A girl who claims she had a sexual relationship with Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler when she was 16 is suing him in California, below a state law that has temporarily extended the statute of restrictions for grownups to just take lawful motion on sexual abuse they suffered as kids.
Julia Holcomb Misley, who has spoken out publicly for decades about Tyler’s procedure of her as a teenager, filed a lawsuit in Los Angeles on Tuesday alleging sexual battery, sexual assault and intentional infliction of distress for the duration of a a few-calendar year interval in the 1970s.
“Because I know that I am not the only a single who endured abuse in the new music industry, I come to feel it is time for me to choose this stand,” Misley, now 65, said in a assertion. She reported the target of her lawsuit was to “make the audio sector safer, expose the predators in it, and expose individuals forces in the marketplace that have both enabled and established a tradition of permissiveness and self-protection of by themselves and the superstar offenders among the them”.
When the lawsuit does not identify Tyler, referring to him only as “Doe 1”, a “well-known musician and rock star”, the complaint prices specifically from Tyler’s 2011 memoir, Does the Sound in My Head Bother You?, in which the rock star describes his sexual partnership with a 16-year-aged woman he picked up after a exhibit in 1973, together with convincing her mom and dad to give him lawful custody of her, “so I would not get arrested if I took her out of state”.
Nevertheless, Misley’s lawyers named Tyler in a press release about the situation. Associates for the singer did not immediately answer to a ask for for remark.
In the lawsuit, Misley states that the rock star fulfilled her immediately after a live performance in Portland in 1973, when she experienced just turned 16, and that he took her back to a hotel, exactly where she informed him her age and described her troubled family background. The musician “performed various functions of criminal sexual conduct”, and then sent her dwelling in a taxi, in accordance to the lawsuit.
He soon followed up to give her a ticket to an additional clearly show, indicating “he would acquire the aircraft ticket so that she could vacation independently from him considering that she was a insignificant and could not vacation with [him] across condition lines”.
He would go on to use his electrical power and impact as a outstanding rock star to “groom, manipulate, exploit, [and] sexually assault” the teen “over the course of a few many years in numerous states across the country”, which includes in California, the lawsuit alleges.
Soon after her sophomore yr in superior faculty, the lawsuit alleges, the rock star introduced the teen to keep with him in Boston, then convinced her not to return property to school, but travel with him on the highway as a substitute. He certain her mom to permit him to turn into her legal guardian, “promising he would enroll her in school” and deliver her with better assistance than her mom could, but in reality, only “continued to journey with, assault and offer liquor and drugs” to her.
When Misley turned pregnant, in 1975, the rock star was now “both the father of Plaintiff’s unborn baby and her authorized guardian”, the suit alleges, and he advised her not to find suitable prenatal treatment, fearful “he would get in trouble” with physicians.
Later on, soon after she was trapped inside a burning condominium and suffered from smoke inhalation, he coerced her to get an abortion, causing her yrs of distress, the lawsuit alleges.
Misley’s marriage with Tyler was properly documented: “Julia Holcomb” was named in a 1976 Rolling Stone profile of the rock star, in which she was portrayed as a girlfriend who was regularly in his company. The two had been photographed together, and Misley was interviewed about her interactions with Tyler in a 2021 documentary, Appear Absent, which targeted on the abuse of youthful girls in the songs sector through the 70s and 80s.
Tyler’s 2011 memoir devotes many webpages to his upbeat and sexually graphic recollections of a three-year romantic relationship with an anonymous teenage “groupie” he compares to Kate Hudson’s character in the film Virtually Well-known, producing that he was “so in appreciate I nearly took a teen bride”.
“With my negative self remaining 20-6 and she hardly previous plenty of to drive and pretty as hell, I just fell madly in appreciate with her,” Tyler wrote.
A “Julia Halcomb” is named in his book’s acknowledgments. In Misley’s lawsuit, she accuses the rock star of inflicting additional psychological distress on her by the “involuntary infamy” of remaining described in graphic phrases in his memoirs, which developed extra trauma, and deep emotions of shame, humiliation and fear in her.
Misley “was in line at a grocery store and noticed a picture of herself on a tabloid that referred to her as DEFENDANT DOE 1’s teen lover. The caption beneath Plaintiff’s image browse, ‘She was 15 when they fell in really like. He’s explained her as possessing “more legs than a bucket of hen,”’” the lawsuit alleges. The similar tabloid story bundled express aspects of her coerced abortion.
Misley has due to the fact develop into an anti-abortion advocate in the US, speaking and composing about her working experience with Tyler in the context of strategies to restrict abortion legal rights, such as an interview with Fox News’ Tucker Carlson and a very long written piece on an anti-abortion advocacy internet site. Her lawsuit and statements emphasised the relevance of her Catholic faith, and stated that she believed basic safety inside the Catholic church experienced been improved due to the fact of lawful initiatives to tackle the sexual abuse of young children in just the church.
Misley’s lawsuit was submitted just days just before the finish of a a few-year window, designed by a 2019 California law, that gave adult survivors a likelihood to file lawsuits about youngster sexual abuse that happened a long time back.
The impending deadline has resulted in a flood of new lawsuits, together with more than 2,000 from the Catholic church, the Los Angeles Occasions claimed.
The Linked Press contributed reporting