James Franco made headlines in January 2018 when theLos Angeles Timespublished an article detailing five women’s accounts of sexual misconduct, four women being his students attending his acting class in the film schoolFrancofounded. At the time,The Disaster Artiststar flatly denied the allegations, even speaking publicly onThe Late Show with Stephen Colbert.He wouldswiftly start being erasedfrom the industry.
Sarah Tither-Kaplan, a former acting student at the now defunct Playhouse West Studio 4, and others who came forward, spoke of the treatment and tone in the program, saying: “I feel there was an abuse of power, and there was a culture of exploiting non-celebrity women, and a culture of women being replaceable.” The women spoke of nude orgy scenes in the artistic films where Franco took liberties beyond the students' consent and was vocally abusive when his directions weren’t followed.
In June 2021,James Franco paid $2.2 million to settlethe sexual misconduct lawsuit from 2019. As part of the settlement both parties issued a joint statement declaring, “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.” The statement continued, “All agree on the need to make sure that no one in the entertainment industry — regardless of race, religion, disability, ethnicity, background, gender or sexual orientation — faces discrimination, harassment or prejudice of any kind.”
After nearly four years, James Franco (Pineapple Express,Maladies) sat down withThe Jess Cagle Podcastand spoke openly for the first time, detailing his reaction to the initial allegations, their repercussions and his steps to get help.
“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,” theZerovillestar explained. “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.”
“Whatever you did, even if it was a gaff or you said something wrong or whatever, there’s probably an iceberg underneath that behavior, of patterning, of just being blind to yourself that isn’t gonna just be solved overnight.”
“So I’ve just been doing a lot of work,” he told Cagle, “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.”
“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.”
“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….'” To listen to the full interview, tune in Thursday, December 23 on SiriusXM’sThe Jess Cagle Showon SiriusXM Stars at 2:00 p.m. ET.
James Franco’s directed the film,The Long Home, which boasts an all-star cast including Josh Hartnett, Josh Hutcherson, Giancarlo Esposito, Garret Dillahunt, Timothy Hutton, Tim Blake Nelson, and Ashton Kutcher. It tells the story of a young contractor who is hired to build a honky-tonk in Tennessee by the man who killed his father. Though the film has been completed, no release date has been set.
