Kirk Douglas allegedly “sexually” assaulted Natalie Wood when the actress was still a teenager. This was revealed by her younger sister, Lana, in her memoir ‘Little Sister’, according to which the attack took place in the summer of ’55, in the Chateau Marmont hotel, during a meeting between the thirty-year-old and already famous interpreter of Spartacus and the sixteen-year-old actress in search of success in the world of cinema.
“It seemed to me to be a long time before Natalie got back in the car – says Lana Wood, who was 8 at the time and together with her mother had been waiting for her sister outside the hotel – She woke me up slamming the door. She looked shocked. She was dishevelled and very upset, and she and Mom started whispering words to each other, without my understanding what they were saying. Apparently, something bad had happened to my sister, but whatever it was, apparently I was too young to be told.”
Lana Wood writes that Natalie did not tell her for years what happened in Mr. Douglas’s suite from which, she told her, of “being hurt.” She also claims that her sister and their mother were of the agreement that it would ruin Natalie’s career to accuse him publicly.
Natalie Wood died under mysterious circumstances in November 1981 by drowning while on a boat trip to Santa Catalina Island in California. Initially judged to be an accident, the actress’s cause of death was changed in 2012 to “drowning and other undetermined factors”. Wood’s husband, Robert Wagner, was flagged as a suspect by police in 2018, and Lana Wood is among those who hold him responsible for Natalie’s death.