Jared Leto Accused Of Criminal Sexual Conduct By Four Women

Last year, nine women came forward to accuse Jared Leto of sexual misconduct. An Air Mail report included stories of assault and harassment from the alleged victims, who said that they were as young as 16 when the Oscar-winning actor and Thirty Seconds To Mars frontman subjected them to his advances. Leto denied the allegations. Now, the BBC has published an investigative report that builds out that story, detailing specific alleged crimes.In a new BBC documentary called Jared Leto: Hollywood's Dark Secret, 10 different women speak publicly about Jared Leto's inappropriate behavior, and four of them describe criminal offenses that allegedly took place between 2002 and 2016. The BBC corroborated many of their accounts with friends and family who spoke to them about the encounters at the time, and the network has also seen pictures and messages that are consistent with the women's stories. Taken together, those accounts depict a dark pattern of Leto sexualizing extremely young women when he was in his thirties and forties.One woman says that Leto came into the Las Vegas store where she was working in 2002, when she was 17. She claims that Leto invited her to what she calls a "dingy gross motel," where she tried to take a show. Leto then allegedly opened the shower, kissed her, grabbed her hand, and used it to masturbate himself. She says that she pulled away and told him she wanted to leave and that he looked around the room to make sure nobody was watching before letting her leave.A former Thirty Seconds To Mars employee tells the BBC that Leto would instruct him to contact local modelling agencies and offer free VIP tickets to female models when the band would tour arenas. One of those models says that she was 19 when she accepted an invitation to see the band play London's O2 Arena but that she told Leto that she was 17 when he invited her to a Shoreditch House afterparty, claiming that she "felt the need" to appear younger than she actually was. She says Leto, 41 at the time, told her, "Age is just a number, and anyway, we're in Europe." That woman says that she was drunk, with a dead phone battery, when she went to another afterparty at a hotel, where she was surprised to find out that Leto was the only other person there. When she asked Leto for a phone charger or some cash for a cab, Leto said he didn't have either. She then asked if she could sleep on the chaise longue in the room, and Leto allegedly told her that if she did, she'd wake up "with a dick in her ass," then repeated it several times. The woman says she left when she realized she wasn't safe.A third woman says that she had sex with Leto at his house in California when she was 17 and he was 34, after a Leto associate approached her in the crowd at a Thirty Seconds to Mars show. She says that Leto "told me, 'I would like you to call me daddy.' And it was either pretend to be a little girl or 'my little girl.'" When that woman brought up California's age of consent laws, she says that Leto "shrugged it off, like it wasn't a huge concern to him." If that account is true, Leto committed statutory rape. A fourth woman tells the BBC that she met Leto when she was 15, waiting in line to get an autograph at a music festival where Thirty Seconds To Mars were performing. When she asked Leto to sign the T-shirt that she was wearing, Leto allegedly signed it across her breasts and told her, "You have a nice rack." She says, "He was asking his bodyguard to go ahead and take me backstage; he didn't even ask me if I wanted to go." The alleged victim says that Leto did all of this right in front of her mother, and she confronted him: "He looked at her and said, 'It's still a nice rack.' He just did not care."The BBC reports also includes a number of stories about Leto making sexual phone calls to teenagers, and it paints an extremely bleak picture. You can read the full thing here.If you or someone you know has been affected by sexual violence, call the 24-hour National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-HOPE (1-800-656-4673), or visit Rainn.org.