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 charges against the 52-year-old actor, who has starred in TV series such as “Six Feet Under” and “NCIS” and the film “The Eyes of Tammy Faye,” relate to alleged assaults between 2021 and 2023. He faces 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 relative. Prosecutors say his crimes date back to 2013 and are investigating allegations dating back to his college days at Yale.
He has been in custody since his initial arrest on August 4, on $3.5 million bail.
In the new charges, prosecutors allege Olds sodomized a woman in September 2021, raped another woman in May 2022 and sexually assaulted another woman in May 2023.
Leonard Levine, Mr. Olds’ attorney, said: “Mr. Olds has pleaded not guilty to all charges. He is adamant that any sexual contact he had with the complaining witnesses was consensual. A fact the defense intends to establish in court.”
LAPD Detective Brent Hopkins said the new victims contacted investigators after reading a Times article about Olds’ case. The women were all involved in romantic relationships with the actor when he allegedly engaged in nonconsensual sexual acts. Prosecutors say the assaults took place at his home, the home of one of the victims and a Los Angeles hotel. Hopkins said none of the women knew each other and that some of his victims worked 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 his Los Angeles home, according to LAPD sex crimes detectives familiar with the case. Detectives later learned that two other women had made similar allegations dating back to 2013. In each case, the women claimed that romantic encounters with Olds escalated into violent sexual assaults.
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 sex crimes.
In the protective order request, 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 “demanded [him] to stop.
“I fainted. I think he slapped me.” [to] “Wake up,” she said in the court filing.
She said she woke up to find Olds putting on a condom and trying to “open my legs” and claimed he stopped the assault only after she vomited on him.
Hopkins said that in each case the assault on the victims was “very similar” and that it was those similarities that strengthened the allegations made by the victim last year.
“We’ve heard the same story over and over again,” Hopkins said. “Mr. Olds started out charming, but then turned brutally violent.”
“Some of these survivors suffered in silence for years before finding the strength to speak out,” Hopkins said.
Hopkins said that because of the considerable gap between the first two assaults reported in 2013 and the one last year, investigators suspect there are more victims.
“There was a time when sexual assault was not as well understood.[…]”Since the #MeToo movement, there’s been a lot more awareness, especially with the Danny Masterson and Harvey Weinstein cases,” Hopkins said. “People are more aware of what’s acceptable and what’s not and are more willing to speak out.”
Authorities say Olds, a New York native who wrote screenplays and starred in numerous roles in the 1990s, used his status as a Yale-educated actor to lure women he met on dating apps. Police say Olds lured the women into a false sense of security during their initial encounters before becoming sexually violent.
Olds is due back in court on September 25. If convicted of the charges, he faces decades in prison.
