James Franco is finally addressing the sexual misconduct allegations against him as well as the sexual misconduct lawsuit filed against his acting school. In his first interview in almost four years with SiriusXM’s Jess Cagle, the actor opened up on the allegations and lawsuit, and his extended break from Hollywood.
Inappropriate sexual behavior allegations against the 43-year-old star were reported on in a bombshell Los Angeles Times report in 2018. The following year, in 2019, his acting school – the now-defunct Studio 4 acting school – was hit by a sexual misconduct lawsuit by former students of his.
Back in February, it was confirmed by ET that James had reached a settlement on the lawsuit, agreeing to a payout of $2,235,000. The lawsuit was filed by two women named Sarah Tither-Kaplan and Toni Gaal who accused James of fostering an environment of sexual exploitation and harassment rumors. His attorney, Michael Plonsker, denied the allegations.
Now, James is shedding light on why he stayed silent all these years:
“Well, 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.
So, 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 really used my recovery background to kind of start examining this and changing who I was.”
The lawsuit claimed that Studio 4 was an avenue to provide James and his male partners young women that they could take advantage of, and alleged that the women were subjected to sexually exploitative shoots and auditions with promises of roles in films that never came to fruition nor released. To this, James now stated:
“Look, I’ll admit I 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. 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, OK. 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 clearheaded as I’ve said. 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…”
He went on to reveal that he has been in recovery for sex addition since 2016 and acknowledged his massive history of cheating:
“It’s such a powerful drug. And I, I got hooked on it for 20 more years. And the insidious part of that is that I stayed sober from alcohol all that time. And I went to meetings, you know, all that time. I even tried to, you know, to sponsor other people. And so in my head, it was like, ‘Oh, I’m sober. I’m living a spiritual life.’ Where on the side, I’m acting out now in all these other ways. And I couldn’t see it.
I’d had girlfriends. I could never be faithful to anybody. So I cheated. I cheated on everyone before Isabel and [my sponsor’s] like, ‘Look, the cheating is dishonest. I don’t think that’s good for your sobriety, but if you’re not dating someone and you wanna go and hook up, like whatever happens between two consenting adults is fine.’ Like, that’s what he said. The problem was, I took that and I ran with it and used it as an excuse to, you know, just hook up all over the place. And it was like, well, we’re being honest here. Right? And like you said, like I was completely blind to power dynamics or anything like that, but also completely blind to people’s feelings.
I didn’t wanna hurt people. And I, in fact, I wasn’t like really a one-night-stand guy. Like people that I, you know, got together with or dated, like 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.”
James then declared that a major aspect of his being away from the spotlight for four years is that he has stopped being a workaholic:
“I have changed. It’s given me the incentive to do the work, to change. I’ve got it. I’m, you know, I’ll keep working at it for the rest of my life. But like at least it got me off that path that was never gonna end and would probably kill me. I truly believe like, if I kept going with my work addiction, I probably would’ve relapsed on alcohol.”
His longtime friend and co-collaborator Seth Rogen recently said in an interview that he currently has no plans to work with him, and that what happened has changed a lot of things about their relationship. To this, James admitted that he felt hurt:
“I love Seth Rogen. I worked with him for 20 years. We didn’t have one fight for 20 years. Not one fight. He was my absolute closest work friend, collaborator. And um, you know, we just gelled and what he said is true, you know, we aren’t working together right now and we don’t have any plans to work together.
Of course it was hurtful, you know, in context, but I get it, you know, he had to answer for me ’cause I was silent. He had to answer for me and I don’t want that. And so that’s why, you know, it’s one of the main reasons I wanted to talk to you today is I just, I don’t want Seth or my brother [actor Dave Franco] or anyone to have to answer for me anymore.”
