Speaking on SiriusXM’s The Jess Cagle Podcast this week, the 43-year-old actor — who was accused of sexual misconduct by multiple women in 2018 — revealed the reason why he remained quiet. “I [was] completely blind to power dynamics or anything like that … I didn’t wanna hurt people,” he said.The actor also confessed to having sex with students at his acting school, Studio 4, more than two years after they accused him of sexual exploitation.“Look, I’ll admit I did sleep with students. I didn’t sleep with anybody in [my ‘Sex Scenes’ class], but, over the course of my teaching, I did sleep with students and that was wrong,” Franco said.“But like I said, I, it’s not why I started the school and I, I didn’t, I wasn’t the person that selected the people to be in the class. “So it wasn’t a master plan on my part. But yes, there were certain instances where, you know what I was in a consensual thing with, with a student and I shouldn’t have been.”In January of 2018, five women told the Los Angeles Times that Franco had been sexually inappropriate or exploitative with them. One detailed how Franco removed plastic guards from actress’ vulvas during a sex scene while simulating oral sex.Two of the women, Sarah Tither-Kaplan and Toni Gaal, sued Franco in 2019, claimed that he tried to “create a pipeline of young women who were subjected to his personal and professional sexual exploitation in the name of education” while they attended his Studio 4 acting school.In July this year, agreed to pay more than $2 million to settle the lawsuit by the former students.And while Franco has been sober and attending meetings for alcohol addiction, he said he also battled sex addiction for 20 years, cheating on ‘everyone’ he dated before his current girlfriend Isabel Pakzad, whom he has been with since November 2017.“I, in fact, I wasn’t like really a one-night-stand guy,” Franco explained. “Like people that I, you know, got together with or dated, like I’d see them for a long time, years. It’s just that I couldn’t be present for any of them. And the behaviour spun out to a point where it was like I was hurting everybody.”Franco said the attention he received from the women he dated was “such a powerful drug” that he got “hooked on it for 20 more years.”It wasn’t until his sister-in-law Iris Torres — who is married to Tom Franco — gave him a book on sex and love addiction. He said it hit him “like a bullet” and he thought, “Oh my God, that’s me.”“Up until that point, like as crazy as it is, like I had inklings like, ‘OK, maybe this is an issue,’” Franco said, also stating that he realised, “Oh, this is an issue that I’m not gonna solve on my own.”By doing “a lot of the work” over the past four years, he said, he has learned that he always struggled with addiction issues, but they had just manifested themselves in a different way.“I’ve really used my recovery background to kind of start examining this and, and changing who I was,” he said.Since he was a teen, Franco has battled alcohol addiction, but got sober at 17, and once he “couldn’t use alcohol to sort of fill that hole,” he sought “success, attention.”“And so in a weird way, I got addicted to validation, I guess, or success, or whatever that is,” he said.“The problem with that is like, I’m sure you can guess, like any sort of drug or anything, like, there’s never enough … And it was, it was never-ending.”
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