James Franco admits to sleeping with students, says he was addicted to sex

Oscar-nominated actor James Franco has admitted he previously slept with students from an acting school he ran, said he struggled with a sex addiction and has been trying to improve his behavior in recent years. are working.

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In excerpts from The Jess Cagle Podcast made public on Wednesday, Franco, 43, said that while teaching, he “slept with the students, and that was wrong.” He said that he did not start the school to woo women for sexual purposes.

“I think at the time, my thinking was whether it was consensual, okay,” he added on the Sirius XM podcast. “I wasn’t clear at the time.”

The comment was his first extended comment about the allegations made by Franco nearly four years ago, when Los Angeles Times reported that five women had accused Franco of conduct they believed to be inappropriate.

Later, in October 2019, two women filed a civil suit against the “Pineapple Express” star, accusing her of exploiting aspiring actors at her now-defunct school and tricking young women into shooting explicit sex scenes. Was accused.

Franco said that he became addicted to sex after he sobered up from the alcohol addiction he developed at an early age.

“It’s such a powerful drug,” he said. “I stuck with it for 20 more years. The insidious part of this is that I abstained from alcohol the whole time.”

Franco co-hosted the Oscars in 2011 and was nominated at the 2012 awards for his performance in “127 Hours”.

According to documents filed in Los Angeles Superior Court, the actor agreed to pay $2.2 million to settle a 2019 civil lawsuit this year.

In a podcast interview, Franco also said that he has been recovering from sex addiction since 2016 and has been “working a lot” after the allegations against him and “changing who I was.”

“I didn’t want to hurt people,” he said.