A BBC documentary has brought forward ten women who allege sexual misconduct by Oscar-winning actor and Thirty Seconds to Mars frontman Jared Leto, with four of them making allegations that amount to criminal conduct.
Nine of the women are sharing their accounts publicly for the first time. Leto has not responded to the allegations.
The four women making criminal allegations – referred to in the documentary as Isabel, Alex, Clara and Etta – say their encounters with Leto occurred between 2002 and 2016, when he was in his 30s and 40s. He is now 54.
Isabel says she was sexually assaulted in a motel bathroom in Las Vegas in 2002, when she was 17, after agreeing to meet Leto at what she had been told was his hotel. “Most of my life I had viewed this event as, I was a stupid girl… and so this bad thing happened,” she tells the documentary.
Alex, who was 19 when she attended an after-party following a Thirty Seconds to Mars concert at London’s O2 arena in 2013, says she was lured by one of Leto’s assistants to a hotel room where she found herself alone with the star.
Clara alleges she first met with Leto at his California home in 2006, when she was 17 and he was 34. U
Etta says she met Leto at a Los Angeles modelling agency in 2014 when she was 16, and that he quickly moved from email contact into sexually explicit phone calls. She was subsequently sent a non-disclosure agreement, which she refused to sign.
A fifth woman, Taylor, describes meeting Leto at a music festival in 2005 when she was 14. She says he signed her shirt across her chest, commented on her body, and instructed a security guard to take her backstage without asking her.
Four further women tell the documentary they also received sexually explicit phone calls from Leto when they were teenagers.
Two former band crew members told the BBC that Leto’s team would routinely contact local modelling agencies before concerts to offer female models VIP tickets, at Leto’s instruction. Staff were uncomfortable with how Leto interacted with teenage girls backstage.
The BBC says it has corroborated a number of the women’s accounts through friends and family who were told about the encounters at the time, as well as photographs and messages in some cases.
Leto has won the Academy Award for best supporting actor for Dallas Buyers Club and has appeared in films including Fight Club, Blade Runner 2049 and Suicide Squad.
His band is scheduled to tour mainland Europe and the UK next spring, with dates at London’s O2 and Manchester’s Co-op Live. Allegations against Leto have circulated online for more than a decade. He denied all allegations made in an Air Mail article last year, in which nine women accused him of sexual impropriety.
The documentary, Jared Leto: Hollywood’s Dark Secret, is airing on the BBC.
