Ben Dreyfuss: “We’re Estranged and Have No Money from Dad

Richard Dreyfuss's son, Ben, says he and his siblings have been estranged from their father for years.

Ben, a journalist who previously worked at Mother Jones, has published emails between him and Richard from January 2024, which he claims are the most recent conversations between him and his father.

He wrote of the email exchange, "It's long and pointless, and he sounds worse than me, but I'm not very famous either."

Richard Dreyfuss's son, Ben Dreyfuss, alleges that he and his two siblings have been estranged from their actor father for years.

On Thursday, November 13, Ben—a 39-year-old journalist who previously worked at Mother Jones—shared several since-deleted posts on X, in which he wrote that he and his two siblings, Emily and Harry, "have no money" saved from their father's successful acting career. "My dad doesn't have any money," Ben wrote in a since-deleted post, which was recorded by USA Today on November 13. "Even if he did, we wouldn't have any because we've been separated since some difficult family drama related to #MeToo."

In those posts, Ben said that his relationship with his father, Richard, a 78-year-old Oscar-winning actor known for his roles in Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, began to crumble several years ago due to a specific incident. In 2017, when the #MeToo movement went viral, Ben was reportedly managing Richard's Twitter account and wrote a post supporting his younger brother, Harry, who accused Kevin Spacey of inappropriately touching him when he was 18. According to Ben's now-deleted post, that tweet "provoked someone to #MeToo my dad," and he has since blamed his children for the incident. According to USA Today, Ben wrote, "This has caused years of bitterness." On Monday, November 17, Ben further strengthened his claims about his estrangement from Richard when he published the latest email exchange between him and Richard on his Substack blog, "Come Down." Ben wrote in the blog post, "I've sent several emails since then, but he hasn't responded." In it, he shared an alleged email exchange between him and his father in January 2024. Ben wrote of the conversation, "It's long and pointless, and he sounds worse than me, but I'm not feeling that good either." In that email conversation, Ben discussed his actions at a 2022 family dinner in San Francisco, where he said he didn't properly explain his confused feelings about the public accusations of nepotism against him. "I didn't explain it all properly, and I hadn't even finished when you and Emily started talking, and we all started yelling at each other about who was at fault," Ben wrote in the email, before admitting he used a homophobic slur against Richard during the argument. In the email, Ben wrote that he had been "trying to make amends" for the incident for over a year.