Women’s safety campaigners are calling for Jared Leto‘s upcoming 2027 UK tour to be cancelled in the wake of sexual misconduct allegations made against him.
It comes after the BBC aired the Jared Leto: Hollywood’s Dark Secret documentary which saw 10 women make allegations relating to alleged encounters with the Oscar-winning actor and Thirty Seconds To Mars frontman between 2002 and 2016.
Four of the women have accused the actor of criminal sexual conduct when they were teenagers, including sexual assault, statutory rape and grooming. Jared Leto has denied the allegations, stating: “I have never sexually assaulted anyone in my entire life. These claims are absolutely and categorically false.”
Leto is due to tour the UK next year with Thirty Seconds To Mars at the likes of The O2 in London and Manchester Co-Op Live arena. End Violence Against Women Coalition and domestic abuse charity Women’s Aid have called for the tour to be cancelled.
A spokesperson for the latter told BBC Newsbeat it is “troubling to hear that UK concerts are still planned to go ahead that will put an alleged abuser in the spotlight”.
“In light of the very serious allegations of criminal sexual conduct, we would urge organisers to put safety over profit and avoid platforming figures like this.”
Janaya Walker, interim director of the End Violence Against Women Coalition, also told the corporation that tickets still being sold for Thirty Seconds to Mars’ upcoming concerts was “really worrying”.
She added: “I think it really is about putting people over profit in this instance, and particularly women and girls’ safety.
“Particularly for victims and survivors of violence against women and girls, they’ll be seeing these reports and then seeing that things are moving forward seemingly without any consequence. I think that will cause a huge amount of alarm and frustration and anger.”
NME has contacted promoters for the tour for comment.
It comes after reports emerged earlier this week that Leto had lost out on a major film role due to sexual misconduct allegations made against him in the BBC documentary.
The director of the documentary Alice McShane, recently questioned why previous allegations against Leto appeared to have little effect on his career.
Last June, nine women accused the actor of sexual misconduct in an Air Mail investigation. His representatives “expressly denied” the claims at the time and described them as “demonstrably false”.
McShane said her team had already begun working on the documentary when that article was published, but were surprised by the response to it.
“It was just really surprising when not a huge amount seemed to happen after that article went live,” she said.
Since the Air Mail report, Leto has appeared in two major films, Tron: Ares and Masters Of The Universe.
Asked why the allegations had seemingly had little impact on his career, McShane replied: “It’s quite a mystery, isn’t it?”
“It just feels like the outrage about stories like this has slightly cooled,” she added, pointing to the rise of the ‘manosphere’. “In a way, these sorts of stories have been normalised in people’s minds, and I just don’t think that they get the traction perhaps that they would have done 10 years ago.”
“He’s cultivated this persona of this kind of weird, enigmatic, mysterious guy, and I think, in a way, that sort of shielded him from accountability,” she said, adding that she believed there was also an element of “pretty privilege”.
For more help, advice or more information regarding sexual harassment, assault and rape in the UK, visit the Rape Crisis charity website. In the US, visit RAINN.
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