James Franco breaks silence 4 years after sexual misconduct allegations, says he had sex addiction and slept with students

December 23, 2021 - 5:35 PM IST

Hollywood actor James Franco is breaking his silence about sexual misconduct allegations made about him nearly four years ago. The actor has now admitted to his wrongdoings that were made against him in 2018. Franco also opened up about why he has decided to talk about the accusations now.

James Franco breaks silence 4 years after sexual misconduct allegations, says he had sex addiction and slept with students

In an interview on SiriusXM's The Jess Cagle Podcast this week, The Pineapple Express actor 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," he recalled. "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.”

The 43-year old actor was accused of sexually inappropriate behavior by five women, four of whom were his acting students, in January 2018. At the time, an attorney for Franco denied each of the allegations and cited the actor's 2018 comments on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert as his formal denial. Over the summer, Franco reached a deal with Tither-Kaplan and Toni Gaal — two of his former acting students who filed a sexual misconduct lawsuit against him in 2019. Records obtained by PEOPLE tabloid from the Los Angeles Superior Court at the time, stated that he agreed to pay $2,235,000 in the settlement.

James Franco revealed he has struggled with sex addiction for years after becoming sober from alcohol at a young age. “It's such a powerful drug,” he explained. “I got hooked on it for 20 more years. The insidious part of that is that I stayed sober from alcohol all that time. And I went to meetings all that time. I even tried to sponsor other people. So 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.”

He admitted that he "cheated on everyone" before his current relationship with girlfriend Isabel Pakzad and he could "never be faithful to anybody." Franco said he became ‘completely blind to power dynamics or anything like that, but also completely blind to people's feelings.’

The Oscar nominee opened his acting school Playhouse West Studio 4 in 2014 before it closed in 2017. In a 2019 lawsuit, Tither-Kaplan and Gaal claimed Franco and his business partners "engaged in widespread inappropriate and sexually charged behavior towards female students by sexualizing their power as a teacher and an employer by dangling the opportunity for roles in their projects," according to court documents previously obtained by PEOPLE.

Franco admitted to Cagle, “I did sleep with students. 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.”

He later added of his past thinking, “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...'”

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