As James Franco was accepting his Golden Globe on Sunday night for Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy, Twitter started buzzing with several women accusing him of sexual misconduct. Now, two days later, the New York Times has canceled* a TimesTalk event with the actor. “The event was intended to be a discussion of the making of the film, The Disaster Artist,†the Times said in a statement. “Given the controversy surrounding recent allegations, we’re no longer comfortable proceeding in that vein.â€
After Franco won his Golden Globe, actress Ally Sheedy posted a few since-deleted tweets about Franco, one of which said, “James Franco just won. Please never ask me why I left the film/tv business.†Multiple other women made specific claims about Franco mistreating them. One of them, going by the name Violet Paley on Twitter, said, “Cute #TIMESUP pin James Franco. Remember the time you pushed my head down in a car towards your exposed penis & that other time you told my friend to come to your hotel when she was 17? After you had already been caught doing that to a different 17 year old?â€
Franco has previously discussed one incident in which he flirted with an “almost†18-year-old girl via social media and offered to get a room for the two of them to spend time together. That was in 2014, and at the time he apologized for his “bad judgment,†calling the situation “embarrassing.†In a post-Weinstein world, copping to poor decision-making is not likely to have the same soothing effect that it did three or four years ago.
Correction: The original version of this article incorrectly stated that James Franco “backed out†of the TimesTalk. It has been corrected to reflect that the New York Times canceled the event.