Jared Leto is under intense public pressure and serious legal pressure now that a BBC documentary, Jared Leto: Hollywood's Dark Secret, has been written and aired. Ten women describe their alleged experiences with the Hollywood actor over a fourteen-year period between 2002 and 2016. Of these, nine women have made public their stories for the first time and four have accused him of criminal sexual conduct, including grooming, sexual assault and statutory rape.
The accounts outlined a worrying pattern of behavior when Leto was in his thirties and forties. One of the accusers reported being sexually assaulted in a motel bathroom in 2002 at the age of seventeen. Another woman reported being left alone in a dark hotel room at nineteen in which Leto threatened her with sexual assault and her boyfriend as well. A third account concerns an encounter in California where the accuser was 17 years old, well below the state’s legal age of consent of 18 years, and the actor casually ignored the legal implications when she was questioned. A fourth woman said she was targeted with repeated sex-based phone calls starting at sixteen and was eventually threatened by a non-disclosure agreement she refused to sign.
Aside from those allegations the documentary also has other, less publicized, accounts of unsettling behavior, including a woman's report that Leto made a comment about her body when she was 14 and security escorting her backstage. To support these stories, the broadcasting network conducted interviews with close friends and relatives who had been told of the event and photographic and text evidence supported. Former members of the band's touring and production team also came forward and reported that they were constantly troubled with Leto’s frequent and unmonitored access to teenage girls backstage and while recording.
These revelations follow years of digital scrutiny and a number of previous journalistic investigations. More than one hundred and twenty allegations have been made online about the actor's conduct with young women. Last year, on social media, similar accusations were made by public figures, mirroring a previous investigation by Air Mail in which nine women made allegations of similar misconduct to Leto, but the actor denied them. Although the media has been all over it in search of a statement or defense of these new findings, representatives for the Academy Award-winning actor have remained silent in response and have not spoken publicly.
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