached a confidential agreement with her The Poof Point co-star Mark Curry in 2015, per The Hollywood Reporter. Curry played her father in the Disney Channel movie.
