A lawsuit alleging that James Franco bullied students in free and exploitative sexual situations at a film and theater school he founded was provisionally closed, according to the plaintiffs’ lawyers.
The lawyers for the plaintiffs at the firm of Valli Kane & Vagnini, LLP, confirmed the deal in a statement to the Associated Press on Saturday night. They claimed that it will be “later memorized in a Joint Settlement to be filed with the Court at a later date”, but did not provide any comment or further details on any possible currency exchange.
The Los Angeles Superior Court received an action from both sides indicating that a provisional settlement was reached in the class action. The document was filed on February 11, but was revealed on Saturday by lawyers for the alumni who filed the lawsuit. Among the named defendants were Franco’s producer Rabbit Bandini and his partners Vince Jolivette and Jay Davis.
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The extinct Studio 4 was the stage of the dispute. Actresses and alumni Sarah Tither-Kaplan and Toni Gaal filed the lawsuit in 2019. They claimed that Franco pressured his students to perform in increasingly explicit sex scenes on camera in an “orgy setting” and was beyond acceptable standards.
The lawsuit claimed that Franco “sought to create a channel for young women who were subjected to their personal and professional sexual exploitation in the name of education”. In addition, students believed that roles in Franco’s films would be the reward for participating in these scenes
The alleged incidents took place in a master class on sex scenes that Franco taught at Studio 4, which ended in 2017.
The plaintiffs agreed to withdraw their individual claims under the agreement, according to the court’s filing. Denunciations of sexual exploitation by other authors in the class action will be extinguished without prejudice. That means they can be archived again, said the joint situation report. The fraud allegations presented by these authors will be “subject to limited release”, according to the document, but did not elaborate on this.
Franco’s lawyers have yet to comment. In their filings in the lawsuit, they said their allegations were “false and inflammatory, legally unfounded and brought up as a class action with the obvious aim of getting as much publicity as possible for attention-seeking Claimants”.
Franco won a Golden Globe for The Disaster Artist in early 2018, the peak of the #MeToo movement.
The original 33-page process can be read here.
The joint situation report presented to the Los Angeles Superior Court said: “The claims of the Sexual Exploitation Class will be dismissed without prejudice. The Class Notice will inform the Class that the sexual exploitation claims are not being released or resolved as part of this agreement, but are being closed without prejudice, and that the prescription was requested pending this proceeding and remains requested until the Court grants the final approval and time for appeal has ended. The parties have also reached an agreement on a number of non-economic terms that will be detailed in more detail in the final documents of the agreement. “