Watch: Jared Leto Denies Sexual Misconduct Accusations
Content warning: This story discusses sexual assault allegations.
Jared Leto is speaking out against new accusations.
The 30 Seconds to Mars frontman denied allegations of sexual misconduct made by four women in the newly released BBC documentary Jared Leto: Hollywood’s Dark Secret.
“I have never sexually assaulted anyone in my entire life,” Leto said in a July 29 statement to E! News. “These claims are absolutely and categorically false.”
In the documentary, which aired July 29, four women recounted alleged interactions with the Oscar winner, 54, they say took place when they were teenagers and he was in his 30s and 40s.
According to the BBC, reporters working on the documentary corroborated these allegations with the accusers’ friends and family who were told about the incidents, as well as seeing “pictures and messages that support the women’s accounts.” Leto did not respond to the BBC’s requests for comment.
One woman—who used the pseudonym Clara during the documentary—accused Leto of having sex with her when she was 17 and he was 34. She alleged that Leto had asked for her phone number during a 30 Seconds to Mars concert in 2006 through one of his associates.
She shared insight into their alleged correspondence, recalling to the British public broadcaster, “He told me, ‘I would like you to call me Daddy.’ It was either pretend to be a little girl or ‘my little girl.'”
Clara said that sometime after the concert, he had invited her and a friend to his Los Angeles home.
“He had shown us where his bedroom was,” she alleged. “We’re sitting on the bed with him. He suggested to my friend, ‘You can wait in the computer room while her and I hang out.’ That is when things had turned sexual, when my friend was in the other room.”
Looking back at that time, Clara—who said this was the first of three or four times to his home—shared that she had been “coming out of a really awkward time in adolescence,” so having Leto’s attention “was very validating.”
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Another woman, who used the alias Isabel, accused Leto of sexually assaulting her in a Las Vegas motel in 2002 when she was 17. She said that she was invited to his motel room after meeting Leto, then 30, while she was working at a mall.
Isabel—who said she only learned his age after the assault—believed that they would meet there and eventually go out. She alleged that Leto had her sit in the bathroom as he showered so they could still talk.
“I don’t think there was many words exchanged and he opened the shower curtain and started kissing me,” she said. “Then he grabbed my hand and he started touching himself with my hand, using my hand to masturbate himself.”
“I pulled away and I was like, ‘OK, I’m going to go.’ He got up, put a towel on,” she continued. “He looked to the left and looked almost like seeing if anybody was around before he let me out of the room.”
A third accuser, who was called Etta in the doc, alleged that she met the Requiem for a Dream actor, then 42, when she was 16 after walking into a Los Angeles modeling agency with her mom.
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She alleged that Leto had taken interest in her career aspirations and exchanged email addresses so he could invite her to his Oscar party. (Leto took home Best Actor in a Supporting Role for Dallas Buyers Club.)
However, she shared that the correspondence moved from email to phone calls after he gave her his phone number in a message shown in the documentary. Their interactions became sexual, with Etta accusing him of asking her questions about sex and sexual kinks, despite asserting that he knew she was a teenager.
“At the time, I remember I had a really hard time saying no to things or putting boundaries up,” she recalled, “but obviously I was 16, so I shouldn’t have to.”
The allegations come a year after Leto denied any wrongdoing in response to separate accusations of sexual misconduct by several women—including four who said they were minors at the time—in an Air Mail report. His rep told the outlet at the time, “All of the allegations are expressly denied.”
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