The photographer who Emily Ratajkowski claimed sexually assaulted her has been publicly accused of abusing another actress when she was 17 — making her change her name after he “stole my youth.”
“Since Emily’s article has dropped I have been a wreck,” Nola Palmer wrote on Instagram about the 29-year-old model’s accusations against Jonathan Leder in a lengthy article for New York Magazine last week.
“Reading her words and the ways in which she described Jonathan instantly brought me to tears. I was in a state of panic before I could even finish the article,” Palmer said.
“I have been carrying around the pain and trauma of Jonathan and his abuse for a decade now. I have gone so far as changing my name because in my mind he owned it and I could not look at that name without seeing him,” the actress wrote
“I have spent ten plus years emotionally tied to my abuser, unable to let him fully go because at seventeen he broke me down and built me back up into his own image, an image I have been at war with ever since.
“But for the first time I am able to publicly say, Jonathan Leder was my abuser and that is thanks to Emily Ratajkowski and her bravery,” Palmer wrote.
Palmer said she was the “crazy actress” that Ratajkowski noted Leder had complained about before she says he sexually assaulted her during a 2012 shoot at his Catskills home.
“Emily, I am so sorry that this man hurt you. I wish I had the strength then to warn you,” she wrote.
“I am so unbelievably struck by your courage and your incredible ability to recount a truly harrowing moment in your life in such a thoughtful and insightful way,” she said of the model-turned-actress.
“It’s women like you Em that give us all strength to tell our own stories,” she wrote, ending her post, “Thank you Emily.”
A rep for Leder did not immediately respond to Page Six’s request for comment about the latest allegations against him.
The photographer had previously dismissed Ratajkowski’s claims as “too tawdry and childish to respond to.”
“You do know who we are talking about right? This is the girl that was naked in Treats! magazine, and bounced around naked in the Robin Thicke video at that time. You really want someone to believe she was a victim?” he told New York Mag.
His rep also said in a statement that he “totally denies her outrageous allegations of being ‘assaulted.'”
“It is grotesque and sad that she is so vindictive to lie in such a way to the press routinely,” the rep said, accusing her of being on a “never-ending search for press and publicity.”