Almost four years after he was first accused of sexually inappropriate behaviour by five women, four out of which were his students, actor James Franco has finally spoken up. 

In an interview with SiriusCM’s The Jess Cagle Podcast, Franco 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.”

He added, “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,” he reflected. “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…”

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His former students Sarah Tither-Kaplan and Toni Gaal had filed a lawsuit and alleged that Franco and some other instructors used to pressurise women into getting naked during auditions, according to a Page Six report. 

On why he didn’t speak up earlier, he 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 be, 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. 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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He recalled the time and spoke of his struggle with substance abuse and sex addiction, “So I’ve just been doing a lot of work and I guess I’m pretty confident in saying like, four years, you know? I was in recovery before for substance abuse. 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.”

When the allegations were first reported in an article by The Los Angeles Times in 2018, Franco’s attorney had denied them, quoting the actor’s statements from The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, in which he’d said, “The things that I heard that were on Twitter are not accurate, but I completely support people coming out and being able to have a voice because they didn’t have a voice for so long. So I don’t want to, you know, shut them down in any way.”