American actor James Franco finally settled a sexual misconduct suit in 2019.
But it has taken him four years to break his silence and admit he had sex with students of his acting school, Studio 4.
In an in-depth interview on the Jess Cagle Podcast on Wednesday (Dec 23) he acknowledged that he slept with students who attended his acting school.
Studio 4 has since closed.
But Franco maintains that the encounters were consensual, and insists that at that time, he was unaware of the power differential in his relationships with the students.
In his first interview in a long time, Franco, 43, told Cagle that he was ready to “take ownership of some things” and offered details of the accusations that had been levelled against him, his substance abuse, and his recovery.
Back in 2018, five women came forward and alleged that he had acted inappropriately towards them. Four of the five had been 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, 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.”
In 2019, Sarah Tither-Kaplan and Toni Gaal filed a class-action lawsuit seeking to represent more than 100 women, all former students at Studio 4. It focused particularly on a class called “Sex Scenes” for which students had to pay $750 to attend.
Ms Tither-Kaplan and Ms Gaal claimed that Studio 4 created “a steady stream of young women to objectify and exploit”.
Ms Tither-Kaplan told NPR in 2019 that instead of learning to handle sex scenes professionally, the class seemed to aim for students to “get naked and do sex scenes and not complain and push the envelope”.
Franco denied the allegations and threatened to countersue. But in February of this year, the women dropped their claims and the suit was settled for $2.2 million in June.
“I didn’t sleep with anybody in that particular class,” Franco told Cagle on Wednesday.
Cagle then asked how Franco, being a famous actor, could have been unaware of the power imbalance between him and the students.
To this, Franco replied: “I suppose at the time my thinking was if it’s consensual, okay.
“Of course I knew, you know, talking to other people, other teachers or whatever, like, yeah, it’s probably not a cool thing.
“At the time I was not clear-headed… so I guess it just comes down to, my criteria was, like, if this is consensual I think it’s cool, we’re all adults.”
He told Cagle he had battled both alcohol and sex addiction.
“Attention from women, success with women also became a huge source of validation for me. The problem with that is, like, I’m sure you can guess, like any sort of drug or anything, there’s never enough.”
He added that he has “been doing a lot of work” on himself in the past few years.
“I’ve really used my recovery background to kind of start examining this, and changing who I was.” /TISG
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