Breaking his silence. James Franco just addressed sexual misconduct allegations originally made about him in early 2018. In a snippet of his upcoming interview for Jess Cagle’s SiriusXM podcast, the actor addresses the claims for the first time in nearly four years.
In a January 2018 article published by The Los Angeles Times, five women accused the 127 Hours star of sexually inappropriate behavior, four of whom were his acting students. Two of his former students filed a sexual misconduct lawsuit against him in 2019, which was settled earlier this year for $2,235,000, as People reported.
An attorney for Franco initially denied the allegations, citing the actor’s comments during a 2018 interview at The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. “The things that I heard that were on Twitter are not accurate,” Franco told Colbert at the time. “But I completely support people coming out and being able to have a voice because they didn’t have a voice for so long.”
Four years later, the actor has finally commented on the claims. In a video published on December 22, 2021, he explained to Cagle why he’s decided to talk about the allegations now. “In 2018, there were some complaints about me and an article about me and, at that moment I just thought ‘I’m gonna be quiet. I’m gonna be, I’m gonna pause,’” said Franco. “Did not seem like the right time to say anything.”
The Disaster Artist actor, 43, continued, “There’s a writer, Damon Young, and he talked about when something like this happens, the natural human instinct is to just make it stop. You just want to get out in front of it and whatever you have to do apologize, you know, get it done. But what that doesn’t do is allow you to do the work, and to look at what was underneath.” He added, “So I’ve just been doing a lot of work.”
In another snippet, Franco revealed that his previous recovery from substance abuse has helped him examine parts of his behavior and that he has struggled with sex addiction for years after becoming sober from alcohol at just 17. He also said that, previous to his current relationship with actress Izabel Pakzad, 28, he “cheated on everyone.”
“[I became] completely blind to power dynamics or anything like that,” he said, “but also completely blind to people’s feelings.”
Franco’s acting school, Studio 4, opened in 2014 and had branches in Los Angeles and New York before closing in 2017. In the 2019 lawsuit, former students Sarah Tither-Kaplan and Toni Gaal claimed that the actor and his business associates “engaged in widespread inappropriate and sexually charged behavior towards female students by sexualizing their power as a teacher and an employer by dangling the opportunity for roles in their projects,” according to People. As part of the 2021 deal, they both agreed to drop their allegations.
During the Jess Cagle Podcast interview, Franco admitted he had slept with some of his students.
“Over the course of my teaching, I did sleep with students, and that was wrong,” he told Cagle. “But like I said, it’s not why I started the school and I wasn’t the person that selected the people to be in the class. So it wasn’t a ‘master plan’ on my part.” He continued, “But yes, there were certain instances where, you know what, I was in a consensual thing with a student and I shouldn’t have been.”
The full interview will be available on December 23, 2021 as part of SiriusXM’s The Jess Cagle Podcast.
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