In an interview with the Times of London published Saturday, Kym Kyrath, who played 5-year-old Gretl in “The Sound of Music,” accused the late producer Patrick Curtis of raping her when she was 15. Kyrath added that there were “pedophile-ish people” around her as she grew up in Hollywood, and her parents were often worried about the dynamics at hand.
“After I did Brady Bunch, I was 13 going on 18, in terms of looking very physically mature. There were some very scary offers and pedophile-ish people who were circulating,” she said. Kyrath added that she believes Curtis, who died in 2022, assaulted others.
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“I heard some stories from somebody who was in a position to know — there were other young people,” she said.
Curtis, an occasional actor most closely associated with his marriage to Raquel Welch, reportedly appeared as an infant in “Gone With the Wind” and worked behind the scenes in film and TV. He backed several films starring Welch, including “The Sorcerers” and “A Swingin’ Summer.”
Karath didn’t tell anyone what happened right away, “but my parents kind of figured out what happened,” she explained. “I couldn’t say much to them because I was afraid my father would go and literally murder the guy and I didn’t want my dad to go to jail.”
Her parents told her to quit acting and focus on school – something she agrees with in retrospect. “It was the safe thing to do. It was really a terrible, frightening period of time,” she said.
Karath ultimately graduated from USC and moved to Paris in her early 20s. She fell in love, got married, and then gave birth to her son – who contracted viral meningitis and ended up with a long-term mental disability — and planned to begin acting again shortly thereafter.
“I have not gone back to acting quite honestly because my son is really the center of my life,” she said. “He lives with me, he’s 34 and needs me. I can’t drop everything to go to auditions.”
The actress publicly tweeted a photo of herself at age 14 in 2017 during the MeToo movement. “I think everybody who went through that needed to add their voices so that it all changed,” she told The Times. “I was really ecstatically happy for what happened with the MeToo movement. It was a big rectifying of things that needed to be rectified.”
Read the entire interview with Kym Karath at The Times.
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