James Franco admits to having had sex with students

Actor James Franco, 43, broke the nearly four-year silence and spoke for the first time about the harassment allegations. In January 2018, five women reported actor James Franco to the Los Angeles Times for inappropriate sexual conduct during acting classes.

In February of this year, Franco reached an agreement with former students Sarah Tither-Kaplan and Toni Gaal, who accused him of having forced them to do explicit sex scenes on camera during a Studio 4 class, founded by actor in 2014 and closed three years later. The actor negotiated for Tither-Kaplan and Gaal to drop the charges.

“I feel there was an abuse of power, and there was a culture of exploitation of women who were not celebrities and a culture of women being replaceable,” Tither-Kaplan told the US newspaper in 2018.

But, in fact, the first time that Franco spoke about the matter was during the podcast The Jess Cagle, published on Wednesday (22) by US radio SiriusXM’s and tried to justify the period of silence. “That moment [em 2018] I just thought: ‘I’ll be quiet, I’ll take a break, it doesn’t seem like the right time to say something. There are people upset with me and I need to hear them’.”

About the accusations of having promoted, during the classes, performances that referred to an “orgy context that went beyond the accepted limits in Hollywood”, the actor says that the purpose of the discussion in class was not to approach sex scenes. “I wasn’t teaching people how to do sex scenes, intimacy or anything of that nature. It was a provocative title,” he said. “It was a class where they did scenes about whatever romance they had when they were young, like meeting people on dating apps or bad dates.”

When asked about the interpretation that some students had of the class, he admitted having had sex with some students. “That was wrong, but that’s not why I started school. I didn’t pick the people who were going to be in the class, so it wasn’t my plan,” he said. “At the time my thinking was that if it was consensual, that would be fine.”

The actor also revealed that, after getting sober from alcohol, he found a new addiction in sex. “When I could no longer use alcohol to fill that void, success and attention were great for me. So, strangely enough, I became addicted to validation,” he said.

He adds that this new addiction has strained most of his previous relationships with his current girlfriend, actress Isabel Pakzad. “I could never be faithful to anyone, so I cheated on all my girlfriends before Isabel.”