James Franco breaks long silence on misconduct allegations, says he’s struggled with sex addiction, admits sleeping with college students

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For the first time in years, James Franco has sat down to speak at length about the allegations of misconduct that have been brought against him in recent years. He previously spoke about the allegations in a late night appearance in 2018, but has been relatively silent on the subject since.

Now James explains why he has been so silent for years and says he has struggled with a sex addiction and has been recovering since 2016.

Click inside to read everything James Franco has shared …

During his appearance on SiriusXM’s The Jess Cagle podcast, James was asked, “Why did you want to sit down today?” Tell me a little more about it.

He replied, “Well, in 2018, uh, there were complaints about me and a post about me and, uh, at that point I just thought I was going to shut up. I gonna be, I’m gonna take a break. It didn’t seem like a good time to say anything. There were people who were mad at me and I needed to listen. There is a writer… Damon Young and he talked about, you know, when something like that happens, like the natural human instinct is just to stop it. You just wanna go out front and whatever you have to do to apologize, you know , do it. But what it doesn’t do is allow yourself to do the, work at, and, and look at what was underneath, like, whatever you did, even if it was a goof or you said something wrong or whatever, there is probably an iceberg underneath, behavior, role model, self-blindness that is not going to be resolved of the day on the next day. So I just did a lot of work. And I guess I’m confident enough to say like, four years old, you know? And I was recovering before, you know, for substance abuse. And there were some issues that I had to deal with that were also related to drug addiction. And so I, I really used my, my recovery history to start looking at that and, and changing who I was.

Then he spoke at length about his acting school, saying, “The dumbest thing I did, or one of the dumbest things I did in school was to call one of my classes, a “Sex Scenes” masterclass. It wasn’t about sex scenes. I wasn’t teaching people how to do sex scenes or intimate scenes or anything like that. nature. It was a provocative headline. You know, there’s a, there’s a show that just got called The Chair about academia. And in it like the cool teacher, teacher everyone wants to follow in her class, she, she has a class called something like Sex and American Literature or something, to be provocative and cool, but like they’re reading Melville, in class, that’s basically what I was doing. It should have been called, you know, Contemporary Romance or something. It was a class where they did scenes on their own. love story, you know, what they went through as young people. So meeting people on, you know, dating apps or breakups, or, you know, just a bad date, stuff like that. This is what was done in this class. They weren’t sex scenes.

Jess Cagle then asked: “When the lawsuit was filed, the plaintiff’s attorneys said that was their assessment of what had happened. “He was seeking to create a pipeline that, James Franco was seeking to create a pipeline of young women who would be subjected to his personal and professional sexual exploitation in the name of education.” It’s obviously very different from what you just told me, but how, why would someone at least have that perception and why would they accuse you of it? “

James replied, “Look, I admit I slept with students. I haven’t slept with anyone in that particular class. But, during my teaching, I slept with students and it was wrong. But like I said, I, that’s not the reason I started school and I, I didn’t, I wasn’t the person who selected the people for be in the classroom. So it was not a master plan on my part. But yeah, there have been some instances where, you know what I was in a consensual relationship with, with a student and I shouldn’t have been.

James also spoke about being addicted to sex and recovering since 2016. “It’s such a powerful drug. And I was addicted to it for another 20 years. And what’s insidious is that I have been abstinent from alcohol the entire time. So, and I’ve been to meetings, you know, all this time. I even tried, you know, to sponsor other people. And so in my head, it was like, ‘oh, I’m sober. I live a spiritual life. ‘ Where next, I now act in all these other ways. And I couldn’t see it. And, even my godfather was like, you know, who’s married and happy. He said to me “listen, no matter what”, but, you know, because I had girlfriends. I could never be loyal to anyone. So I cheated. I cheated on everyone before Isabel and he said: “Look, cheating is dishonest”. I don’t think that’s good for your sobriety, but if you’re not dating someone and you want to go hook up, like everything between two consenting adults, that’s fine. Like that’s what he said. The problem was. I took that and ran with it and used it as an excuse to, you know, just hook up everywhere. And it was like, well, we’re being honest here. To the right? And like you said, like I’m completely blind to power dynamics or something, but also completely blind to people’s feelings. I didn’t want to hurt people. And I, in fact, wasn’t much of a one-night stand. Like people that, you know, I’ve met or dated, like I saw them for a long time, years. It’s just that I couldn’t be there for any of them. And the behavior escalated to such an extent that it was like I was hurting everyone.

James’ frequent collaborator, Seth Rogen, has been questioned about whether he would work with James again amid all these allegations.

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