Cindy Smith still vividly remembers the day of her first job interview with a top talent agency based here.

"The president of the agency walked by me in the waiting room and gestured me into his office," says Ms. Smith, now a writer and mother of two. "Without a moments hesitation he said, 'if you sleep with me right now, I will get you anywhere you want to go in this industry.' He was not even being bold but rather matter-of-fact. That's what shocked me most."

The incident, as she recounts it, is one of the more overt examples of an oft-told tale: female teen comes to Hollywood to become a star, and instead becomes a victim of sexual abuse or harassment.

Now, because of a California law lifting the statute of limitations in certain molestation cases, incidents as old as the one from three-decades ago described by Ms. Smith (not her real name) are open to legal action. Coming after the scandals in the Roman Catholic Church, one of the law's effects is to raise new questions about the extent to which sexual harassment of young people has gone unchecked in the male-dominated culture of Hollywood.

Such questions have surfaced with regularity over the decades in high-profile scandals from Charlie Chaplin's dalliances with underaged girls in the 1930s to Roman Polanski's departure from the US in 1978 after allegedly seducing a teenager.

Today, lawyers who are preparing dozens of cases against Catholic priests say there's the potential for even more sex-abuse cases to come forward within the film, modeling, music, and television industries. "Because of this new law, I anticipate that the number of cases coming forward in California by victims of the entertainment industry will be larger than that of the Catholic church," says Larry Drivon, a Stockton-based lawyer who helped draft the California law.

His firm just named John Casablancas, the founder of top modeling agency, Elite, in a sexual-abuse lawsuit filed under the new law by a former model. The woman, now a housewife, claims that Casablancas impregnated her when she was 15 in the late 1980s, and then arranged for her to have an abortion.

Child, family, and sexual-abuse groups say they are preparing for the onslaught of similar cases, which could snowball as revelations are made - much like the church scandal.

But other lawyers and civil libertarians worry that it could lead to an unwarranted witch hunt - a frenzy of sensationalism, greed, and revenge reminiscent of the McCarthy era. While there may be legitimate cases of sex abuse in the entertainment industry, they say, there is great potential for abuse of the new law by damaging public reputations through mere allegation.

Legislators in several states are watching the California example for clues on how to proceed in their own moves to extend statutes-of-limitation in sex cases. Similar laws are pending in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, New York, and Missouri, and early moves are afoot in Michigan, Florida, and Ohio.

The Casablancas lawsuit, filed in Los Angeles Superior Court, alleges that Casablancas began sexually abusing the girl in 1988 when she was in Elite's "Look of the Year" competition, a pageant to find new models. Casablancas, now 60, set up the business in 1970 and built it into one of the world's leading agencies with models such Cindy Crawford and Naomi Campbell. "The industry is full of [sexual abuse]," says supermodel Tyra Banks, "A lot of it is disgusting. You need to be mature enough to handle it."

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