Multiple women accuse Thirty Seconds To Mars frontman and Oscar-winning actor Jared Leto of sexual misconduct in a new BBC documentary.
The programme, Jared Leto: Hollywood’s Dark Secret, airs tonight (July 29) at 9pm on BBC Three and 10:45 on BBC One. It reports that the alleged offences took place between 2002 and 2016, when the accusers were in their teens and Leto was in his 30s and 40s.
One woman, using the pseudonym Isabel, claims that the actor/musician sexually assaulted her in a motel bathroom in 2002, when she was 17 and he was in his early 30s.
“I don’t think there was many words exchanged and he opened the shower curtain and started kissing me,” she claims. She says that he then grabbed her hand and used it to masturbate himself.
Another woman, Alex, says he threatened her with sexual assault when they were alone in a London hotel room in 2013, when she was 19 and he was 41. She claims she “felt the need” to pretend that she was 17 to protect herself, to which Leto allegedly answered: “Age is just a number, and anyway, we’re in Europe.”
She adds that, when she asked if she could sleep on the room’s chaise longue, he told her, if she did, she’d wake up “with a dick in her ass”.
A third accuser, Clara, alleges that she had sex with Leto at his California home when she was 17 and he was 34, which constitutes statutory rape. “He told me, ‘I would like you to call me daddy.’ And it was either pretend to be a little girl or ‘my little girl’,” she tells the BBC.
When Clara attempted to start a conversation about the age of consent in California being 18, Leto allegedly “shrugged it off, like it wasn’t a huge concern for him”. It was the first of three or four visits to his home, according to Clara.
A fourth woman, Taylor, says that, when she was attending a signing with her mother aged 14, Leto made a lewd comment about her breasts. “He chose to sign my shirt across my breasts, and he told me, ‘You have a nice rack,’” she claims.
He then allegedly told a security guard to take Taylor backstage. After Taylor’s mother confronted Leto, “he looked at her and said, ‘It’s still a nice rack,’” the accuser says.
Other women allege that they received often sexual messages and phonecalls from Leto when they were younger. One, using the pseudonym Etta, says that she met Leto when she was 16, when she walked into a modelling agency in Los Angeles with her mother in 2014.
Etta claims that Leto asked for her email address and that the nature of their online conversations quickly turned sexual. He allegedly asked “Are you a virgin? Do you have any kinks?” and “did at least once mention him and I having sex at some point”.
She adds that she was presented with a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) in 2016 but refused to sign it. The BBC says it has seen the NDA, as well as multiple text messages that corroborate Etta’s claims.
The BBC has made repeated attempts to contact Leto regarding the allegations, but he has not responded.
Leto rose to prominence as an actor in the 1990s, appearing in Fight Club (1999), Girl, Interrupted (1999) and American Psycho (2000). His performance as a drug addict in 2000’s Requiem For A Dream was critically acclaimed and is regarded as his breakout role. For his performance as a trans woman in Dallas Buyers Club (2013), he won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.
His band Thirty Seconds To Mars have won multiple awards and gone Platinum in several countries. Their albums Love, Lust, Faith And Dreams (2013) and America (2018) were top-10 hits in the US.
Leto was accused of sexual misconduct by nine women in an article published by Air Mail last year. One woman accused Leto of being completely naked in front of her when she was 17 and masturbating in front of her when she was 18. A representative of Leto “expressly denied” the accusations.
