James Franco has finally addressed the sexual misconduct allegations that have surrounded him for several years.
In a new interview on SiriusXM’s The Jess Cagle Show, the actor attempted to explain why he decided to speak out four years after the allegations first surfaced. He insisted that he’s a changed man since then, saying that he’s been “doing a lot of work,” including getting help for sex addiction.
No apology was forthcoming, however, and Franco continued to dismiss the accusations of sexually exploitive behaviour mentioned in a 2019 lawsuit from two of his former acting school students.
When asked why he had stayed silent in the aftermath of the accusations, Franco replied, “There were people that were upset with me and I needed to listen/ When something like this happens, like 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 look at what was underneath.”
He continued, “There’s probably an iceberg underneath that of behaviour, 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. And I guess I’m pretty confident in saying like, four years, you know?
And I was in recovery before for substance abuse. And 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, and changing who I was.”
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Franco said his outlook changed after being given a book on sex and love addiction by his sister-in-law. “When I read this book, it hit me like a bullet,” he recalled. “Up until that point, like as crazy as it is, like I had inklings like, okay, maybe this is an issue… 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.”
It was some advice from his sponsor that Franco misinterpreted though. “He’s like, ‘Look, the cheating is dishonest. I don’t think that’s good for your sobriety, but if you’re not dating someone and you wanna go and hook up, like whatever happens between two consenting adults is fine,” Franco remembered.
“Like that’s what he said. The problem was, I took that and I ran with it and used it as an excuse to just hook up all over the place. And it was like, well, we’re being honest here. Right? And like you said, like I was completely blind to power dynamics or anything like that, but also completely blind to people’s feelings.”
One of Franco’s former acting classes was called “Sex Scenes”, which he acknowledged was rather ill-advised. He also denied that he slept with any members of his class, although he did have sex with other students at his school.
The interview finished with Franco stating he understood why his former mate Seth Rogen publicly said he no longer wanted to work with the actor. “I get it, he had to answer for me ’cause I was silent,” Franco explained. “He had to answer for me and I don’t want that. And so that’s one of the main reasons I wanted to talk to you today is. I don’t want Seth or my brother or anyone to have to answer for me anymore.”
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