A woman once described by Steven Tyler as his “teen bride” filed a lawsuit against the Aerosmith frontman on Thursday, Rolling Stone reported.
Julia Holcomb sued Tyler in Los Angeles Superior Court and accused him of sexual assault, sexual battery and inflicting emotional distress dating to the 1970s, according to an article in the music magazine. Tyler is not named in the lawsuit, but it quotes from his own memoir, and Holcomb has previously spoken and written about her relationship with Tyler.
Holcomb has said she met Tyler in 1973 when she was just 16 years old and he was 25. She said her parents signed away her guardianship to Tyler, allowing him to take her across state lines and continue a sexual and romantic relationship with her.
Tyler, now 74, wrote in his 2011 memoir that he “almost took a teen bride” and said, “Her parents fell in love with me, signed a paper over for me to have custody.” He never referred to Holcomb by name, but she was also referenced in a 1976 Rolling Stone article.
Holcomb filed the lawsuit until California’s 2020 Child Victims Act, which created a three-year window in which people who were sexually abused as children could sue their attackers. The window will close after Saturday.
After Tyler released his memoir in 2011, Holcomb wrote about her experience for the anti-abortion website Life Site News. She also said Tyler pressured her to get an abortion.
“I became lost in a rock and roll culture,” Holcomb wrote. “In Steven’s world it was sex, drugs, and rock and roll, but it seemed no less chaotic than the world I left behind.”
In the lawsuit, Holcomb said Tyler pressured her into sex acts and “performed various acts of criminal sexual conduct,” according to Rolling Stone. In her 2011 essay, she mentioned taking birth control until Tyler decided he wanted a child with her.
Holcomb said Tyler’s family rejected his plea to marry her specifically because she was too young. Already pregnant, she said Tyler forced her to get an abortion shortly after their apartment caught fire in 1975.
Since publishing the essay, Holcomb has spoken at multiple anti-abortion rallies across the country.
“I left Steven in February 1977 and returned to live with my mother and stepfather,” Holcomb wrote. “Steven called a few times after I returned home and then I never heard from him again.”
———
