Four women accuse Jared Leto of criminal sexual conduct when they were teenagers

Leto has been a prominent actor since the 1990s and won the 2014 Academy Award for best supporting actor for Dallas Buyers Club. He has appeared in hit films such as Fight Club, Blade Runner 2049, Suicide Squad and, most recently, featured in Masters of the Universe.

His award-winning rock band, Thirty Seconds to Mars, was formed in 1998 and is touring mainland Europe and the UK next spring, with concerts at the O2 London and Manchester’s Co-op Live arena.

Allegations against Leto have lingered for decades. The BBC has counted more than 120 separate allegations made online relating to his behaviour towards women, some of them historical.

Last year, allegations flared up again when a Los Angeles DJ named Allie Teilz posted on social media saying she had been assaulted by the actor when she was 17, prompting several other women to come forward with similar claims.

Nine women last year also accused Leto of sexual impropriety in an article by US media outlet Air Mail. He denied all the allegations.

In the BBC documentary, the four women who allege criminal behaviour – Isabel, Alex, Clara and Etta – describe in detail what they say happened to them in their encounters with the star.

Now in her 40s, Isabel (not her real name) says she only recently stopped blaming herself for the sexual assault that she says took place in 2002, when she was 17.

“Most of my life I had viewed this event as, I was a stupid girl… and so this bad thing happened.”

Isabel says she agreed to meet Leto at his hotel after she had shown the actor and his friends around the Las Vegas store where she was working.

The address she was given turned out to be a “dingy gross motel”, but she says she presumed they would be heading out somewhere else.

Isabel says she was sitting on the bed waiting for Leto to get ready, when he called her into the bathroom so the pair could talk while he showered.

“I don’t think there was many words exchanged and he opened the shower curtain and started kissing me,” she tells the documentary.

He then grabbed her hand and used it to masturbate himself, she says.

Taken by surprise, the then-teenager says she pulled away and told him she wanted to leave.

Putting on a towel, Leto went outside and appeared to check who was around, she says, before letting her out of the room.

It was only later, she says, when she looked up the actor online, that she realised he was in his 30s.

In the 2010s, Thirty Seconds to Mars was headlining in major international arenas, and crew working with the band would call local modelling agencies to offer female models free VIP tickets, according to one ex-crew member we are calling Brad.

“That [request] was direct from Jared,” he says.

There would be a backstage room for the models, he confirms, describing the task of requesting only females as “a little bit uncomfortable”.

Ex-model Alex says her agency was invited to the band’s concert at London’s O2 arena in 2013. Leto’s female assistant then invited her to an after-party at Shoreditch House in east London, she says.

Alex was 19 at the time, but says to protect herself she “felt the need” to pretend to be younger when she met Leto.

She says she told him she was 17, and that Leto, then 41, replied: “Age is just a number, and anyway, we’re in Europe.”

Although her phone battery was dying and she felt drunk, Alex says, one of Leto’s assistants encouraged her to go to another party at a nearby hotel later.

“I get into the hotel room, it’s really dark, and then I see that it’s just him,” she tells the documentary. “Weren’t there supposed to be other people?”

She says she then asked whether he had a phone charger or any cash, so she could get home, but that Leto said no to both.

Out of options, Alex says she considered whether she might be able to sleep on the chaise longue in the room.

But when she asked Leto if she could do that, Alex says the star responded by saying that, if she did, she would wake up “with a dick in her ass”.

He repeated this response several times, she says – and it was then that she realised “I’m not safe” and left the room.

Alex says she later texted a friend to tell her what had happened.

“He was threatening sexual assault, you should report him,” her friend replied.

For a long time, Alex says she tried to dismiss what happened, but she now believes the hotel encounter had been “all planned out”.

“The assistant knew what to say, to lure me into his hotel room,” she tells the BBC.

Brad, the former crew member, describes young girls joining Leto on stage for final songs at gigs, and then crew members being instructed to invite them backstage.

“And he [Leto] would talk to them in his dressing room. I couldn’t tell you what happened from there,” Brad tells the BBC.

Another man who worked with the band, whom we are calling Simon, says at one point there would typically be about two girls a day stopping by to see Leto at a house where the band was working.

A woman we are calling Clara alleges that she first had sex with Leto when she was 17 – and he was aged 34 – at his house in California.

“He told me, ‘I would like you to call me daddy’. And it was either pretend to be a little girl or ‘my little girl’,” she tells the BBC.

Clara says she was “so naive and vulnerable” at that age and had no sense of how “normal” this kind of behaviour was in an adult relationship.

“It was only as time went on that I realised more and more how scary that really was,” she says.

An associate of Leto’s in his 40s had approached her on the musician’s behalf and got her phone number, she says, while backstage at a Thirty Seconds to Mars gig in 2006.

Clara says she remembers having a conversation about the age of consent in California with Leto, because her father worked in law enforcement at the time.

“He [Leto] just kind of shrugged it off, like it wasn’t a huge concern for him,” she says.

They went back to Leto’s house, she says, and had sex while her friend waited in another room. It was the first of three or four visits to Leto’s home, according to Clara.

If an adult has sex with someone below the age of consent in California it can constitute the criminal offence of statutory rape and lead to prison time.

“There is no well-adjusted man in his 30s who’s going to look at a teenager and think… she would be a great partner,” says Clara.

Another woman tells the BBC her encounter with the star at a music festival, when she was 14, stopped her from going to concerts altogether.

Taylor says she met Leto with her mother in 2005, after watching Thirty Seconds to Mars perform.

The band had offered to meet fans and sign autographs, and the teenager held out the T-shirt she was wearing for Leto to sign – maybe on an arm or across her stomach, she explains.

“Instead he chose to sign my shirt across my breasts, and he told me ‘you have a nice rack’,” Taylor tells the documentary.

“He was asking his bodyguard to go ahead and take me backstage, he didn’t even ask me if I wanted to go,” she continues.

It would have been “very obvious” she was a teenager, she says, explaining that she was very short and wore braces on her teeth at the time.

Taylor says her mother witnessed what happened and confronted Leto.

“He looked at her and said ‘it’s still a nice rack’. He just did not care,” Taylor says.

The encounter “really altered my life… there was nothing I could do about what happened to me.”

Etta – not her real name – is one of the five women who tell the BBC they received strange and often very sexual phone calls from Leto. Four of them were teenagers at the time.

Sixteen-year-old Etta met Leto when she walked into a modelling agency in Los Angeles with her mother in 2014, she says.

The star took an interest in the teenager’s ambition to be a model, according to Etta, and asked for her email address, to invite them both to his Oscar party.

“He did email me and then very quickly it turns into this sexual thing on the phone,” she tells the documentary.

Leto knew she was 16 and asked her questions such as: “Are you a virgin? Do you have any kinks?” – and other more explicit questions, she recalls. “He did at least once mention him and I having sex at some point.”

Etta remembers feeling “nervous”, “anxious” and “uncomfortable”, but says she had a hard time putting up boundaries at that age and saying no.

She says Leto asked if he could pass her number to a friend of his, making it sound like the friend could be a good contact for her career – and she agreed.

Then that friend, who she knew as “Christian”, would call a lot and ask her to shoot porn, saying it did not matter if she was under age, says Etta.

Both “Christian” and Leto would ask similar, explicit questions, she says – adding she “would not be surprised” if they were the same person.

Two more of the five women who allege they received similar phone calls from Leto say they were also called by other men around the same time. Like Etta, they also believe the men could have been Leto playing characters.

Etta says she got a call from Leto in 2016 who told her his lawyer wanted to send her a non-disclosure agreement (NDA). The lawyer had been concerned about his relationships with women, he said.

Etta says Leto “chuckled” at that, as if it were funny.

She did not sign the NDA, which the BBC has seen – alongside corresponding texts and email exchanges.