Four women have accused Jared Leto of criminal sexual conduct. The allegations, which took place when the women were teenagers, were recounted in a new BBC documentary Jared Leto: Hollywood’s Dark Secret, which aired Wednesday.
One of the women said she was sexually assaulted by Leto in a motel bathroom when she was 17. Another, then 19, said Leto threatened her with sexual assault after being left alone with him in a hotel room. A third woman claims she had underage sex with Leto in California when she was 17, which would be classified as statutory rape in the state. The fourth woman claimed she was groomed by Leto and accused him of abusing his celebrity status by making repeated sexually explicit phone calls to her when she was 16. (Reps for Leto did not immediately reply to a request for comment. Leto did not respond to “repeated attempts” by the BBC to contact him.)
The documentary features a total of 10 women speaking about their alleged experiences with Leto. Nine of them are speaking publicly on the incidents for the first time. All the women described encounters with Leto, who is now 54, between 2002 and 2016, when he was in his thirties and forties.
There have been multiple allegations against Leto for years. Last year, Los Angeles DJ Allie Teilz claimed on social media that she had been assaulted by the actor when she was 17, prompting several other women to come forward with similar claims. Air Mail released an article last June recounting nine allegations, all of which Leto denied.
In the documentary, the women describe problematic encounters with Leto in multiple cities around the world. In 2006, an associate of Leto’s approached a 17-year-old backstage at a Thirty Seconds to Mars concert and took her phone number for the musician, then 34. She claims she had sex with him at his house in California.
“He told me, ‘I would like you to call me daddy,'” she told the BBC. “‘And it was either pretend to be a little girl or ‘my little girl.'” She said she was “so naive and vulnerable” and had no sense of how “normal” this behavior was. “It was only as time went on that I realized more and more how scary that really was,” she said, adding that Leto “shrugged off” her concerns about the age of consent.
One of the women recalled meeting Leto at a music festival in 2005 when she was 14. When she held out a T-shirt for him to sign, he signed “across my breasts, and he told me ‘you have a nice rack,'” she said. “He was asking his bodyguard to go ahead and take me backstage. He didn’t even ask me if I wanted to go.”
In addition to accusations of criminal sexual conduct, five women who appear in the documentary said they received strange and sexual phone calls from Leto. Several say were asked to sign NDAs by Leto’s lawyer. The documentary also features two men who worked with Leto’s band for many years. Both described feeling uncomfortable about the way Leto interacted with teenage girls. “I think everyone thought the age gap was way too big,” one of them said.
Michaela Coel in ‘The Christophers.’Claudette Barius/NEON