James Franco Admitted That He ‘Did Sleep With Students’
Three years after sexual misconduct allegations were made against James Franco, he admitted that "I did sleep with [acting] students."
In a new interview with The Jess Cagle Podcast on Sirius XM, he addressed the accusations that five women made against him in January 2018. He explained that he just wanted to be quiet when it happened and he just wanted to listen. Franco noted that the natural human instinct would have been to defend himself or apologize but that wouldn't have allowed him "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," he continued.
Franco stated that he struggled with both alcohol abuse and sex addiction for over 20 years.
"So I've just been doing a lot of work," he admitted. "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."
He said that he was sober from alcohol and believed that he was in an okay place while "acting out now in all these other ways, and I couldn't see it." Franco shared that he was "completely blind to power dynamics or anything like that, but also completely blind to people's feelings."
"I didn't want to hurt people. In fact, I wasn't really a one-night-stand guy. People that I got together with or dated, I'd see them for a long time, years. It's just that I couldn't be present for any of them. And the behavior spun out to a point where it was like I was hurting everybody."
Four of the five women that made the accusations in 2018 were acting students of his. At first, Franco's representative denied the allegations. He later reached a settlement with two of the former students that filed a sexual misconduct lawsuit against him.