Disgraced actor James Franco, 43, has finally admitted to sleeping with his students in an interview more than two years after he was accused of sexual exploitation.
During a new interview with SiriusXM’s Jess Cagle, James Franco claimed that he believed at the time that sleeping with the students at his acting school was acceptable because it was “consensual,” but he is denying starting the program to have access to them.
“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,” the actor said.
“But like I said, I, it’s not why I started the school and I, I didn’t, 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, with a student and I shouldn’t have been,” Franco added.
The actor acknowledged that he realized sleeping with his students was a bad decision after speaking with other people about what he had done, but claimed that he did not know it at the time.
“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,” Franco said. “At the time I was not clearheaded, as I’ve said. So I guess my, 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…”
Two of James Franco’s ex students, Sarah Tither-Kaplan and Toni Gaal, filed a lawsuit in Los Angeles County Superior Court in October of 2019 which claims that Franco and other instructors had pressured women at the acting school to get naked for auditions while promising them opportunities for movie roles that rarely came about.
By engaging in “widespread inappropriate and sexually charged behavior towards female students,” Franco created “an environment of harassment and sexual exploitation” at the school, the lawsuit claims, according to reporting by the New York Times.
During the interview with Jess Cagle, James Franco also opened up about his sex addiction, which likely contributed to his actions that led to this lawsuit against him.
Franco is an alcoholic who got sober at 17, and now believes that he transferred a lot of that addictive behavior into a sex addiction. In the interview, he revealed that he has been in recovery for sex addiction since 2016.
“It’s such a powerful drug, and I got hooked on it for 20 more years,” Franco said. “The insidious part of that is that I stayed sober from alcohol all that time. … 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’ve just been doing a lot of work,” he added, referring to what he’s been doing since the accusations emerged in 2018. “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.”
“I’m just trying to fill that hole and it never gets filled,” Franco recalled, adding that he didn’t know that he had a problem until his sister-in-law, Iris Torres, gave him a book about sex addiction. “When I read this book, it was like it hit me like a bullet. And it was like, ‘Oh, my God, that’s me.’”
After he read the book, the actor realized that he needed to seek professional help for his problem.
“It was like, ‘Oh, this is an issue that I’m not gonna solve on my own,’” Franco said. “The behavior spun out to a point where it was, like, I was hurting everybody.”
