James Franco has admitted to sleeping with students from an acting school he previously ran, nearly four years after accusations of sexual misconduct were made against him.
In January 2018, five women, including four of his former pupils, came forward with allegations of sexually inappropriate behaviour by the actor.
The following year, two of his former acting students filed a class action suit for alleged sexual harassment, exploitation and coercion.
In June of this year, it was reported that the 43-year-old had agreed to pay $2.23m to settle the suit, which alleged that he and his business partners had “engaged in widespread inappropriate and sexually charged behaviour towards female students by sexualising their power as a teacher and an employer by dangling the opportunity for roles in their projects”.
In an episode of SiriusXM’s The Jess Cagle Show, James addressed the allegations for the first time in four years, saying: “Look, I’ll admit I did sleep with students.”
“I didn’t sleep with anybody in that particular class. But, over the course of my teaching, I did sleep with students and that was wrong. It’s not why I started the school.”
One allegation made against the star in the lawsuit was that he ran a “sex scene” masterclass and during the auditions “student-actors were encouraged to perform and improvise sexual acts during the audition process”.
Students alleged that James filmed these auditions and handpicked who was going to be in the class.
He denied this, saying: “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. I suppose at the time, my thinking was if it’s consensual, Okay.”
“Of course I knew, talking to other people, other teachers or whatever, like, yeah, it’s probably not a cool thing. At the time, I was not clearheaded.”
“One of the stupidest things I did at the school was I called one of my classes, a master class, ‘Sex Scenes’. I was not teaching people how to do sex scenes or intimate scenes or anything of that nature. It was a provocative title… It should have been called ‘Contemporary Romance’ or something like that.”
“It was a class where they did scenes about whatever their romance is, what they go through as young people. So meeting people on dating apps or breakups, or just a bad date, stuff like that. That’s what was being done in that class. It was not sex scenes.”
Speaking on the 2018 allegations against him, James said: “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 pause.”
“Did not seem like the right time to say anything. There were people that were upset with me and I needed to listen.”
| Joseph Marzullo/WENN.com
James also revealed on the podcast he has been in recovery for sex addiction, and admitted he “cheated on everyone” before he started dating his current girlfriend Isabel Pakzad in 2017.
He said: “I’ve just been doing a lot of work. And I guess I’m pretty confident in saying like, four years, you know?”
“And, I was in recovery before, you know, for substance abuse. And, there were some issues that I had to deal with that were also related to addiction. And so I’ve, I’ve really used my, my recovery background to kind of start examining this and, and changing who I was.”
