Believe All Women, But Not All Men.
When a man is assaulted he has to claw his way back.
Brendan Fraser’s Hollywood story is not one clean scandal. It is a pile-up: a real leading-man peak, a body wrecked by stunts, a brutal divorce, and an alleged assault he says pushed him out of the industry for years. The comeback only arrived after fans and a few directors refused to let him stay gone.
The peak
Fraser broke through in the early 1990s with Encino Man and School Ties, then became a genuine movie star. George of the Jungle (1997) and especially The Mummy (1999) and its sequels made him the charming action lead Hollywood wanted. He also had serious-actor credits, notably Gods and Monsters (1998). By the early 2000s he was bankable, married to actress Afton Smith, and raising three sons.
What broke
Three things hit at once.
The body went first. He did a lot of his own stunts on the Mummy films. He has said that cost him years of surgeries: repeated laminectomies on his back, a partial knee replacement, spinal work, and vocal-cord repair. He has described roughly seven years cycling in and out of hospitals. Action-hero casting stopped making sense when he could barely work.
The marriage collapsed next. He and Smith announced a split in 2007; the divorce was finalized in 2009. The settlement required about $900,000 a year in combined alimony and child support, plus a large property payment. He later asked a court to cut the support, citing medical limits and falling income. She accused him of hiding contracts. One of their sons is autistic; Fraser has spoken about that as a reason he stepped back from public life and moved toward a quieter farm life in upstate New York. His mother died in 2016, which he has also named as part of the withdrawal.
The allegation is the part he calls the final piece. In a 2018 GQ profile, Fraser said that in 2003, at an HFPA luncheon at the Beverly Hills Hotel, then-HFPA president Philip Berk groped him while they were shaking hands — grabbing him and touching him between the legs. Fraser said he felt ill, like a child, and later became depressed and self-blaming. He told his wife, then mostly stayed quiet. His reps got a written apology from Berk in 2005. Berk’s version has always been different: in his memoir he called it a joking pinch; to GQ he called Fraser’s account a fabrication and said the apology admitted no wrongdoing. Fraser said work “withered on the vine,” that he was rarely invited back to the Golden Globes, and that “the silence was deafening.” Berk and the HFPA denied any blacklist. The HFPA said it had no prior knowledge of the detailed allegation and opened an inquiry after the GQ piece. Berk was expelled from the HFPA in 2021, but over a separate email about Black Lives Matter, not the Fraser claim.
The disappearance
From the mid-2000s into the late 2010s he was mostly off studio marquees: smaller films, TV, long gaps. Fans treated it as a mystery — “what happened to Brendan Fraser?” — until the 2018 interview put the injuries, the divorce, and the Berk allegation in one place. Public sympathy turned into a nickname: the Brenaissance.
The return
He rebuilt through television, including Cliff Steele / Robotman on Doom Patrol (2019–2023). Darren Aronofsky then cast him as Charlie in The Whale (2022). The Venice premiere got a long standing ovation. In March 2023 he won the Academy Award for Best Actor. He skipped the Golden Globes that season, citing the old HFPA history. He has kept working since, including talk of returning to the Mummy world in better physical shape.
What is documented is a star whose body gave out, whose personal life became expensive and public, and who says a powerful awards-group figure assaulted him and that the industry went quiet afterward. He has been clear that the assault was not the only reason he vanished. It is the reason he gives for why he stopped fighting to stay.