Will sexual misconduct allegations against Jared Leto become too difficult for Hollywood to ignore?

In October 2025, Jared Leto was on the promotional trail for his latest film, Tron Ares.

The sci-fi epic reportedly cost $US180 million ($259m) to make and is based on one of Disney’s long-held pieces of intellectual property, spawning two previous films and one really awesome theme park ride.

It should have been a massive deal, the kind of blockbuster release that studio publicists will usually want to capitalise for its lead star with a splashy front cover feature in a publication such as GQ, Esquire or The New York Times weekend magazine.

Instead, if you go through to even the 12th page of Google search results, Leto’s appearances in support of Tron: Ares are short red carpet interviews with predominantly influencers or friendly entertainment reporters, and junket videos where he’s paired with other cast.

There’s little risk of being asked an awkward question in the span of 60 seconds amid the chaos of a premiere or when sat next to Gillian Anderson. He did do a segment on Jimmy Fallon, and the host may now regret calling him “one of our favourite guests”.

The publicity machine surrounding a Hollywood celebrity is always tightly controlled, but with Leto and Tron: Ares, there was an extra layer of caution.

Four months before the release of Tron: Ares, Airmail, an online publication started by Graydon Carter, the former editor of Vanity Fair, published an expose which it spoke with nine women who recalled sexualised or “creepy” encounters with Leto, which he denied, when they were still teenagers.

Some of the details in that Airmail piece included parties at which, it was alleged, there would be a ratio of girls and women to men of 60 to five, and one attendee, 18 years old at the time, recounted that she “definitely not the youngest person there”.

There was also a former model, Laura La Rue, who said she was 16 years old when Leto, then 36, cracked onto her at a charity benefit (Leto denied to Airmail anything inappropriate had happened).

There was a pattern. Leto, as the New York Post had said in 2005, “likes ’em young”, a statement his team once decried as “demonstrably false”.

The Airmail piece didn’t blow up either his acting career or his musical one as the frontman of the band 30 Seconds to Mars, as you might have expected. Leto’s publicity duties may have been curtailed to protect him from any probing questions from less compliant journalists or influencers, but he just kind of got away with it.

The rumours about Leto’s predilections have been around a long time, whispered on the internet by women who claimed to have had encounters with him, usually when they were young, to the point that filmmaker James Gunn and actor Dylan Sprouse have even posted about them.

In 2018, Sprouse tweeted, “Yo @jaredleto, now that you’ve slid into the DMs of every female model aged 18-25, what would you say your success rate is?”, to which Gunn replied, “He starts at 18 on the internet?”.

Perhaps it’s that Leto has over decades cultivated a reputation for himself as a weirdo who once turned up on the Met Gala red carpet with a model of his own disembodied head, or that he, as a super-Method actor, had sent joke “gifts” of anal beads, dead rats and used condoms to his Suicide Squad co-stars.

So, you’re not as surprised when there are rumours about Leto as you would be about someone with a sterling reputation.

It’s not that he was held to a lower standard because of his persona but Hollywood has often protected or looked the other way when it comes to problematic men, as the world knows only too well.

The MeToo movement was loud and collected some high-profile scalps, most notably Harvey Weinstein, but there were many more “when is it going to come for so-and-so?” that went unanswered. And, depressingly, many of the men who were publicly held to account for their behaviour have been staging comebacks anyway.

Louis CK just released a comedy special on Netflix, and he actually admitted to masturbating in front of female colleagues without their consent, and Johnny Depp, who a British civil court upheld as a “wife beater”, has a studio Christmas movie due out in a few months.

But the cloud around Leto might be harder to ignore after the release of the BBC documentary Jared Leto: Hollywood’s Dark Secret which detailed the testimony of 10 women who had encounters with Leto between 2002 and 2016. Four of them accused him of criminal misconduct.

Through his publicist, Leto said in a statement about the BBC documentary, as reported by Deadline, “I have never sexually assaulted anyone in my entire life. These claims are absolutely and categorically false”.

The allegations in the documentary from the women, who appeared on screen, include one woman who claimed she was sexually assaulted in a motel bathroom when she was 17 years old. Another said she had sex with him when she was 17 years old in California, which would constitute statutory rape in the state.

Another alleged he made sexually explicit phone calls to her when she was 16 years old, and then was asked to sign a non-disclosure agreement, which the BBC sighted. One woman was 14 years old when, she claimed, he made a crass comment about her body during a backstage autograph-signing session.

The 30 Seconds to Mars concerts, it was alleged, provided another opportunity for Leto to be in the company of younger women. The documentary featured one former crew member who recalled that wherever the band was performing, the crew would call local modelling agencies and offer free VIP tickets, and some of these models were then funnelled to after parties.

One former model, Alex, was 17 when she met Leto in 2013 in London, and she claimed she told him her age and he had replied, “Age is just a number, and anyway, we’re in Europe”.

Alex said one of Leto’s assistant encouraged her to go to another party, and she was directed into a dark hotel room. There, she alleged, he had threatened sexual assault, and she left the room.

All the specific alleged incidents took place when Leto was in his 30s and 40s.

The BBC said it has counted more than 120 different allegations made by women online about Leto’s behaviour towards them.

Leto’s screen breakthrough was in the 1994 TV series My So-Called Life opposite Claire Danes. In the show, he played Jordan Catalano, a fictional heartthrob character of that era, a sensitive popular boy who struggled with dyslexia, and eventually became a couple with Danes’ character. It was a fantasy of every wallflower high school girl.

He went on to appear in lauded projects beloved by cinephiles including American Psycho, Fight Club, The Thin Red Line and Requiem for a Dream, and won an Oscar in 2013 for his performance in Dallas Buyers Club.

His next screen credit will be in Lunik Heist, a film based on a real-life 1950s US government attempt to heist a Soviet spacecraft. It also features Lupita Nyong’o and John Mulaney.

Lunik Heist is being released by Searchlight, which is owned by Disney, who had released Tron: Ares.

Perhaps, this time, Disney won’t even want Leto on the red carpet in front of influencers who can usually be relied on to be friendly. Surely, even they can’t ignore Hollywood’s open secret.