Updated March 13, 2026, 2:48 p.m. ET
At least four women have told police that the Emmy-award winning actor and director Timothy Busfield groped their breasts and genitals, and forced himself on them, dating from 1993 to 2000. One was a 16-year-old community theater intern when she said Busfield pushed his hand into her pants and his tongue into her mouth.
The women came forward after Busfield was arrested on suspicion of child sex abuse on January 13. The women shared their stories with an Albuquerque police detective in January according to six video interviews with the women that USA TODAY obtained from the Second Judicial District Court in New Mexico under a public records request.
A grand jury indicted Busfield on four counts of criminal sexual contact of a child on February 6. A trial date has been set for May 2027 in New Mexico.
Busfield, 68, is best known for his roles in “The West Wing” and “Thirtysomething.” He has denied the charges.
Larry Stein, a civil attorney representing Busfield, told USA TODAY that these allegations aren’t relevant to the boys’ case. “I will not waste my time nor the public’s commenting on 30-year-old unproven allegations with adult women,” he said. “I don’t want to focus everyone’s attention on on the irrelevant facts of these women. And I don’t want to say anything negative about them. They are unproven allegations. They aren’t relevant to this case.”
Instead, Stein says the case is about two boys who denied abuse and a year and a half later, after prodding from their father, said they were abused.
“Every single witnesses denies that it happened or could have happened. There is nobody that says they observed him doing anything inappropriate. Every single witness who was there has said he did absolutely nothing wrong and he couldn’t have done anything wrong,” Stein said. “He’s worked with 100s of children over his career. And none of them have ever said he did anything.”
At least two of the women told police that when they refused Busfield’s advances, he told them their future in the film industry was limited. One, then a 20-year-old apprentice at a Sacramento theater, said Busfield would often whisper in her ear, “You don’t belong in this business. You have no talent.”
One told police that Busfield and his wife, the actress Melissa Gilbert, encouraged her to do drugs with them.
Busfield is accused of abusing twin boys on the set of “The Cleaning Lady” when they were seven and eight years old. The crime thriller, mostly shot in an Albuquerque studio, followed a surgeon in the Philippines who comes to the U.S. for her son’s medical treatment and winds up working as a cleaner for the mob.
The boys’ attorney said that their refusal of Busfield’s advances got them fired from the show, according to a court document filed by Busfield’s defense team.
Busfield’s attorney said in a court hearing on January 20 that the boys’ parents were angry that their children were dropped from the TV series after three seasons. The parents, Busfield’s attorneys say, were so dependent on their boys’ salaries – about $2 million over three seasons – that they manufactured the abuse and manipulated their children to tell the lie.
The women say they contacted police to share their stories because they say what Busfield is accused of with the boys feels familiar.
He was charismatic. He was well liked.
He abused them on set, in a trailer or while working, they told police.
Some were afraid to tell anyone. Others say they did, but nothing was done.
“I’ve been telling this story my whole life because it’s affected me and I wanted people to know about it. I just haven’t gotten to tell it to police officers because I was too old at the point where I thought that anyone would take me seriously,” one of the women told Albuquerque Police Detective Marvin Brown in a recorded interview on January 15.
USA TODAY is not naming the women who alleged the abuse.
Brown, who has worked on child sex abuse cases since 1989, has talked with more than two dozen cast and crew members, and reviewed therapy and medical reports for this case.
USA TODAY reviewed the recordings with six women Brown interviewed in January. Four alleged sexual abuse. One told him that he touched her inappropriately and when she refused his advances and later quit that Busfield told her she would never work in the film industry. Another woman said Busfield told her about his sexual fantasies and followed her car to a gas station when she tried to avoid him.
“It was just a creepy moment with the guy who obviously was ill,” the woman told Brown in a January 23 interview. When she saw Busfield’s arrest, she thought: “I thought these are not isolated cases. And your time is not the one and only time it’s ever happened. This time it was a kid.”
Brown told one of the six women he interviewed that some of the details could be used to show Busfield’s character such as “how aggressive he is.”
Here are their stories:
The intern
She was a 16-year-old intern working at B Street Theatre in Sacramento in 1996. Busfield and his brother owned the theater.
She says Busfield asked her to clean his office one day when the other interns went to a warehouse.
“He grabbed me in between the legs and pulled me down from the ladder and turned me around and stuck his tongue down my throat and touched me all over aggressively,” she told police. “And I pushed him off of me.”
He had grabbed her breasts and pushed his hand into her pants.
“I was freaked out because at first I was just in shock that it was happening, but then he was so big and just gnarly,” she told Brown in a recorded interview on January 15. “I was scared.”
She pushed Busfield off.
She said she immediately told a friend and a woman who worked in the box office. She then left work and took a few days off. Busfield’s brother, she says, told her if she didn’t return, she would be fired.
Afterward, she said the interns no longer rehearsed with Busfield. “And so, everybody was mad at me, so that’s why I thought it was my fault, because (the boys) were like, ‘We don’t get to work with Tim anymore?’ “
Her father and her stepfather met with Busfield.
“Tim admitted doing this. He started crying with all of his Emmy award winning acting and I fell for it. I felt badly for him,” her father said in a January 13 call with police. “So, I told him if he went to therapy for a year or two, that I would not report this to the police.”
The father, a therapist, said he now worries he had been too empathetic to Busfield, at the expense of his daughter who is now 42.
“His internship program was nothing more than a pool of young people that would do anything to get ahead in their acting career and looked at Tim Busfield as a God,” he told Brown. “And he took advantage of them many times over many years.”
The apprentice
At 20, she left her boyfriend and job in San Francisco to take an apprenticeship at B Street Theater in Sacramento in 2000.
Two months into her new role, she told police, she stood in a lighting booth alone against a ladder when Busfield started kissing her and groping her. He touched her breasts, her butt, her genitals over her clothes.
“It felt like sexual assault,” she told Brown. “He almost dove on me. I was in shock because I didn’t see it coming.”
“I said no. I’m not interested. And he was heaving. His body was heaving and he was upset and he was really angry that I did that to him,” she said in an interview on January 23. “It just really, really shocked me and it really, really scared me. I mean, he’s the owner of the theater and here I am an apprentice.”
She said Busfield stormed out.
Then the harassment began and lasted the year-long apprenticeship, she told Brown.
“He would whisper in my ear that I was untalented,” she said. “He would tell me that I was in the wrong business. He would say, ‘You should get out now. You don’t belong in this business. You have no talent.’ ”
“I remember being at some party, like a gala and he would make a point to find me and do that. He’d whisper these awful things in my ear, and he did it several times,” she said.
She didn’t tell anyone.
“I was also promised an equity card that they never gave me. I felt like it was a punishment for my refusal of him and that really upset me,” she said. “He just made it known over and over and over again to me that he didn’t like me, that he didn’t want me there as an apprentice, that he thought I was an untalented piece of (profanity) who should get out of the business.”
The extra
She was a 17-year-old extra on a Minnesota set for “Little Big League” in 1993 when Busfield invited her and a friend to his trailer. Busfield gave her beer. “They were trying to get us drunk,” she told police.
When she tried to leave, she told police that he pinned her against a refrigerator and pushed his bare foot into her genitals.
She ran out of the trailer and went to report the incident to Minneapolis police, she told Brown.
“They basically told me, ‘Look, he’s filming a show here. He’ll be back in California in three weeks. The most that’ll happen is he’ll get a slap on the wrist,” she told Brown in an interview recorded on January 15. “So, they really told me it wasn’t worth their time for pursuing.”
She went to therapy. In 1994, she sued Busfield in Los Angeles Superior Court, claiming Busfield assaulted her.
Busfield sued her attorneys for extortion. They settled privately, and later a judge dismissed the defamation suit and ordered Busfield to pay her law firm $150,000 it had cost to defend itself.
“Thank you for believing these children,” she told Brown before ending the call.
The actress
In 1991, she was a 26-year-old actress filming “Strays” with Busfield.
An assistant director told her that Busfield wanted to practice a scene with her in his trailer, she told police.
“It happened so fast. He probably grabbed me around the chest area and threw me against the wall. And I mean, it was enough to shock and scare me, and I’m a pretty tough cookie,” she told police in a January 19 interview. “He was trying to push me against the wall and basically dry hump me. I remember the erection and the tongue and the hands and throwing me up against a wall, like pinning me against the wall.”
She said she ran to the assistant director and told him to keep Busfield away from her. She kept her distance for the rest of the shoot.
The assistant
She took a class from Busfield during her spring semester of her senior year at Michigan State University.
When she graduated with a film degree in May 2017, Busfield and his wife hired her as a personal assistant.
She managed schedules, took care of their dogs and picked up laundry. She was on call 24-7, she told police.
“The comments that Tim made towards me were pretty uncomfy,” she told Brown in a January 15 interview. “I remember feeling very early on that I didn’t necessarily feel safe alone with him. He would push my shoulders and kind of just give unwanted touch.”
She said during a trip to Traverse City for a film festival, he hit on her, and wanted her to stay late and drink with him.
She declined his advances.
He drove them home from the trip. She told police she was in the passenger seat when he put his hand on her knee and said, “’You better be careful or I might start developing a crush for you or I might have a crush on you.’ And then yeah, it got very serious very quickly after that and I did not say I was very silent and I remember crying and it was noticeably that I was crying.”
She was 22.
She continued working for Busfield and Gilbert, following them to New York City. She worked on the movie “Guest Artist” with him.
“I came in Monday and he proceeded to yell at me for three hours saying that I’ve been so unprofessional. I will never make it in this industry. I’ll never be able to learn from anybody but him,” she told police. “Just very manipulative language being thrown at me.”
While she said Busfield never attacked her, she wanted to share her experience. “He is very predatory. He’s very manipulative. He’s very charismatic. He’s very charming when he needs to be.”
Laura Trujillo is a national columnist focusing on health and wellness. She is the author of “Stepping Back from the Ledge: A Daughter’s Search for Truth and Renewal,” and can be reached at ltrujillo@usatoday.com.
