EXCLUSIVE: Timothy Busfield has been dropped by Innovative Artists on the same day the actor made his first court appearance over child sex abuse charges.
A rep for the company confirmed to Deadline the actor and director was no longer with the agency but declined to comment further. Busfield was with IA for several years with a fair sized team handling his career.
Facing two counts of criminal sexual contact with a minor and child abuse over allegations of multiple incidents with two young boys who were actors on The Cleaning Lady which Busfield directed several episodes. One of the children, called SL in official documents, told authorities that Busfield touched his “‘poop’ and ‘pee’ area.”
The Emmy winner turned himself into Albuquerque police on January 13, having supposedly driven himself from the East Coast to New Mexico.
The dramatic surrender to the APD came five days after an arrest warrant was issued for Busfield and US Marshals were activate to apprehend him. Currently in custody at the Bernalillo County Metropolitan Detention Center after being arrested and booked, the 68-year-old orange jumpsuit wearing Emmy winner appeared via video feed in front of Judge Felicia Blea-Rivera on Wednesday afternoon.
Widely expected to eventual say not guilty after proclaiming his innocence on Tuesday, Busfield entered no plea today. Just before going to the authorities, Busfield put out a video in which he bluntly said, “I did not do anything to those little boys.”
Wednesday’s hearing followed a filing this morning by the Bernalillo County DA seeking to keep the defendant in custody and denying him bond. That same filing also revealed a new sex abuse claim against Busfield involving a 16-year-old girl. That incident, around an audition the teen was making at a theatre program Busfield founded, occurred nearly 30 years ago.
Facing potentially more than a decade behind bars if found guilty on the felonies over the two Cleaning Lady boys, Busfield and his Larry Stein-led defense are set to return to court in no more than five business days for another hearing. That session will be to address a pre-trial detention motion filed today by incumbent DA (and current Land of Enchantment would-be governor) Sam Bergman’s office to keep Busfield off the streets up to and including a trial.
“No conditions of release will reasonably protect the safety of any other person or the community,” the 7-page document asserted, among other things.
In what could prove a critical part of Busfield’s defense in the weeks and months to come, the actor told APD Officer Marvin Brown in a November 3, 2025 phone interview quoted in the warrant, what he believed may be the motivation behind the devastating accusations. The thirtysomething actor told the officer that Cleaning Lady “lead actress, Elodie Yung” told him back in late 2024 that “the mother of SL and VL (sic) that she wanted revenge, and I’m going to get my revenge on Tim Busfield for not bringing her kids back for the final season.”
To that, it was only back in September of last year, after nearly a year of the claims being mainly about tickling and head-kissing of the children by director “Uncle Tim” that the accusations became much more serious. Last fall, the mother of VL and SL contacted the police again. On that occasion she told the cops “on 09/02/2025, SL reported to his counselor that Timothy Busfield “touched his penis and bottom. That obviously transformed what, like a previous probe by Cleaning Lady producers Warner Bros TV, had been a rather torpid investigation into something much more urgent
As well as the allegations concerning the two 2014-born boys (referred to as SL and VL in last week’s arrest warrant) who starred on The Cleaning Lady over multiple seasons before being let go for having aged out of the role, the 68-year-old Busfield has also been accused in two previous sexual assault allegations.
Those claims arose out of incidents that took place in 1994 and 2012, and involved a 17-year-old girl and a 28-year-old woman, respectively. The West Wing vet wasn’t ever charged in either of those cases, However, in an outcome that has been mischaracterized as a settlement of some sort, the actor was ordered to pay $150,000 in the mid-1990s matter over legal fees in an unsuccessful countersuit.
