James Franco addresses sexual assault allegations

He was accused four years ago.

James Franco has spoken out about the sexual misconduct allegations that were made against him in 2018, almost four years ago. The actor said that he has been "doing a lot of work" on himself ever since these allegations came to light and spoke about his addiction recovery. After the allegations surfaced in January of 2018, a number of women came forward accusing Franco of sexual misconduct. At the time, he denied them, saying they were "not accurate" but did not want to "shut down" those who "did not have a voice." Franco agreed to pay a $2.2 million settlement earlier this year after he was accused of pushing female students into explicit sex scenes on camera after he was sued in October 2019 by students at his acting school. The lawsuit was led by Sarah Tither-Kaplan and Toni Gaal who claimed he had abused his position of power. Now speaking to SiriusXM this week, he said: "In 2018, there were some complaints about me and an article about me and at that moment I just thought, 'I'm gonna be quiet, I'm going to pause'. "It did not feel like the right time to say anything. "There were people that were upset with me and I needed to listen." He continued: "There's a writer called Damon Young and he talked about when something like this happens, then the natural human instinct is to just make it stop. "You want to get out in front of it and (do) whatever you have to do, apologise and get it done. "What that doesn't do is allow you to do the work and look at what was underneath. "Whatever you did, even if it was a gaffe or you said something wrong, there's probably an iceberg underneath, of behaviour, of patterning, or just being blind to yourself that isn't just going to be solved overnight. "I was in recovery before for substance abuse. 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."