James Franco addressed the
sexual misconduct allegations against him in a podcast interview released,
marking the first time the 43-year-old actor has publicly spoken about them in
nearly four years.
He said: “In that silence, in
the vacuum of me speaking out, now my family and friends have had to answer for
me. And I don’t think that’s right. I don’t want anybody to have to answer for
me.”
In the nearly hour-long
episode of “The Jess Cagle Podcast,” recorded. Franco stated that he had
slept with some of his students at Studio 4. He denied creating a
“pipeline” for sexual exploitation, as he was accused of doing in his capacity
as a teacher, but said he did not factor in the power imbalance.
He said of the Sex Scenes
master class described by the Times: “Look, I’ll admit, I did sleep with
students. I didn’t sleep with anybody in that particular class, but over the
course of my teaching, I did sleep with students. And that was wrong. But like
I said, it’s not why I started school. … It wasn’t a master plan on my
part.”
Franco repeated in the episode
that he has “just been doing a lot of work” over the past four years. He
attributed some of the behavior in question to history with addiction, stemming
from his alcohol abuse as a teen, and said he “really used my recovery
background to start examining this and changing who I was.”
