Hollywood actor Jared Leto has been accused of criminal sexual conduct by four women in a new BBC documentary, with the women alleging that the offences took place when they were teenagers.
Leto, an Academy Award winning actor recognised for roles in Suicide Squad, Dallas Buyers Club and the recent Masters of the Universe, is among those named in Jared Leto: Hollywood’s Dark Secret, in which a total of ten women came forward with allegations against him.
One woman said that she was sexually assaulted in a motel bathroom at age 17. Another said that Leto threatened her with sexual assault when she was 19. A third woman said that she had sex with the actor in California at 17, an act that meets the legal definition of statutory rape in the state given its age of consent is 18, adding that Leto “shrugged off” a conversation about her age at the time. A fourth described being groomed by Leto, alleging that he made several sexually explicit phone calls to her when she was 16 and proposed that they have sex.
Four additional women told the BBC that they too had received unusual and sexually charged phone calls from Leto when they were younger.
All the women interviewed by the BBC said their encounters with Leto took place between 2002 and 2016, a period when he was in his 30s and 40s. Leto is currently 54.
The BBC said that it corroborated several of the accounts through friends and family members who had been told about the encounters at the time and that in some instances, it reviewed photographs and messages supporting the women’s claims.
Two men who had worked with Leto’s band for years told documentary makers that staff were often uneasy about how Leto interacted with teenage girls, describing instances where he invited them backstage to his dressing room or to the house where he was recording. “I think everyone thought the age gap was way too big,” one of them said.
Leto did not respond to the BBC’s requests for comment.
The allegations are not the first directed at the actor. The BBC said that it had identified more than “120 separate allegations made online relating to his behaviour towards women, some of them historical.”
