Actress Pamela Guest has been on a one-woman crusade against sexual assault in the entertainment industry for more than 40 years. It started, she says, after she was raped in the early 1970s by Oscar-winning songwriter Joseph Brooks while auditioning for what she thought would be a role in one of his movies.

A newly elected member of the national and local boards of SAG-AFTRA, Guest is continuing that quest, and has posted an account of her ordeal – and her decades-long battle for justice and healing – on the website of Membership First, the union’s “loyal opposition.” Read it below.

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One of her first acts on the local board was to propose a Sexual Harassment Task Force, which passed unanimously last month. “I was given the mandate to spearhead the effort,” she wrote. “There was much discussion as to whether it would be under a national or local committee. So far its status is unknown. I heard a rumor that the LA Local Women’s Committee put me on a task force or commission that they’re forming, but I’ve heard nothing official.”

Two weeks after the local board approved her motion to establish a task force, however, SAG-AFTRA announced that it had launched a President’s Blue Ribbon Commission on Safety to evaluate and address workplace safety issues on film and TV productions.

Guest told Deadline she’s heard that this Blue Ribbon Commission now is going to address not only safety issues but issues of sexual harassment and abuse as well. But she said she thinks “sexual harassment is a big enough issue to deserve its own task force.”

The union confirmed tonight what Guest had heard; it will be folded into the Blue Ribbon Commission on Safety, chaired by SAG-AFTRA president Gabrielle Carteris, that the national board approved in October.

A spokesperson for the union said tonight, “The SAG-AFTRA Sexual Harassment Work Group is a subcommittee of the Blue Ribbon Commission on Safety and was created by Gabrielle as chair shortly after our public statement on harassment.”

On October 13, Carteris declared that “our union has a zero tolerance policy against harassment of its members and others employed under our collective bargaining agreements” – even though the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which enforces workplace anti-discrimination and sexual harassment laws, cautions against adopting “zero tolerance” policies regarding sexual harassment, finding that “the term ‘zero tolerance’ is misleading and potentially counterproductive. Accountability requires that discipline for harassment be proportionate to the offensiveness of the conduct.”

“Now you might ask,” Guest wrote in the post, “how a newly elected SAG-AFTRA board member was so bold as to find herself making a motion to form a SAG-AFTRA Sexual Harassment Task Force. The story involves my personal #MeToo story, a film and an Oscar winning composer.”

The composer was Brooks, who won the 1978 Oscar for Best Music and Original Song for the title tune from You Light Up My Life. Police said Brooks committed suicide in 2011 while awaiting trial on charges of drugging and raping numerous actresses who, like Guest, had been led to believe that he was auditioning them for roles in his movies. He was indicted in June 2009 in Manhattan and faced more than 90 counts of rape, sexual abuse assault and other charges.

Guest, however, never was listed in police records as one of his victims. She says he had given her a fake name during her “audition,” and she only came to realize his true identity many years later.

Here is the full text of Guest’s post: