Timothy Busfield made a first appearance in New Mexico court Wednesday as prosecutors detailed a new sexual abuse accusation against the Emmy-winning actor.

Busfield, 68, has been charged with two felony counts of criminal sexual contact of a minor and a single count of child abuse for allegedly inappropriately touching two child actors while he worked as a director and executive producer on the Fox drama “The Cleaning Lady,” filmed in Albuquerque. He was held without bond pending a hearing on a motion for pretrial detention.

In that motion, prosecutors argued Busfield should be jailed pending trial due to what they called “a sustained pattern of predatory conduct” that they said dated to at least 1994. That year, a 17-year-old extra on the film “Little Big League” accused Busfield of sexually assaulting her in a lawsuit filed in Los Angeles Superior Court that was later settled privately, the motion states.

Most recently, a man named Colin Swift reported to law enforcement on Tuesday that, years ago, Busfield sexually abused Swift’s then-16-year-old daughter during an audition at B Street Theatre in Sacramento, the motion states. Swift alleged that Busfield begged the family to not report the abuse to law enforcement if he received therapy, and they initially agreed, the filing states.

No charges have been filed against Busfield in connection with that incident.

Busfield founded B Street Theatre as a touring company called Theatre for Children Inc. in 1986, according to its website. Although he is listed as an emeritus board member, he has not participated in the organization since 2001, and the incident recently reported to police is alleged to have taken place there about 25 years ago, according to a statement from B Street Theatre. The theater has retained legal counsel to conduct an internal investigation, the statement said.

Prosecutors allege Busfield’s conduct “reflects a calculated pattern of grooming, lack of boundaries, and exploitation of professional authority to gain access to minors,” according to the motion for pretrial detention. Witnesses have said they fear retaliation and career harm for speaking out against him, demonstrating “how individuals in positions of power are able to silence victims and witnesses, allowing abuse to persist unchecked,” they wrote.

A representative for Busfield could not be reached Wednesday. His attorney Stanton “Larry” Stein previously said in a statement that the actor is innocent and “determined to clear his name.” He also referenced an affidavit in which Busfield suggested to investigators that the child actors’ mother might have sought “revenge” on the director for “not bringing her kids back for the final season.”

The actor, known for his work on television series “The West Wing” and “Thirtysomething,” turned himself in Tuesday, which prosecutors allege was five days after he knew a judge had issued a warrant for his arrest. During that time, Busfield traveled from New York to New Mexico to avoid the extradition process and surrender at a convenient time, the motion alleges.

He was booked into the Metropolitan Detention Center in Albuquerque, where he remained Wednesday.

Busfield is accused of inappropriately touching the two child actors, who are brothers, on the set of “The Cleaning Lady,” according to an affidavit. Their mother reported the abuse took place from November 2022 to spring 2024, according to the complaint. Police launched an investigation in November 2024 after being notified of the alleged abuse by a doctor at the University of New Mexico Hospital.

According to prosecutors, “Cleaning Lady” producer Warner Bros. conducted an investigation into Busfield’s behavior in February 2025 after the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists hotline fielded an anonymous complaint that the director entered a trailer on the set and kissed a 6-year-old boy on the face while he was getting a haircut. Another caller to the hotline claimed that, in September 2024, Busfield asked a parent to wait outside and took a minor — one of the alleged victims in the New Mexico case — behind closed doors for an audition at the Cinelease Studios office in Albuquerque, according to the motion.

A third-party investigator retained by Warner Bros., however, found no evidence that Busfield had been alone with the brothers on set or engaged in other inappropriate conduct, according to a statement from the investigator released by Stein, Busfield’s attorney. But the investigator failed to speak with one of the victims and his parents, as well as key witnesses, prosecutors allege in the motion.

Warner Bros. Television said in a statement that it takes all misconduct allegations seriously and has cooperated with law enforcement by expediting the sharing of the report by its third-party investigator, which it could have withheld as privileged. The studio has a clear non-retaliation policy to ensure employees feel comfortable reporting concerns, the statement said. “Our top priority is the health and safety of our cast and crew across all productions,” it said.

Busfield, who is married to actor Melissa Gilbert, was also accused of battery in March 2012 by a 28-year-old woman who said he sexually assaulted her in a Los Angeles movie theater, but prosecutors declined to file charges due to “slim evidence,” according to the motion for pretrial detention.

The hearing on the motion, during which a judge will decide whether Busfield remains in jail, will be scheduled in 2nd Judicial District Court in Albuquerque within the next five business days, said Camille Cordova, a public information officer for the Bernalillo County Metropolitan Court.

Before he surrendered, Busfield recorded a video at his attorney’s office in which he denied the allegations. “I’m gonna confront these lies,” he said in the video published by TMZ, “they’re horrible.”

Prosecutors called the move “troubling” and said it demonstrated “a willingness to prioritize personal narrative control and public relations” over complying with court processes.

Times staff writer Alexandra Del Rosario contributed to this report.

Jodie Foster plays a self-assured psychoanalyst whose composure unravels after a patient unexpectedly dies in the genre-bending French film “A Private Life.”

Rebecca Zlotowski’s latest, in theaters Friday, is part noir, part comedy of remarriage, and part Freudian fever dream about past lives.

This is a film that does not abide by rules or play into any easy expectations about what it should be, resulting in big swings, tonal shifts and even a lurking Holocaust through-line. Also, oddly enough considering such grave themes and subjects, it’s all done with a relatively light touch set, in part, by the cheeky needle drop at its opening: the Talking Heads song “Psycho Killer.” Some parts work better than others, but you can’t help but admire the go-for-broke originality and unabashed femininity of it all. And anchoring it all is Foster, using the full force of her star power and impeccable French to make “A Private Life,” unwieldy and complex as it is, go down as easy as a glass of gamay.

Foster’s character, Dr. Lilian Steiner, is an American expat living and working in France. She’s an accomplished, sophisticated woman who believes she has a grasp on people and the world around her, recording and cataloging all her private sessions with clients on meticulously organized CDs. This act in and of itself is a little odd — her son wonders why she doesn’t just use a more modern method, for instance. But it also kind of gets to the heart of why, perhaps, despite her evident intelligence, there’s a cold disconnect between analyst and subject. Is she even listening to them?

Lilian starts to wonder this herself after she receives a call that her client Paula ( Virginie Efira ) has died by suicide. Paula was not someone she believed was capable of this. Instead of looking inward, she goes back to the tapes to begin an amateur investigation to find some other explanation: It must be murder, she concludes. Suspects include Paula’s daughter Valérie (Luàna Bajrami) and husband Simon (Mathieu Amalric).

She also enlists a sidekick in her sleuthing, her ex-husband Gabriel (a delightful Daniel Auteuil ) who is more than happy to go along for the ride, to listen to her conspiracy theories over several bottles of wine, to be a decoy distraction so that she can snoop through Simon’s house, and, ultimately, to just be there for her, no matter how unhinged she’s becoming. You can just see the love and admiration in his attentiveness. He’s not off put by the crazy; it’s just part of what makes her, well, her. Their rekindled relationship, so effortlessly lived in, so mature, so fun, is by far the highlight of “A Private Life.”

It’s a shame that their romance is basically a side show to the more convoluted rest, which involves a hypnotist and a revelation of a past life in which Lilian and Paula were members of the same WWII-era orchestra and lovers torn apart by jealous exes and Nazis. One of those Nazis is Lilian’s son (Vincent Lacoste), which she awkwardly, drunkenly tells him at his birthday dinner to try to explain why they’ve never been that close. She’s also completely disinterested in her grandchild, which might be one “let’s unpack that” too many in this film. In other words, there’s a lot going on in “A Private Life,” which Zlotowski co-wrote with Anne Berest.

One thing there’s not enough of is Efira. She gets some moments in flashback, but most of them teeter on the “dead wife montage” cliche. It’s not that Zlotowski wasn’t aware of what she had in Efira (case in point, their poignant, tender work together in “Other People’s Children”), but perhaps she was counting on our familiarity to fill in the gaps.

“A Private Life” is ultimately Foster’s show anyway and she seems to relish the tricky assignment. The tone around her might be on the lighter side, but for Lilian, the stakes are grave with the very essence of her self-worth and life’s work on the line. It’s a fascinating portrait of a woman essentially forced to rethink and revise all of the rules she’d lived by, the facts that she made sense of the world with and submit herself to the idea that some things might just be unknowable — even for a know-it-all psychoanalyst.

“A Private Life,” a Sony Pictures Classics release in theaters Friday, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for “language, graphic nudity, brief violence, some sexual content.” Running time: 105 minutes. Three stars out of four.

After another impressively profitable weekend in theaters, James Cameron’s “Avatar: Fire and Ash” helped crown its star Zoe Saldaña the queen of the box office.

The third “Avatar” movie boasted $21.3 million in North American sales last week, bringing it to a global total of $1.23 billion. With those impressive stats, Saldaña officially surpassed Scarlett Johansson as the highest-grossing actor of all time.

The Oscar winner has grossed more than $15.47 billion at the international box office, according to box office tracking website the Numbers. Johansson only recently gained the title after surpassing her “Avengers” co-star Samuel L. Jackson with the release of last summer’s “Jurassic World Rebirth.”

What helped buoy Saldaña to the top is the fact that the 47-year-old actor stars in the three highest-grossing films of all time: 2009’s “Avatar” ($2.9 billion), 2019’s “Avengers: Endgame” ($2.8 billion) and 2022’s “Avatar: The Way of Water” ($2.3 billion).

Saldaña is also the only actor to appear in four movies that brought in over $2 billion worldwide. (2018’s “Avengers: Infinity War” grossed $2.05 billion.)

Last year proved that Saldaña’s talent exceeded the realm of popcorn movies when she nabbed her first Academy Award for her supporting role in the controversial musical “Emilia Pérez.” Her win marked the first time an actor with Dominican roots had won an Oscar.

“I am a proud child of immigrant parents, with dreams and dignity and hardworking hands,” she said through tears while accepting the award for supporting actress. “And I am the first American of Dominican origin to accept an Academy Award, and I know I will not be the last.”

Saldaña cemented her Oscar win while side-stepping criticisms of the film — namely regarding its portrayals of Mexicans and transgender people — as well as the scandal that surrounded “Emilia Pérez” co-star Karla Sofía Gascón, when her offensive tweets with anti-Muslim, anti-diversity and racist language resurfaced.