This week saw two Hollywood scandals with a Russian connection. Action star Steven Seagal was sued for sexual harassment by a former executive assistant, who said that Seagal had two Russian assistants who were “available for his sexual needs 24 hours a day, seven days a week.”
Meanwhile, Mel Gibson broke up with his Russian-born girlfriend, singer Oksana Grigoryeva, People.com reported, citing those old “irreconcilable differences.” The couple first appeared together in public in April last year. Grigoryeva, who originates from Saransk in Mordovia and previously had dated Bond star Timothy Dalton, had a baby with Gibson in October.
Seagal, 59, is a regular visitor to Russia and claims to have some Russian heritage. “I know Russian blood flows in my roots,” he told Ekho Moskvy in 2006 in a mixed metaphor that may explain his acting skills. His films now may all go straight to DVD, but Seagal is still a huge star in Russia, especially for the generation that remembers the first heady showings of his 1980s action movies in the perestroika era.
He first came to Moscow in the 1990s to promote a branch of Planet Hollywood, which never really thrived on a charmless concrete strip of Krasnaya Presnya.
In 2003, he was invited round to then-president Vladimir Putin’s country house at Novo-Ogaryovo for a party that also included Italian vintage sex bomb Gina Lollobrigida and French femme fatale Fanny Ardant. Sadly, no transcript is available on the Kremlin web site.
“I respect him very much and I liked all the thoughts he told me,” Seagal said of Putin in an interview with Ekho Moskvy radio in 2006.
In October, he appeared on Channel One’s “ProjectorParisHilton” improvised comedy show — the coolest thing on state television — riffing blues guitar in a black leather shirt and showing off a frighteningly convincing Russian accent.
Comedian Sergei Svetlakov asked him, “Steven, is it true that you love Russian women?” — getting a simple “yes.” He then presented Seagal with a student card. “Without this, you won’t get into any dormitories after 11 p.m.,” he advised him.
Not much information is available on Seagal’s allegedly Russian assistants — a term that in Los Angeles probably covers everywhere from Lithuania to Outer Mongolia.
Seagal certainly has a taste for Eastern European women. In 2007, his round of commitments included attending Miss Ukraine Intercontinental, KP reported, saying he needed to cast 13 “beautiful girls” for his latest film. It’s not clear what film this was, since Seagal’s movies tend to lack a woman’s touch.
In 2007, Komsomolskaya Pravda reported that he was hiring a young Moldovan girl to work for him as a “personal assistant.” The photograph showed him posing with his arm around the shoulder of the girl — 22-year-old law student Felichiya Lupashka, who wore a leopard-print dress.
In March, a former Miss Tver, Viktoria Shchukina, was photographed in KP with Seagal embracing her and a scantily clad female friend at a party in Hollywood. “He spoke fluent Russian,” she said. “At first I didn’t know how to ask him for a photo with him, but then I didn’t know how to get away, especially as he started asking the organizers how old I was.”
Bitchy gossip site Spletnik.ru prompted a debate on Seagal. One blogger called him a “goat,” while another wrote: “Of course, the Russian girls have to be sex slaves while a virtuous American girl comes along and exposes their dark dealings. I can’t stand reading stuff like this.”