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Arnold fights hitler claims Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
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Schwarzenegger Fights Harassment, Hitler Claims
Actor Apologizes To Women, Says He Despises Hitler
Opponents Pounce On Claims Against Recall Frontrunner
Oct 3, 2003 8:10 pm US/Pacific
Women's groups and religious leaders worked feverishly Friday to galvanize opposition to Arnold Schwarzenegger after he acknowledged treating women badly and was accused of telling an interviewer he admired Adolf Hitler.
A coalition of women's groups met at the Feminist Majority offices here to unveil an anti-Schwarzenegger ad campaign and introduce a former TV network intern who said the gubernatorial candidate groped her when she led him to a sound stage 25 years ago.
She was one of several women -- including radio psychologist Dr. Joy Browne -- to come forward Friday with new allegations Schwarzenegger groped or made inappropriate comments to them. The allegations echo complaints made by other women against the Republican front-runner in Tuesday's election to recall Gov. Gray Davis.
Criticism also poured in from religious leaders and the state's top Democrats for remarks attributed to the actor in 1975 that he admired Hitler's ability to rise from humble beginnings. Schwarzenegger also played Nazi marches and mimicked SS officers, according to the director of the 1975 bodybuilding documentary "Pumping Iron."
Schwarzenegger, meanwhile, reiterated Friday that he despises Hitler and cannot imagine he ever would have praised him. Late in the day, the Schwarzenegger campaign also issued a statement from "Pumping Iron" director George Butler saying the Hitler remarks were taken out of context and his transcripts may not have been entirely accurate. The campaign said it did not solicit the statement,
"To express admiration for a person directly responsible for the death of tens of millions of people during World War II is beyond comprehension," said Rep. Tom Lantos, D-Calif., the only Holocaust survivor in Congress. "I think it probably ends any political ambition he may have had."
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., called praise for Hitler "appalling" and Davis said it was "unconscionable."
The Austrian-born Schwarzenegger acknowledged and apologized Thursday for having "behaved badly sometimes" around women, but said he could not imagine saying anything positive about Hitler.
On Friday, aboard the campaign bus "Running Man," named for one of his movies, he again stated his dislike for Hitler.
"No, I can't imagine saying it and I have always despised everything that Hitler stands for and what my history of my country stood for," he said.
The actor, who said he grew up among both Jewish and Christian friends, added that his father, a member of the Nazi party, never discussed what he did during World War II.
"There was a certain denial in my country. I have never heard my father talk about the war. Never ever," he said. " When I went to college here I learned much more about our history than when I was over there."
He said he felt badly that the women who accused him of sexual harassment hadn't confronted him face to face so he could have apologized.
"No one confronted me. If someone comes to me and says, `How dare you do this, how dare you say this,' I can apologize right then and there. But because no one tells me, just now I'm picking up the paper, the L.A. Times, and all of a sudden I'm reading these things."
Women's rights officials said they were organizing demonstrations around the state.
"Arnold Schwarzenegger has an appalling record of disrespect and abuse of women," said Joan Blades, co-founder of MoveOn.org, an Internet-based political action group that paid for the new television ad unveiled at the women's coalition news conference. "It would be a disgrace to women and a disgrace to all the people of California if he became governor."
At his campaign stops, many supporters either ignored the sexual allegations or laughed them off.
"He can grope me," one woman shouted at a campaign stop in Santa Clarita. One supporter held a sign reading: "Gray Davis groped me ... While reaching for my wallet."
When his bus stopped at a diner in the mountain town of Gorman, Schwarzenegger ordered a club sandwich for lunch and schmoozed with voters. He signed autographs, sat on one man's Harley-Davidson motorcycle and spoke with a woman whose husband put her on the line and handed the actor his cell phone.
He had to persuade the woman on the phone he was really Schwarzenegger and not someone impersonating him.
The Los Angeles Times quoted six women on Thursday -- two by name and four anonymously -- who said Schwarzenegger had groped or sexually harassed them during separate incidents between 1975 and 2000.
Browne told "Inside Edition" Friday that Schwarzenegger groped her ankles and knees during an interview in the 1970s.
Still another accuser was Dan Lurie, a prominent figure for decades in the sport of bodybuilding, who told The Associated Press on Friday that he watched in amazement as Schwarzenegger repeatedly groped waitresses at a snack bar at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York around 1969 or '70.
The two were waiting for a plane to London where Schwarzenegger was to take part in a bodybuilding competition that Lurie, by then retired from competition, was covering for a muscle magazine.
"I said, `Arnold, what are you doing?" Lurie, now 80, recalled from his home on New York's Long Island. "He said, `I want sex, this is what I do in my country.'
"I said, `You're in America now, you can get killed for that, you don't know if they're married.'
"He said, `I don't have time to take them out and romance them."'
As more women came forward, campaign spokesman Todd Harris said one of the accusers, a waitress who claims the actor confronted her outside a Santa Monica coffee shop in 1978 when she was 16, was a member of a union that opposes Schwarzenegger.
"So here we have the first direct fingerprint of Democratic involvement in this last-minute anti-Arnold sleaze campaign," Harris said.
The San Diego Union-Tribune, which has endorsed Schwarzenegger's candidacy, said in a Friday editorial that the sexual allegations raise serious questions that must be addressed further. Representatives of several women's groups called for a criminal investigation, though none of the women filed complaints about the alleged groping.
"Due to the fear and intimidation caused by Mr. Schwarzenegger's celebrity status, an investigation may be the only way that other victims will ever feel safe enough to come forward," the California Women's Law Center said in a letter faxed Thursday to Los Angeles County District Attorney Steve Cooley and Los Angeles police Chief William J. Bratton.
The district attorney's office doesn't investigate such cases, said William Hodgman, who heads the office's sex crimes division.
Such matters are handled by police investigators, who then forward their findings to the district attorney for possible prosecution, Hodgman said in a reply to center officials.
Stories by ABC News and The New York Times said the actor told an interviewer during the filming of "Pumping Iron" that he admired Hitler's rise to power and wished he could have experienced the thrill Hitler must have had in speaking to huge audiences who agreed with everything he said.
The news organizations said the remarks were contained in transcripts from a book proposal made by Butler.
"As I have made clear to The New York Times and ABC, statements by Schwarzenegger (taken from the "Pumping Iron" outtakes) were not in context and not even strictly accurate as it turns out from a closer reading of a copy of what (I believe) to be a transcript of the original, now found after many years," Butler said in a statement released Friday.
The director added that he does not have the "Pumping Iron" outtakes.
In West Los Angeles, leaders of Jewish, black and Muslim community groups called a news conference Friday to denounce the Hitler report.
"There is a chance that a man who admires Adolf Hitler could be the next governor of California," said Scott Svonkin, Southern California chairman of the B'nai B'rith Center for Public Policy.
Jona Goldrich, who said he escaped from the Nazis at age 14, said an apology in this case wouldn't be adequate.
"There is no room for apology, to praise someone who killed 61/2 million Jews," said Goldrich, 76.
Amber Bowden, 19, said in San Bernardino that she voted for Schwarzenegger by absentee ballot but wishes she could take her vote back in light of the allegations. That's impossible, said San Bernardino County Registrar Scott Konopasek.
"It lowers my esteem of him," said Bowden, who was voting in her first election. "It might affect his ability to lead the state."
© 2003 The Associated Press.
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