James Franco Breaks Silence on Misconduct Allegations Four Years Later, Admits to Having Sex with Students

James Franco has broken his silence four years after he was accused of sexual misconduct by several students at his former acting school Studio 4.

“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 said in a Wednesday interview with SiriusXM’s Jess Cagle.

“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.”

In January 2018, five women accused Franco of inappropriate behavior in an article published by the Los Angeles Times. Four of the women were his acting students.

“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,” said one of his former students, Sarah Tither-Kaplan. 

Franco is now admitting to behaving inappropriately, telling Cagle that he has “just been doing a lot of work,” since teaching a “master class” on sex scenes.

“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,” Franco revealed.

“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,” he added. “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.”

Cagle pushed Franco on how he could find the relationship appropriate considering the clearly one-sided power dynamic, prompting Franco to admit that he figured “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 continued. “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…”

In October 2019, Tither-Kaplan and another student Toni Gaal filed a lawsuit in the Los Angeles County Superior Court alleging that Franco had pressured women to get naked for auditions while using potential movie roles as an incentive. The suit further accused Franco of using his school as “a pipeline of young women.”

According to Variety, Franco settled the lawsuit for $2,235,000 in June 2021.

Franco’s school, Studio 4, is now permanently closed.

Watch above, via YouTube.