Actor Derek Dixon spoke out Tuesday in his first television interview since filing a lawsuit against Tyler Perry, accusing him of sexual harassment and assault.
Dixon sat down with ABC News Live anchor Linsey Davis to discuss his allegedly complicated history with the media mogul, saying he did not “want to stay silent about it anymore.”
Dixon says he met Perry at a studio opening party in 2019 while he was working at an events company. According to Dixon, Perry asked him if he was an actor, gave him his number and said “we’ll talk about this.”
In early 2020, Dixon landed the role of Dale in Perry’s BET series The Oval. According to the civil complaint, when Dixon was working on the show, Perry began sending text messages to him, with some being sexual in nature.
“One of them says, ‘What’s it going to take for you to have guiltless sex? Have y’all found that in therapy yet? I would hope that you would let someone hold and make love to you,'” Dixon said.
Dixon claims that in January 2020 Perry’s physical behavior started resembling the tone of his text messages, with Dixon saying one alleged incident occurred when he was having drinks at the mogul’s guest house.
Instead of driving home that night, Dixon said Perry told him to stay in the guest quarters, where he allegedly climbed into Dixon’s bed and started rubbing his leg, causing Dixon to jump out of the bed.
“I thought after that instance, it was pretty clear that I was not interested in that type of a relationship,” Dixon told ABC News.
Then, at the end of the second season of The Oval, Dixon’s character was shot four times in the chest, which he said made him realize “if I don’t make him happy, I could stay dead on the show.”
The actor said he ended communication with Perry in the spring of 2024 and decided to leave The Oval in September 2024. He also said Losing It, a show he had been writing that the mogul owns the rights to, was never developed beyond the pilot.
Then in January, Dixon filed a complaint with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, a federal agency responsible for protecting workers from discrimination.
Dixon said he came up with the amount of $260 million in damages for his subsequent lawsuit for two reasons: “Part of that number is my lost job, my lost income, the loss of a show. The other part of that is a deterrent for how do you stop a billionaire who won’t stop themselves from doing this.”
Dixon said he hopes Perry takes “accountability for what happened” and learns to “not treat your employees this way and to never use someone’s dream to coerce them into a relationship that’s not professional.”
When asked about justice, Dixon said it would look like he “made a change and that something like this won’t happen to another actor that works for him or another actor in the industry.”
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