Richard Dreyfuss has seemingly not spoken to his three children in several years.
The 78-year-old Jaws star’s eldest son Ben, 39, recently revealed that he and his siblings – Emily, 42, and Harry, 35 – have been estranged from their father for nearly ten years.
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Ben opened up about the strained relationship in a series of since-deleted tweets on X/Twitter, sharing that it started during the #MeToo movement.
“Everyone assumes my siblings and I are wealthy from our dad and we’re all a bit too uncomfortable to make it clear, but we have no money from my dad,” he wrote in deleted posts, via USA Today. “My dad has no money. If he did, we wouldn’t get it since we’ve been estranged ever since some complicated family drama to do with MeToo.”
The estrangement dates back to 2017 after Ben‘s brother Harry alleged he was groped by Kevin Spacey in 2008.
Ben was running his father’s Twitter account at that time and shared a post in support of Harry.
“That tweet prompted someone to MeToo my dad. He blames us for that,” Ben said. “This led to years of acrimony.”
He then continued to talk about the estrangement on his Substack blog, Calm Down, where he explained he deleted the tweets because of the responses.
“I deleted it because the responses made me uncomfortable—90% of them were this patronizing, syrupy sympathy I don’t feel I deserve, and the other 10% were from the Krippendorf Hive or some sh-t being like ‘I love your father and spit his name out of your mouth.’ But once I saw it in the newspaper, I realized I’d made myself look ashamed by deleting it. I’m not. I deleted it out of self-loathing, not embarrassment,” he wrote.
Ben also revealed the last email exchange he had with his father, noting that it was the last one Richard responded to, despite Ben sending “plenty since.”
“I love my father. I have always loved him. I think he’s better than this email. But it’s been two years, and this appears to be the last email I’m ever going to get from him, so f-ck it,” he noted before sharing the emails.
In the email exchange, Ben explains his actions at a 2022 family dinner, where he says he didn’t explain his feelings well enough about public accusations of nepotism.
His father replied with an all caps email saying he thought Ben was claiming the actor has “money I’m keeping from you.”
“At least keep this one letter. It’ll be the last one unless you stop being a coward. Or start being better than your brother or sister,” Richard wrote in all caps.
“As I told you, to start writing me without any attempt to explain all the things that you said on the last night at the restaurant. Until you all wrote something addressing the lies, distortions, that kept a set of different feelings, values, kept them hidden from me, you would not be hearing from me,” Richard concluded.
Earlier this year, Richard missed SharkCon as he was hospitalized with bronchitis.
Source: justjared.com
