Six years ago this summer, Jared Leto’s followers descended on Mars Island, a private resort off the coast of Croatia. For three days, fans—many of them young women, some of them paying more than $6,499 to be there—meditated, chanted, and lounged barefoot in caftans alongside Leto, who, in addition to starring in American Psycho, Fight Club, House of Gucci, and Blade Runner 2049, is the front man of Thirty Seconds to Mars. The band called it a “spiritual retreat.” The French magazine L’Officiel called it something else: “The Cult of Jared Leto.”
Photos from the retreat show Leto, dressed in white robes and reflective sunglasses, leading silent processions through pine forests, his signature long hair blowing in the breeze. In one image, he stands on a cliff with his arms raised, dozens of fans below him mimicking the pose. “Yes, this is a cult,” reads one of the band’s tweets. “#MarsIsland.”
Mars-branded T-shirts and sweatshirts abounded, as did fans who had the band’s logo—a triangle reminiscent of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon album cover—tattooed onto themselves.
But the theatrics, the robes, the rituals, and the guru-posturing at this and other Mars-hosted events haven’t fully been able to obscure decades’ worth of rumors about Leto behaving inappropriately with younger women in his orbit. I spoke with nine of these women, who revealed a darker side to the 53-year-old actor.
“Jared Leto Likes ’Em Young”
On September 12, 2005, the New York Post published an item on Leto, who had, a few years earlier, appeared opposite Jennifer Connelly in the movie Requiem for a Dream. The story opened with the blunt line: “Jared Leto likes ’em young.”
Though Leto, 33 years old at the time, had been spotted around New York with Ashley Olsen and Lindsay Lohan—who were both of age by this point—the New York Post alleged that he was more interested in groups of teenage models staying at the Maritime Hotel. “Girls from IMG, Elite, Next and Women are staying there, and Jared has been hitting on all of them,” an anonymous source told the paper. “He’s a serial texter. He is constantly texting these other 16- and 17-year-old girls. It’s really kind of creepy.” (A representative for Leto calls the New York Post item “recycled tabloid fodder and demonstrably false.”)
Twenty years later, the women I spoke to say Leto’s alleged past behavior was not a phase but rather part of a long-standing pattern—one that was and continues to be widely known in some circles and, generally, quietly accepted. “It’s been an open secret for a long time,” one of the women tells me.
Another woman I spoke to, a model and music producer, says she was 16 when, in 2006, Leto approached her at Urth Caffé in Los Angeles, then a popular destination for Hollywood agents and middle-school girls. The woman’s mother was outside waiting for a table. As the woman pushed through the crowd to go to the bathroom, Leto—seated nearby with Olsen, 19, whom he was rumored to be dating at the time—grabbed her arm.
“I looked down and it was Jared Leto,” the woman says. “We had a quick conversation, and he got my number.”
A few days later, Leto called her home in the middle of the night. “I don’t know if he was on drugs or what … It was the weirdest, grossest voice…. [But] for me, it’s Jared, you know?” (A representative for Leto says he “has not had a drink or used drugs in over 35 years.”)
That night, Leto was hosting a party at his house in Los Angeles’s Laurel Canyon neighborhood organized by Brent Bolthouse, a nightlife promoter behind the then infamous Neon Carnival parties—lavish, invitation-only affairs held at the Desert International Horse Park, in Thermal, during Coachella.
Leto invited the woman, but she declined. “I didn’t even have a driver’s license,” she says.
Still, over the next three weeks, the calls kept coming. “Always at one, two, three A.M.,” she remembers. “And the conversations turned sexual. He’d ask things like, ‘Have you ever had a boyfriend? Have you ever sucked a dick?’”
The woman says the experience left her shaken. She was in rehab at the time and discussed it with her counselor. “He changed—his voice, the way he talked. It scared me,” she says. “That was the first time I thought, ‘Oh my God, that’s not just in movies.’” (The woman’s mother, who she says overheard one of their phone calls, has confirmed her story.)
In 2008, the model Laura La Rue, also 16 at the time, had a similar encounter. At Yes! on Prop Two, an animal-rights benefit held at a private residence in Beverly Hills, La Rue remembers Leto spotting her from across the room. He was watching her so intensely, she says, that her mother, who was also at the benefit, noticed.
At one point, he came over to talk to her. “He asked how old I was. I said, ‘I’m 16. How old are you?,’” La Rue says.
Leto was 36 at the time. He asked for her number anyway. (Her mother didn’t stop it, La Rue says, because she thought being acquainted with Leto would be good for La Rue’s burgeoning modeling career.)
La Rue was living in Ojai but traveled to Los Angeles often for work, and she and Leto began e-mailing. In one exchange, she asked how late he typically worked in his music studio. He replied, “Late. Come visit soon.”
She did, arriving at Leto’s 4,000-square-foot minimalist property one day in late April 2009. “I remember him teasing me the whole time I was there,” she says. “He was flirting with me. He’d lean in close, then pull away, like it was a game.”
“Their communications contain nothing sexual or inappropriate,” says a representative for Leto, “and Ms. La Rue later applied to work as Mr. Leto’s personal assistant, further underscoring the absence of anything inappropriate in any of their interactions.” La Rue denies ever applying to work as Leto’s personal assistant.
Another woman who had an on-and-off affair with Leto around the same time described similar behavior. “He’d be sweet, then suddenly really demeaning. It was a switch.”
Flattered by the star’s attention, La Rue says, she continued to visit Leto sporadically over the next few months. On one occasion, she alleges, he walked out of a room completely naked. “He just walked out, dick out, like it was normal,” she says. La Rue didn’t know what to think—she was 17 when the incident took place. “I thought maybe this was just what adult men do,” she says.
Also around this time, another woman I spoke to says she was approached by Leto’s assistant at an 18-and-older nightclub, geared toward young people who are above 18 but under the drinking age of 21. According to this woman, who was 20 when this took place, the assistant told her that Leto wanted her number. “We ended up hooking up a little at the club,” she says, and “hung out a few times at his house, but he was weird. Look, I know some people are kinky, and that’s fine. But his kind of kink—it just didn’t feel right.”
Another woman I spoke to, an actress who began a texting relationship with Leto when she was still under-age, described how visits to his house could quickly turn uncomfortable. She recalls him saying things like “Do any of the little boys you hang out with fuck you?”
When she was 18, the woman says, his sexual overtures escalated. She describes an incident during one visit to Leto’s home when “he suddenly pulled his penis out and started masturbating. Then he walked over, grabbed my hand, and put it on him. He leaned in and said, ‘I want you to spit on it.’”
(A representative for Leto says, “All of the allegations are expressly denied.”)
“Cute Girls Only”
Leto’s dealings with younger women allegedly extended to larger gatherings as well. Several of the women I spoke to mentioned Leto’s friendship with Bolthouse—once dubbed “the overlord of the L.A. party scene” by the Los Angeles Times—who organized several parties at Leto’s home starting in the mid-2000s, according to someone who worked with Bolthouse.
Young women were allegedly recruited to attend these events, some through modeling agencies, others through direct outreach. One party invitation greeted guests with “Hey Kids.” (A representative for Leto says he “did not write or approve the invitation … and only recently saw it for the first time.”)
A woman I spoke to who attended Leto’s parties in 2007 and 2008 said that when she wanted to bring a friend to one of the parties, she was asked for photos of her plus-one. “They would ask who, and they’d be like, Cute girls only,” she says. (“Headshots were a regular requirement for all guests, male and female,” Bolthouse says.)
“I was 18 the first time I went, and I was definitely not the youngest person there,” the woman I spoke to says. She estimates the ratio at the parties to be 60 very young women to four or five men. She says the focus seemed to be on getting girls to skinny-dip: “The energy was all about getting the girls in the pool.” (Bolthouse says that he “never saw anyone skinny-dipping.”)
Leto tended to keep to the shadows at these events. As one of the women who attended his parties told me, “He was sober, meticulous, always in control.” (“There was never any recruiting, complaints, or impropriety,” says a representative for Leto.)
Something Darker
Last month, the Los Angeles–based D.J. and music producer Allie Teilz reposted a 2012 Facebook status she’d written to her Instagram Stories: “Youre [sic] not really in L.A. until Jared Leto tries to force himself on you backstage… In a kilt.. And a snow hat.”
“I was assaulted and traumatized by this creep when I was 17,” she wrote in another Instagram story. “He knew my age and didn’t care. What he did was predatory, terrifying and unacceptable.”
She added a comment: “Throwback to 2012, Jared Leto was a creep then … still a creep now, going on 15+ years of being Hollywood’s most persistent predator in a kilt.” And another: “29+ years of being a pedophile. when does this end? protect our girls 💗 #jaredleto.” (“Ms. Teilz’s allegations are demonstrably false,” says a representative for Leto.)
Teilz has 113,000 Instagram followers, and her post went viral, triggering a wave of responses. She shared over 50 of the responses she received on Instagram (though noted she only included responses by women she “personally knows”), and many of them echoed the accounts of the women I spoke to for this story.
Yet women have been hesitant to come forward beyond Instagram. Many of those whom I spoke to seemed to still be processing their encounters with Leto, given how young they were when they happened. “He put on this show of really believing in me,” one woman says. “It made me feel validated—seen—as an 18-, 19-year-old, by this successful actor.”
Cosmopolitan reported on a now deleted 2015 video posted by the director James Gunn (Guardians of the Galaxy, the upcoming Superman) accusing Leto of sleeping with under-age girls. The next morning, Gunn posted: “Good morning … and sorry to all of you around the world who saw my Ambien-fueled Periscope session last night at 3 a.m.”
In 2016, Leto made headlines again for reportedly sending used condoms, anal beads, and dead rats to his Suicide Squad co-stars Margot Robbie, Will Smith, and Viola Davis. “I got so many weird things,” Robbie later said in an interview with E! “I can’t even begin to tell you.”
At the time, the story was dismissed as extreme Method acting, something Leto is known for. “99.9 percent of what people read is bulls—,” Leto later told Entertainment Weekly. “There were no used condoms.... Any of the very few gifts that were ever given were given with a spirit of fun and adventure and received with laughter.”
But to some in the industry, it suggested something darker.
In 2018, the British tabloid Metro reported on a Twitter post by the actor Dylan Sprouse that read: “Yo @JaredLeto now that you’ve slid into the DMs of every female model aged 18–25, what would you say your success rate is?”
To which Gunn replied: “He starts at 18 on the internet?” (Gunn and Sprouse did not respond to Air Mail’s requests for comment, and a representative for Leto says he has never met either of them.)
“Let me be clear,” Teilz wrote in another Instagram story. “What he’s done is not OK: the sheer volume of these cases—and how young some of these girls were, just 14, 15, 16—breaks my heart.”
“ I remember being so physically ill to the point of throwing up when I passed billboards … for his films,” one woman tells me, “and just wondering how everybody in L.A. knows.”
Elena Clavarino is the Senior Editor at Air Mail
