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.

In a statement provided by his reps, Leto said: “I have never sexually assaulted anyone in my entire life. These claims are absolutely and categorically false”.

Last year, the actor “expressly denied” the accusations made against him in online publication Air Mail, which carried the tagline: “He has acted in everything from American Psycho to House of Gucci. Now Jared Leto stands accused of impropriety by nine women.”

The accusations included an assertion by one woman that Leto approached her in a café in Los Angeles in 2006, when she was 16 and he was 35. After asking for her number, he called her at home, the conversation quickly turning sexual. “I don’t know if he was on drugs or what… It was the weirdest, grossest voice […] He’d ask things like: ‘Have you ever had a boyfriend? Have you ever sucked a d—?’” (Leto “has not had a drink or used drugs in over 35 years”, the actor’s representative told Air Mail.)

Even before the Air Mail article, questions had been raised about Leto’s personal and professional conduct. In 2005, the New York Post published an article about Leto with the headline “Jared Leto likes ’em young”. A decade later, he was accused of weird behaviour after being cast as the Joker in superhero blockbuster Suicide Squad (2016): he sent a live rat to co-star Margot Robbie, while Viola Davis said he “did some bad things, Jared Leto did. He gave some really horrific gifts”. These included dead pigs and rats, used condoms and pornographic magazines. Even Will Smith – an actor whom we can safely say is no stranger to controversy – was weirded out.

“First we found out that Jared wasn’t going to be in rehearsals,” said Smith, who played Deadshot. “And we were like, ‘That’s messed up! How is he not going to be in rehearsals?’ And then there was a bang on the door, and this dude barges in and throws a dead pig on the floor in front of us. We’re like, ‘OK. Jared has officially set off the Suicide Squad. He went full Joker’.”

His creepy gifts were just one element of the conversation around him. In 2018, Disney actor Dylan Sprouse tagged Leto in a tweet and said: “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.” In another (now deleted) post, Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn added: “He starts at 18 on the internet?”

Leto didn’t seem to care. Twelve months later, in 2019, he was photographed in Croatia, modelling white robes and a Jesus-like beard, surrounded by fans of Thirty Seconds to Mars (for which his brother Shannon plays drums). They had accompanied him to Europe for the latest in a series of “summer camps”, where activities include yoga, cooking classes and – well, there’s always a downside – a Thirty Seconds to Mars performance. Just so nobody missed what he was going for, the band’s social media wrote: “Yes, this is a cult #MarsIsland.”

Leto was born into poverty in Bossier City, Louisiana. His father, Tony Bryant, abandoned the family when Leto was an infant, and would die by suicide when Leto was just eight. Leto’s mother, Constance, later married Carl Leto, Jared’s adoptive father. But this failed to restore stability to the young Leto’s life. By 16, he was taking drugs and paying for his addiction with theft.

“There was a moment involving a gun and some cocaine that may have been a turning point for me. I knew it wasn’t good,” he said. He turned himself around, though, and, aged 22, had his big break as Jordan Catalano in the teen drama My So-Called Life, opposite Claire Danes.

In 2014, he won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for playing a transgender character in Dallas Buyers Club. However, his campaign to carve out a space in blockbusters came unstuck with his disastrous turns in David Ayer’s aforementioned Suicide Squad and the critically panned 2022 vampire-horror Morbius, for which Leto met “doctors and patients who could teach him about living with a rare, incurable blood disease”. To walk with a cane – as Morbius does in the film – he “studied with real cane users”. “I remember fearing for this guy’s spine,” said co-star Adria Arjona.

He would later deny the grisliest of the rumours and was reportedly outraged when Warner Bros announced that it was pivoting to a Joker origin story starring Joaquin Phoenix, directed by Todd Phillips (for which Phoenix would win the Oscar for Best Actor).

Will the BBC’s report damage Leto’s career beyond repair? The Suicide Squad controversy only seemed to endear him to weird fans on the internet, and he appeared to survive the fallout of the 2025 Air Mail article. He is also due to tour the UK in 2027 with Thirty Seconds to Mars. The documentary arrived as Leto’s career was entering an upswing: his comedic performance as the villain Skeletor in Masters of the Universe, released earlier this year, drew widespread praise.

But the BBC’s documentary is arguably more hard-hitting than previous reports, in that you can hear and see the women talk about what they suffered, several wiping away tears as they revisit their trauma. Maybe this is the final nail in the coffin for Leto, after all.