Dame Joan Collins says she will not ‘judge’ Chris Noth following sexual abuse allegations

Dame Joan Collins has said that she will not “judge” Chris Noth following allegations of sexual abuse against the Sex and the City actor.

Earlier this month, four women accused 67-year-old Noth of sexual assault. The actor has denied the charges. In a statement to The Independent, Noth said any allegations against him were “categorically false”.

The Dynasty actor made the comment about Noth in a recent Woman’s Hour podcast released on BBC Radio 4 on Christmas Day. Collins was promoting her recently released BBC documentary This is Joan Collins.

Woman’s Hour presenter Chloe Tilley asked Collins how she dealt with “the advances” of men within Hollywood, as a young actor. Collins said she coped with it “by laughing a lot” or, sometimes, “a stiff knee to the nether regions”.

The 88-year-old actor said her father, late theatrical agent Joseph Collins, had “warned” her about the way women were treated in the industry, “particularly if they were pretty”, in the Seventies.

When asked what these men would have made of the #MeToo movement, Dame Joan said they would have been “a lot more careful”, before addressing the allegations against Noth.

“Who knows what he did? I know him, and I’m not going to judge him, because who knows who these women are? But his career is wrecked, absolutely wrecked, in doing what he did,” she said.

“I think that men – certainly men in my business – have to be quite a bit more careful, because we were abused,” Collins said, before adding: “It’s just that I happened to be a particularly tough person, so it did not fracture my life.”

Collins has previously opened up about being sexually assaulted by her future husband when she was 17.

She admitted that she married late actor Maxwell Reed, whom Collins accused of drugging and raping her while they were dating, because she was “stupid and naive”. The actors separated in 1952 and were formally divorced in 1954.

On the subject of being assaulted, Collins told Tilley: “It was something I was able to get rid of, because I have a theory that you don’t dwell on things.”

Comparing herself to an ostrich “with my head in the sand”, Collins said she was able to get through “a lot of things that have not gone well” by “waking up the next morning with a smile on my face”.

“Most of the time but not all of the time,” Collins clarified.

Meanwhile, in a joint statement issued last week, Noth’s Sex and the City co-stars Sarah Jessica Parker, Cynthia Nixon, and Kristin Davis said they were “deeply saddened” by the allegations against the actor.

“We support the women who have come forward and shared their painful experiences,” their statement said.

If you have been raped or sexually assaulted, you can contact your nearest Rape Crisis organisation for specialist, independent and confidential support. For more information, visit their website here