Abbott Elementary star Sheryl Lee Ralph, who grew up in Hempstead and attended Uniondale High School, says she was once sexually assaulted by “a famous TV judge,” who she quickly discovered was “not a judge “ was [Greg] Mathis. I love him; he’s a great man.”
Speaking on Tuesday’s Way Up with Angela Yee podcast to promote her memoir DIVA 2.0, the 66-year-old Emmy-winning actress recalled promoting a television show “in a very public place.” have. Dressed in a suit: “I was doing my business for the TV show I was on at the time. He and I were on the same network. This man walked in, grabbed my neck, turned me around and rammed his nasty…tongue down my throat. And everyone on the network saw it.
Not only did she see it, she said, but asked her to keep quiet. “You know they didn’t want any bad publicity surrounding their show and didn’t care about what just happened to me,” Ralph continued, mimicking the network guys’ response: “‘It wasn’t that bad, or? … It’s not that bad, is it? Please don’t say anything. We don’t need bad press – it’s a brand new show. Your [also] is a new show.’ I was like ‘Lord have mercy’.”
Ralph added that she reached out to then-New Orleans Mayor Marc Morial at the time, without specifying how the two knew each other. “He said, ‘You want me to send the police over there right away? Because we’re about to fix his you-know-what.’ “Morial’s two terms ran from 1994 to 2002. During that time, Ralph was a star of the UPN sitcom Moesha from 1996 to 2001.
She also described an earlier experience that she says in her book involved a “famous promoter” who saw her in “Dreamgirls,” the 1981-85 Broadway musical in which she received a Tony for her starring role received an award nomination. The unnamed man took her to lunch “to talk about my future in entertainment,” she wrote, but then she found “his hand crawling up my thigh.”
“It was about the third time something like this had happened to me,” Ralph said on the podcast. “And I was like, ‘What did I do to deserve this?’ My skirt is on my knees; I’m wearing a sweater blouse. What made this man think that he could just come over and put his hands on my body…?”
Then, years later, “I was in a situation and this man walked through the door. He sat down across from me at the table. He didn’t remember any of it. But I had to let him know what he did that night. … I had to confront him about it. Do you want to know what the shocking part was? Everyone at the table was appalled that I was going to stand up for myself… They told me I should be ashamed and why should I be, bring that up? And at the dining table.”
This, she said, is “the kind of thing that happens to women.” “That’s what happens. That makes it difficult for women to talk about these things.”
Ralph has not commented further, and her rep has not responded to a request for comment from Newsday.
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