The actor opens up about sex addiction and admits that he did sleep with students at his old acting school.
James Franco just broke his silence on the accusations of inappropriate sexual conduct what was done against him almost four years ago. The 43-year-old interpreter was charged with sexually inappropriate conduct by five women, four of which were his acting students, in an article published by Los Angeles Times in January 2018.
One of the alleged victims, Sarah Tither-Kaplan, said that Franco “abused his power by exploiting the non-famous women he worked with under the pretext of giving them opportunities.”
At the time, a lawyer for Franco denied each of the allegations and cited the actor’s comments in 2018 in The Late Show with Stephen Colbert: “The things I heard that were on Twitter are not accurate, but I fully support people. Get out there and have a voice because they didn’t have a voice for so long. So I don’t want to turn them off in any way. “
Over the summer, Franco settled with Tither-Kaplan and Toni Gaal, two of his former acting students who filed a sexual misconduct lawsuit in 2019. Los Angeles Superior Court records indicated that he agreed to pay $ 2 ′ 235,000.
Franco sat down this week for an extensive interview at the podcast SiriusXMby Jess Cagle, producer of People magazine investigates, and discuss the accusations for the first time. “In 2018 … It didn’t seem like the right time to say anything,” he recalled. “There were people who were upset with me and needed to listen to them.”
“Whatever you did, even if it was a mistake or you said something wrong or whatever, there is probably an iceberg underneath that behavior, of patterns, of being blind to yourself that won’t be solved overnight. Franco continued. “So I’ve been working a lot,” he told Cagle, “and I think I’m pretty safe to say… that I was recovering from substance abuse before… So I really used my recovery experience to begin to examine this and change who I was. “
Franco revealed that he has battled sex addiction for years after becoming sober from alcohol at a young age. “It is such a powerful drug,” he explained. “I was hooked for 20 more years. The insidious part of that is that I was sober from alcohol the entire time. And I went to meetings all that time. I even tried to sponsor other people. So in my head it was like ‘oh I’m sober. I’m living a spiritual life ‘and I couldn’t see it.
He admitted that he “cheated on everyone” before his current relationship with his girlfriend Isabel Pakzad and that “he could never be faithful to anyone.” Franco said he became “completely blind to power dynamics or something like that,” but also “completely blind to people’s feelings.”
“I didn’t want to hurt people. In fact, he wasn’t really a one-night stand. The people I hung out with or dated I saw for a long time, years. It’s just that I couldn’t be there for any of them when they needed it. “
The Oscar nominee opened his acting school Playhouse West Studio 4 in 2014 before it closed in 2017. In a 2019 lawsuit, Tither-Kaplan and Gaal claimed that Franco and his business partners “engaged in widespread inappropriate and sexually charged behavior toward female students by sexualizing their power as a teacher and as a employer ”, according to previously obtained court documents.
Tither-Kaplan and Gaal also alleged that the circumstances “led to an environment of sexual harassment and exploitation both inside and outside the classroom”. As part of the settlement reached this year, Tither-Kaplan and Gaal agreed to withdraw their individual claims.
Franco finally admitted: “I slept with students”. (I)
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