James Franco has broken his silence four years after allegations of sexual misconduct were brought forth against him.
Five women, four of whom were his acting students, accused Franco of engaging in sexually inappropriate behavior in 2018. The following year, two of Franco's former acting students, Sarah Tither-Kaplan and Toni Gaal, filed a sexual misconduct lawsuit against him. Franco reportedly agreed to a $2.2 million settlement.
Franco denied the allegations and has since remained silent on the topic — until now. Speaking during an appearance on SiriusXM's "The Jess Cagle Podcast" this week, Franco explained why he has chosen to finally speak out.
"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.' Did not seem like the right time to say anything," he recalled, according to People.
"There were people that were upset with me and I needed to listen," he 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 to, and to look at what was underneath."
Franco explained that he had been "doing a lot of work" since the allegations emerged, and had been focusing on change.
"I was in recovery before for substance abuse," he said. "There were some issues that I had to deal with that were also related to addiction. And so I've really used my recovery background to kind of start examining this and changing who I was."
Franco went on to admit that he had struggled with sex addiction after becoming sober from alcohol years ago and revealed that he had "cheated on everyone" before his current relationship with girlfriend Isabel Pakzad. Franco said he had become "completely blind to power dynamics or anything like that, but also completely blind to people's feelings."
"I didn't want to hurt people," he said. "In fact, I wasn't really a one-night-stand guy. People that I got together with or dated, I'd see them for a long time, years. It's just that I couldn't be present for any of them. And the behavior spun out to a point where it was like I was hurting everybody."
In their 2019 lawsuit, Tither-Kaplan and Gaal claimed that Franco and his business partners "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 court documents previously obtained by People. Addressing this, Franco admitted to Cagle that he did "sleep with students."
"Over the course of my teaching, I did sleep with students, and that was wrong. 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," he said. "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."
Franco then confessed he was not "clear-headed" at the time.
"So I guess it just comes down to my criteria was like, 'If this is consensual, like, I think it's cool. We're all adults, so ...' "
Zoe Papadakis ✉
Zoe Papadakis is a Newsmax writer based in South Africa with two decades of experience specializing in media and entertainment. She has been in the news industry as a reporter, writer and editor for newspapers, magazine and websites.
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