It’s nine years since the MeToo movement first lifted the rock on Hollywood’s history of abuse by powerful men. But there are many awful stories still to tell – and the BBC’s new documentary, Jared Leto: Hollywood’s Dark Secret, may in time come to be seen as the latest grim addition to the entertainment industry’s hall of shame.
Director Alice McShane’s soberly told programme revolves around the testimonies of a number of women who accuse Leto – the Oscar-winning actor and frontman of rock band Thirty Seconds to Mars – of criminal sexual conduct. Their recollections are relayed from the first-hand perspective of journalist Jessica Sartenaer, who began investigating Leto, 54, after a 2025 Instagram post by DJ Allie Teilz led multiple women to accuse him of inappropriate behaviour.
The women interviewed in Hollywood’s Dark Secret were teenagers at the time of the incidents and their testimonies make for upsetting viewing. Isabel (all of the women featured have had their names changed) recalls meeting Leto at Planet Hollywood in Las Vegas when she was 17. She says that Leto asked for her number and whether she would like to “hang out”. She recalls arriving at a “dingy motel”, knocking on the door and sitting on the bed; Leto asked her to wait whilst he showered. She alleges he then asked her to come into the bathroom so they could “talk”. “I don’t think there were many words exchanged and he opened the shower curtain and started kissing me,” she says in the documentary.
“And then he grabbed my hand… I don’t even know how to say this part, but he grabbed my hand and he started touching himself with my hand, like using my hand to, I guess, masturbate himself with my hand.”
The BBC also speaks to Alex, an American who moved to London in 2013 and signed to Elite Model Management. She was invited to attend a Thirty Second to Mars concert at the O2 Arena, followed by a VIP meet-and-greet with Leto after the show. She told the BBC that, later in the evening, while drunk and with her phone losing power, she was encouraged by a female assistant to join Leto, who was then 41, in a hotel, where she alleges she was threatened with sexual assault. She had told Leto she was 17 (she was actually 19), and had been led to believe that there would be a number of people present. But when she arrived, it was just him. “The assistant is a woman, so I trusted her,” she says.
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