One time Oscar nominee James Franco has finally admitted that he did have sex with some of his students when the actor ran his own acting school. The confession came in an appearance on the SiriusXM Jess Cagle show.
Franco, now 43, came right out and said, “Look, I’ll admit I did sleep with students. I didn’t sleep with anybody in [my ‘Sex Scenes’ class], but, over the course of my teaching, I did sleep with students and that was wrong,”
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But in the lawsuit that was filed against him in 2019 by former students Sarah Tither-Kaplan and Toni Gaal, Franco was accused of having engaged in misconduct with students at his acting school called Studio 4. The school has since closed.
The women claimed that under the guise of teaching them how to be actors they were required to take part in explicit sex scenes on camera. They claimed that the scenes were unnecessary and felt to them more like orgies than an acting class.
Kaplan has tweeted, “Apologies are meaningless until active steps towards harm reduction are taken and directed towards survivors specifically. General statements of “sorry” or “I was wrong” or “I love women” etc. do nothing to actually help those who have been harmed.”
“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,” Franco said as he remembered how it all unfolded. “There were people that were upset with me and I needed to listen. 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.”
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James Franco admits sleeping with students from his acting school https://t.co/cpukHPieWv
— BBC News (World) (@BBCWorld) December 23, 2021
In July, Franco agreed to a settlement in his sexual misconduct law suit. Franco and his co-defendants will pay $2.2 million to the plaintiffs. JBN first reported on the preliminary settlement agreement back in February.
The two sides in the law suit released a joint statement about the agreed upon settlement. “While Defendants continue to deny the allegations in the Complaint, they acknowledge that Plaintiffs have raised important issues; and all parties strongly believe that now is a critical time to focus on addressing the mistreatment of women in Hollywood,” read the statement. “All agree on the need to make sure that no one in the entertainment industry — regardless of sex, race, religion, disability, ethnicity, background, gender or sexual orientation — faces discrimination, harassment or prejudice of any kind.”
