James Franco Breaks His Silence 4 Years After Sexual Misconduct Allegations

James Franco spoke out for the first time since five women accused him of sexual misconduct in 2018. In his first interview in four years, Franco told Sirius XM host, Jess Cagle, he has been "doing a lot of work" and struggled with a sex addiction after becoming sober. At the time the allegations surfaced, Franco denied them in an interview on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. 

On Wednesday, Franco told Cagle his first response in 2018 was to stay quiet. "There were people that were upset with me and I needed to listen," the 127 Hours actor explained on The Jess Cagle Show, reports PEOPLE. "There's a writer Damon Young and he talked about when something like this happens, the natural human instinct is to just make it stop. You just want to get out in front of it and whatever you have to do apologize, you know, get it done. But what that doesn't do is allow you to do the work to, and to look at what was underneath."

"Whatever you did, even if it was a gaff or you said something wrong or whatever, there's probably an iceberg underneath that behavior, of patterning, of just being blind to yourself that isn't gonna just be solved overnight," Franco continued, adding that he was "doing a lot of work" on himself. "I was in recovery before for substance abuse," he said. "There were some issues that I had to deal with that were also related to addiction. And so I've really used my recovery background to kind of start examining this and changing who I was."

Franco told Cagle he "got hooked" on sex for 20 years after he got sober from alcohol. Even though he continued going to meetings and tried to sponsor other people while staying sober, he was still "acting out now in all these other ways, and I couldn't see it." He "cheated on everyone" before he began dating his current girlfriend, Isabel Pakzad, and could "never be faithful" to anyone. He was "completely blind to power dynamics or anything like that, but also completely blind to people's feelings," Franco said. "I didn't want to hurt people. In fact, I wasn't really a one-night-stand guy. People that I got together with or dated, I'd see them for a long time, years. It's just that I couldn't be present for any of them. And the behavior spun out to a point where it was like I was hurting everybody."

Later on, in the wide-ranging interview, Franco admitted to sleeping with members of his acting class, admitting it was wrong. "At the time I was not clearheaded, as I've said. So I guess it just comes down to my criteria was like, 'If this is consensual, like, I think it's cool. We're all adults so...'" Franco recalled.

In January 2018, five women accused Franco of sexual misconduct in a Los Angeles Times report. Four of the women were former acting students of Franco. In 2019, two of the victims, Toni Gaal and Sarah Tither-Kaplan, filed a sexual misconduct lawsuit against him in Los Angeles. Gaal and Tither-Kaplan accused the actor and his business partners of engaging in "widespread inappropriate and sexually charged behavior towards female students by sexualizing their power as a teacher and an employer by dangling the opportunity for roles in their projects." Franco settled the lawsuit earlier this year, agreeing to pay a $2.2 million settlement.