A lawsuit alleging actor James Franco of intimidating students at an acting and film school into gratuitous and exploitative sexual situations has reached a settlement agreement.
In a lawsuit filed in October 2019 in Los Angeles County Superior Court, two former students of the now-defunct acting school Studio 4 alleged that James Franco and his partners subjected them to sexually exploitative auditions and film shoots.
The students, Sarah Tither-Kaplan and Toni Gaal, say in the lawsuit that James Franco and his 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.”
The suit outlines that these actions “led to an environment of harassment and sexual exploitation both in and out of the class.”
The lawsuit details that Franco pressured Studio 4 students to perform in increasingly explicit filmed sex scenes in an “orgy type setting” in a master class on sex scenes. The lessons allegedly ignored film-industry guidelines on how actors should be treated whilst filming a nude scene.
The suit claims that students were denied the protections of nudity riders, and the class preyed upon “often young and inexperienced females” who “were routinely pressured to engage in simulated sex acts that went far beyond the standards in the industry.”
As Deadline report, a court filing outlines that the plaintiffs agreed to drop their individual claims under the agreement settlement.
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The sexual exploitation allegations of other plaintiffs in the lawsuit will be dismissed without prejudice, meaning they may be re-filed. Fraud allegations brought by those plaintiffs will be “subjected to limited release,” the document says.
Franco’s attorneys have not yet commented. In their filings in the lawsuit, the lawyers praised the #MeToo movement that acted as a catalyst for the lawsuit, whilst emphasising that the claims were “false and inflammatory, legally baseless and brought as a class action with the obvious goal of grabbing as much publicity as possible for attention-hungry Plaintiffs.”
Franco previously addressed the allegations of sexual misconduct during an appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. The Disaster Artist actor maintained that the allegations were inaccurate, but said, “If I’ve done something wrong, I will fix it. I have to.”
