Molly Shannon alleges she was sexually harassed by Gary Coleman

Molly Shannon alleges she was sexually harassed by late actor Gary Coleman (VIDEO)

American actor Molly Shannon has shared her creepy experience of being in a hotel room with Diff’rent Strokes star Gary Coleman and being sexually harassed by him.

On April 12, Shannon appeared on The Howard Stern Show, where she shared an incident that happened around the time she was starting out in Hollywood. It is unclear when exactly the incident occurred.

The actor had signed with Mark Randall, an industry agent who also managed Coleman. She was given a chance to meet Coleman alongside Randall in the celebrity’s penthouse hotel.

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Shannon says that when she went up to meet him with Randall, Coleman was dressed in a suit and held her hand. He told her she reminded him of Kimberly from Diff’rent Strokes, who played Coleman’s adoptive sister on the show.

Shannon was excited at the thought of being compared to Kimberly: “I was like, ‘Oh my god, if I could only be on Diff’rent Strokes!'” she told Stern, before entering the darker side of the story.

Dana Plato as Kimberly in “Diff’rent Strokes” (Source: Columbia Pictures Television)

Once Shannon was in Coleman’s presidential suite, her agent “disappeared,” leaving her alone with Coleman, who began tickling her while she was seated on his bed. He then got aggressive and tried to kiss her. When she pushed him off, he began jumping and bouncing on the bed and trying to wrap himself around her, trying to get on top of her.

At first, she wasn’t sure what was going on, saying that she was just a young and naive Catholic virgin.

“I guess because of his size, I didn’t feel physically threatened,” she said. But when Coleman kept repeating the groping and smothering, she threw him off, running to the bathroom for safety.

Coleman allegedly grabbed Shannon by the legs and ankles, but she made a run for it and managed to lock herself in the bathroom. That was not the end of it.

“Then he sticks his hands under the door and he’s like, ‘I can see you,'” she told Stern.

Shannon sprinted out the door and saw her agent. “I was like, ‘You gotta watch that client of yours.’ I wish I could have stood up for myself more but that’s all I said.”

Her new memoir, titled Hello, Molly!, covers what happened that night in more detail.