For the entirety of her brief film career, Temple was forced to fight off sexual predators, as she was regularly groped, threatened, and terrorized by men. After she rebuked one Hollywood producer for his advances, he
responded, “Look, I’m going to be a big executive. We’re going to have to get along... What I had in mind was just a workplace formality.”
“It may be in your contract, but not mine,” she replied.
“Sex is like a glass of water,” the man she simply refers to as “Wizard” continued. “You get thirsty, you drink. You want sex, you have it.”
Then there was the beloved comedian George Jessel, who once invited her to his office to “discuss a key role” in his upcoming film:
We were standing a pace apart, eyeball to eyeball. In one swift movement he opened his trousers and, with a sudden reach, encircled me with one arm… I could feel his other hand groping to lift my shirt. Hard on the heels of the Wizard, this new assault seemed unreal, but little could I do but thrust my right knee upward into his groin... Pain, disgust, and hate flickered across his face, but I felt no mercy. More and more the adult movie business seemed populated with a bunch of copulating tomcats.