Winona Ryder claims Mel Gibson asked her if she was a Jewish ‘oven dodger’
“Braveheart” is in hot water yet again.
Just when you thought Mel Gibson was back in Hollywood’s good graces, actress Winona Ryder has alleged that the 64-year-old actor slandered her with an anti-Semitic slur while they were at a party in 1995. The “Stranger Things” star dropped the bombshell, which was first reported by GQ in 2010, while discussing her experiences with anti-Semitism in Hollywood in an interview with the UK-based Sunday Times.
“We were at a crowded party with one of my good friends, and Mel Gibson was smoking a cigar,” Ryder, 48, told the news outlet. She added that something came up about the Jewish faith, at which point the “Mad Max” actor said, “You’re not an oven dodger, are you?” — an apparent reference to the way Jewish prisoners were incinerated in Nazi death camps.
At the same industry soiree, Ryder claims Gibson asked her friend, who is gay, “‘Oh, wait, am I gonna get AIDS?’” She’s also alleged that he later tried to apologize for his offensive statements.
However, when reached for comment, Gibson’s rep told The Post, “This is 100% untrue. She lied about it over a decade ago, when she talked to the press, and she’s lying about it now. Also, she lied about him trying to apologize to her back then. He did reach out to her, many years ago, to confront her about her lies and she refused to address it with him.”
In the same interview, the “Reality Bites” star — who was born Winona Laura Horowitz — also claimed that an unnamed studio head said she “looked ‘too Jewish’ ” to star as a member of a blue-blooded family featured in an unspecified period piece she was shooting years ago.
Gibson was first accused of making anti-Semitic remarks in 2006, when he was stopped for a DUI near Malibu, California. The actor-director told a police officer, “Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world” and referred to the policewoman on the scene as “sugar tits.”
That wasn’t the first time Gibson’s rants ruffled feathers. People’s “Sexiest Man Alive” of 1985 infamously made homophobic comments to a Spanish newspaper in 1991, and said he wanted New York Times writer Frank Rich’s “intestines on a stick” after the critic skewered “The Passion of the Christ.”
In Gibson’s most notorious incident in 2010, tapes surfaced of epic misogynistic and racist tirades recorded by former girlfriend Oksana Grigorieva, with quotes including, “If you get raped by a pack of [N-words], it will be your fault.”
Grigorieva claimed he had punched her in the head and face on multiple occasions. Gibson pleaded no contest to a charge of misdemeanor battery in 2011 and served no jail time.
The Oscar-winning actor-director’s father, the late author Hutton Red Gibson, once gave an interview in which he declared the Holocaust “fiction.”