James Francois breaking his silence about sexual misconduct allegations made about him nearly four years ago.
For more on James Franco’s interview with Jess Cagle, listen below toour daily podcast on PEOPLE Every Day.
Franco sat down for a wide-ranging interview on SiriusXM’sThe Jess Cagle Podcastthis week to discuss why he’s speaking out about the accusations now.
“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 recalled. “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.”
“Whatever you did, even if it was a gaff or you said something wrong or whatever, there’s probably an iceberg underneath that behavior, of patterning, of just being blind to yourself that isn’t gonna just be solved overnight,” continued Franco.
James Franco.Kevin Winter/Getty
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“So I’ve just been doing a lot of work,” he told Cagle, “and I guess I’m pretty confident in saying like,four years, you know? I was in recovery before for 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.”
Franco revealed he has struggled with sex addiction for years after becoming sober from alcohol at a young age.
“It’s such a powerful drug,” he explained. “I got hooked on it for 20 more years. The insidious part of that is that I stayed sober from alcohol all that time. And I went to meetings all that time. I even tried to sponsor other people. So in my head, it was like, ‘Oh, I’m sober. I’m living a spiritual life.’ Where on the side, I’m acting out now in all these other ways, and I couldn’t see it.”
He admitted that he “cheated on everyone” before his current relationship with girlfriendIsabel Pakzadand he could “never be faithful to anybody.” Franco said he became “completely blind to power dynamics or anything like that, but also completely blind to people’s feelings.”
“I didn’t want to hurt people. In fact, I wasn’t really a one-night-stand guy. People that I got together with or dated, I’d see them for a long time, years. It’s just that I couldn’t be present for any of them. And the behavior spun out to a point where it was like I was hurting everybody.”
The Oscar nominee opened his acting school Playhouse West Studio 4 in 2014 before it closed in 2017.
Tither-Kaplan and Gaal also alleged that the circumstances “led to an environment of harassment and sexual exploitation both in and out of the class.” As part of the deal reached this year, Tither-Kaplan and Gaal agreed to drop their individual claims.
Franco admitted to Cagle: “I did sleep with students.”
“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 the school and I wasn’t the person that selected the people to be in the class. So it wasn’t a ‘master plan’ on my part. But yes, there were certain instances where, you know what, I was in a consensual thing with a student and I shouldn’t have been.”
He later added of his past thinking, “At the time I was not clearheaded, as I’ve said. So I guess it just comes down to my criteria was like, ‘If this is consensual, like, I think it’s cool. We’re all adults so….’ "
Jess Cagle’s full interview with James Franco, as part of the latest episode of SiriusXM’sThe Jess Cagle Podcast, will be available on Thursday, Dec. 23. The interview will also air on SiriusXM’sThe Jess Cagle Showon SiriusXM Stars (ch. 109) on Thursday, Dec. 23 at 2:00 p.m. ET.
If you or someone you know is struggling with addiction, please contact the SAMHSA substance abuse helpline at 1-800-662-HELP.
source: people.com
