The James Franco Lawsuit Has a Point to Make About ‘Comfort Zones’

Late yesterday, news broke: Two women, Sarah Tither-Kaplan and Toni Gaal, are suing James Franco and two of his partners in the acting school Studio 4—on the grounds that the men “engaged in widespread inappropriate and sexually charged behavior towards female students by sexualizing their power as a teacher and an employer by dangling the opportunity for roles in their projects.”

The allegations themselves are not, strictly, new; they represent a legal escalation of —by five women—in January 2018. The new suit alleges that Franco and his partners used Studio 4, essentially, as a front: a mechanism through which they could take advantage of young women who attended classes there in the hopes of becoming actors. The school disbanded in 2017. Before it did, the suit alleges, its students were “routinely pressured to engage , “the women said they were encouraged to push beyond their comfort zones while they were denied the protections of nudity riders and other film-industry guidelines that govern how actors can be portrayed and treated in nude scenes.”