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Jared Leto, the American actor and lead singer of Thirty Seconds to Mars, has been accused of criminal sexual conduct by four women in a new BBC documentary. The women claim the offences occurred when they were teenagers.
Leto is an Academy Award winning actor known for roles in Suicide Squad, Dallas Buyers Club and the recent Masters of the Universe, among others.
In Jared Leto: Hollywood’s Dark Secret, 10 women come forward with allegations against the actor.
One of the women said she was sexually assaulted in a motel bathroom when she was 17 years old. Another said she was threatened with sexual assault by Leto when she was 19. One woman said she had sex with the actor in California when she was 17 years old — an act classified as statutory rape given that the legal age is 18 in the state — and that Leto “shrugged off” a conversation about the age of consent. A fourth woman described being groomed by Leto, who she claims made several sexually explicit phone calls to her when she was 16 and suggested they should have sex.
Four other women also told the BBC that they had received strange and often very sexual phone calls from the actor when they were younger.
All the women the BBC spoke to say they encountered Leto between 2002 and 2016, when he was in his 30s and 40s. The actor is now 54 years old.
The BBC said it corroborated a number of the women’s accounts with friends and family who were told about the encounters with Leto at the time. In some cases, the BBC said it has also seen pictures and messages that support the women’s accounts.
Two men who worked with Leto’s band for many years told the documentary makers how uncomfortable staff felt about the manner in which Leto interacted with teenage girls, sometimes inviting them backstage to his dressing room or inviting them to the house where he was recording.
“I think everyone thought the age gap was way too big,” one said.
Leto did not respond to requests for comments from the BBC.
This is not the first time allegations have been levelled against the actor. The BBC counted more than “120 separate allegations made online relating to his behaviour towards women, some of them historical”.