Four years ago, James Franco was accused of sexual misconduct. In a Los Angeles Times article, Franco was accused of sexually inappropriate behavior by five women. Four of the women were his acting students.
Following the accusations, Franco would deny the claims on Twitter and in a statement with his attorney. People reports, in the past summer, Franco and accusers Tither-Kaplan and Toni Gaal reached a deal in a lawsuit that paid $2,235,000.
This week, Franco sat with SiriusXM’s The Jess Cagle Podcast to detail why he is speaking now.
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“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. “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.”
Franco would reveal that he is “doing a lot of work” noting that he has battled substance abuse. “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 changing who I was.”
You can see the full conversation below.