Alfred Hitchcock Allegedly Sexually Assaulted Actress Tippi Hedren

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Actress and Alfred Hitchcock muse Tippi Hedren claims in a new memoir that the director sexually assaulted her while they were working on the 1963 movie The Birds, New York Post reports.

In the book, Tippi, Hedren describes how her excitement of being discovered by Hitchcock and cast in the Psycho follow-up turned sour as the director became more and more obsessed with the then 31-year-old actress. Hitchcock, according to the memoir, would talk to Hedren about getting erections, ask her to "touch him," and would become "petulant" and angry when he'd see her speaking to other men on set. He even reportedly forced himself on her in the back of a limo.

"It was an awful, awful moment," Hedren writes in Tippi.

Later, Hitchcock allegedly "lied" to the actress, saying that he would use a flock of mechanical birds in a scene, but then used live birds that swarmed and pecked at her. "Not even the greatest trainer in the world could control every move an animal makes, especially when it's under stress," she writes in the book. "It was brutal and ugly and relentless."

After The Birds was a success, Hedren went on to shoot the film Marnie with Hitchcock again. Hedren says Hitchcock's treatment of her did not change—he had a secret door built connecting her dressing room to his office and asked the special effects department to build him a replica of her face just for his personal use. At one point, Hedren says the director showed up in her dressing room and aggressively assaulted her.

"It was sexual, it was perverse," the memoir reads. "The harder I fought him, the more aggressive he became."

Hedren didn't tell anyone about the assault and obsession at the time, though. "Sexual harassment and stalking were terms that didn't exist [back then]," she writes.

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