Richard Dreyfuss’ son Ben Dreyfuss is alleging he and his two siblings have been estranged from their actor father for years.

On Thursday, Nov. 13, Ben — a 39-year-old journalist who previously worked at Mother Jones — shared a number of 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 has no money,” Ben wrote in a since-deleted post, as recorded by USA Today on Nov. 13. “If he did, we wouldn’t get it since we’ve been estranged ever since some complicated family drama to do with MeToo.”

In those X posts, Ben said that his relationship with his father, Richard — the 78-year-old Oscar-winning actor known for his roles in Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind — began to break down years ago due to a specific incident. Around the time the #MeToo movement went viral in 2017, Ben was allegedly managing Richard’s Twitter account and wrote a post supporting his younger brother, Harry, who accused Kevin Spacey of groping him when he was 18 years old. At the time, a lawyer representing Spacey denied the allegations.

According to Ben’s since-deleted X posts, the tweet “prompted someone to MeToo my dad,” and he has since blamed his children for the incident. “This led to years of acrimony,” Ben wrote, per USA Today.

On Monday, Nov. 17, Ben furthered his claims regarding his estrangement from Richard by publishing what he described as the most recent email exchange between himself and Richard on his Substack blog Calm Down. “I’ve sent plenty since, but he hasn’t replied,” Ben wrote in the blog post. In it, he shared an alleged January 2024 email exchange between him and his father. “It’s long and pathetic, and he comes off worse than I do, but I’m not exactly covered in glory either,” Ben wrote of the exchange.

In that email exchange, Ben appeared to explain his actions at a 2022 family dinner in San Francisco, where he said he poorly explained his complicated feelings about public accusations of nepotism against him.

“I didn’t explain any of this well, and I didn’t even finish the thought before you and Emily started to speak, and we all started to scream at each other about a completely separate tangent over who is to blame for what,” Ben wrote in the email, before acknowledging he called Richard a homophobic slur during the ensuing argument. In the email, Ben wrote he had “been trying to make amends” for the incident for more than a year.

In response, Richard allegedly wrote a largely all-caps email stating he believed Ben thought “I have money I’m keeping from you,” and said Ben and Emily made a public scene during the 2022 dinner argument. “AT LEAST KEEP THIS ONE LETTER. IT’LL BE THE LAST ONE UNLESS YOU STOP BEING A COWARD. OR START BEING BETTER THAN YOUR BROTHER OR SISTER,” Richard wrote.

“AS I TOLD YOU, TO START WRITING ME WITHOUT ANY ATTEMPT TO EXPLAIN ALL THE THINGS THAT YOU SAID ON THE LAST NIGHT AT THE RESTAURANT. UNTIL YOU ALL WROTE SOMETHING ADDRESSING THE LIES, DISTORTIONS, THAT KEPT A SET OF DIFFERENT FEELINGS, VALUES, KEPT THEM HIDDEN FROM ME, YOU WOULD NOT BE HEARING FROM ME,” Richard concluded, in what Ben claimed is the last correspondence he has received from his father.

PEOPLE is out to Richard’s team for comment.

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Ben wrote in his Substack blog post and in a Nov. 16 X thread that he now regrets deleting his original Nov. 13 thread about his estrangement from Richard.  “I love my father. I have always loved him. I think he’s better than this email,” Ben wrote on Substack. “But it’s been two years, and this appears to be the last email I’m ever going to get from him, so f— it.”

Richard shares sons Ben and Harry, as well as daughter Emily, with ex-wife Jeramie Rain, a former actress and producer. (Richard and Rain divorced in 1995; he has been married to Svetlana Erokhin since 2006.) Emily is also a journalist, and is currently an editor at The San Francisco Standard.

“Ben and I have different experiences of this sadness, but I’m relieved it’s finally out in the open now,” she wrote in a Tuesday, Nov. 18 X post regarding Ben’s Substack blog.