Before actress Eliza Dushku won a $9.5 million settlement from CBS over harassment by the network’s “Bull” star Michael Weatherly, he dated Jessica Alba when she was a just teen, and took her virginity.
Alba, then 18, and Weatherly, who was 30 at the time, dated for a few years after they met on the set of Fox’s “Dark Angel” in 2000. He proposed on her 20th birthday — despite their nearly 13-year age gap, and her born-again Christian parents’ disapproval. She later told Cosmo, “Relationships can be tough . . . I’ve only had two boyfriends. In the first one, with Michael [Weatherly], I didn’t have a voice yet, and he was so much older . . . I was so young, 18, when I started dating him. I was a virgin. I knew I wanted to be in love with the first person I slept with, because for almost everyone I knew, the first experience made them feel like s–t . . . I wanted to be careful that he was going to be in love with me, and wasn’t just going to leave me.”
They split in 2003, and Alba got her first tattoo. She later told Stephen Colbert, “He was really anti-tattoos, and I felt like after I broke up with him, I, like, found myself again.” The “Fantastic Four” star is now happily married to Cash Warren, with whom she has three children.
It was just revealed that Weatherly, 50, a regular on CBS’s prime-time lineup for 15 years, made sexually inappropriate comments to Dushku, 37, on the 2017 set of “Bull,” including a rape joke and a comment about a threesome. She was fired when she complained, and later won a settlement from CBS. Weatherly, who wed Bojana Jankovic in 2009, said the comments were “jokes mocking some lines in the script . . . what I said was both not funny and not appropriate, and I am sorry.”
But Dushku added in an op-ed this week, “It is easy to see how uncomfortable, speechless and frozen he made me feel. For Weatherly’s part, it looks like a deeply insecure power play, about a need to dominate and demean . . . What is hardest to share, is the way he made me feel for 10 to 12 hours per day for weeks . . . I was made to feel dread nearly all the time I was in his presence.”