Four women have accused Jared Leto of criminal sexual conduct in a new BBC documentary titled Jared Leto: Hollywood's Dark Secret, which aired Wednesday. The women described encounters they say took place when they were teenagers.
According to Rolling Stone, one woman said she was sexually assaulted by Leto in a motel bathroom when she was 17. A second woman, who was 19 at the time, said Leto threatened her with sexual assault after she was 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 under state law. A fourth woman said she was groomed by Leto and accused him of making repeated sexually explicit phone calls to her when she was 16. Representatives for Leto did not immediately reply to a request for comment, and the BBC said Leto did not respond to repeated attempts to contact him.
The documentary includes a total of 10 women describing alleged experiences with Leto. Nine of them are speaking publicly about the incidents for the first time. All of the women described encounters with Leto, who is now 54, taking place between 2002 and 2016, during a period when he was in his thirties and forties.
Several specific incidents were recounted in the film. A 17-year-old was approached backstage at a Thirty Seconds to Mars concert in 2006 by an associate of Leto's, who took her phone number. She says she later had sex with Leto at his house in California. In the documentary, she recalled what he said to her: "He told me, 'I would like you to call me daddy.' And it was either pretend to be a little girl or 'my little girl.'" She described herself as "so naive and vulnerable" and said she 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.
Another woman described 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. She added that Leto asked his bodyguard to take her backstage without asking whether she wanted to go.
In addition to the criminal conduct accusations, five women in the documentary said they received strange and sexual phone calls from Leto. Several said they were asked to sign NDAs by Leto's lawyer. Two men who worked with Leto's band for many years also appeared in the documentary, and both described feeling uncomfortable about the way Leto behaved.
Allegations against Leto have surfaced publicly in recent years. Los Angeles DJ Allie Teilz claimed on social media last year that she had been assaulted by the actor when she was 17, prompting other women to come forward. Air Mail published an article in June of last year detailing nine allegations, all of which Leto denied at the time.
No criminal charges have been reported in connection with the allegations documented in the BBC film.
