#la times

[teamhatosy]

Shawn Hatosy x Los Angeles Times Photographed by Ian Spanier

[rayslittlekitten]

How Charlie Hunnam reinvented himself with 'Monster: The Ed Gein Story'

A self-described overthinker, the actor threw himself headlong into the Netflix limited series. His preparation even included reading Gein's

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Opinion: U.S. leaders knew we didn't have to drop atomic bombs on Japan to win the war. We did it anyway

We've been taught that the U.S. had to drop atomic bombs on Japan to end World War II. Historical evidence shows Japan would have surrendere

The US didn't drop those two atomic bombs on August 6 and 9 to defeat Japan. Japan was already defeated. They dropped them for geopolitical reasons going forward, including making sure Japan surrendered to the US and not the USSR, which had just joined the war there.

Essay: At a time when Americans are reassessing so many painful aspects of our nation’s past, it is an opportune moment to have an honest national conversation about our use of nuclear weapons on Japanese cities in August 1945. The fateful decision to inaugurate the nuclear age fundamentally changed the course of modern history, and it continues to threaten our survival. As the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock warns us, the world is now closer to nuclear annihilation than at any time since 1947.

The accepted wisdom in the United States for the last 75 years has been that dropping the bombs on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, and on Nagasaki three days later was the only way to end the World War II without an invasion that would have cost hundreds of thousands of American and perhaps millions of Japanese lives. Not only did the bombs end the war, the logic goes, they did so in the most humane way possible.

However, the overwhelming historical evidence from American and Japanese archives indicates that Japan would have surrendered that August, even if atomic bombs had not been used — and documents prove that President Truman and his closest advisors knew it.

The allied demand for unconditional surrender led the Japanese to fear that the emperor, who many considered a deity, would be tried as a war criminal and executed. A study by Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s Southwest Pacific Command compared the emperor’s execution to “the crucifixion of Christ to us.”

“Unconditional Surrender is the only obstacle to peace,” Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo wired Ambassador Naotake Sato, who was in Moscow on July 12, 1945, trying to enlist the Soviet Union to mediate acceptable surrender terms on Japan’s behalf.

But the Soviet Union’s entry into the war on Aug. 8 changed everything for Japan’s leaders, who privately acknowledged the need to surrender promptly.

Allied intelligence had been reporting for months that Soviet entry would force the Japanese to capitulate. As early as April 11, 1945, the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s Joint Intelligence Staff had predicted: “If at any time the USSR should enter the war, all Japanese will realize that absolute defeat is inevitable.”

Truman knew that the Japanese were searching for a way to end the war; he had referred to Togo’s intercepted July 12 cable as the “telegram from the Jap emperor asking for peace.”

Truman also knew that the Soviet invasion would knock Japan out of the war. At the summit in Potsdam, Germany, on July 17, following Stalin’s assurance that the Soviets were coming in on schedule, Truman wrote in his diary, “He’ll be in the Jap War on August 15. Fini Japs when that comes about.” The next day, he assured his wife, “We’ll end the war a year sooner now, and think of the kids who won’t be killed!”

The Soviets invaded Japanese-held Manchuria at midnight on Aug. 8 and quickly destroyed the vaunted Kwantung Army. As predicted, the attack traumatized Japan’s leaders. They could not fight a two-front war, and the threat of a communist takeover of Japanese territory was their worst nightmare.

Prime Minister Kantaro Suzuki explained on Aug. 13 that Japan had to surrender quickly because “the Soviet Union will take not only Manchuria, Korea, Karafuto, but also Hokkaido. This would destroy the foundation of Japan. We must end the war when we can deal with the United States.”

While a majority of Americans may not be familiar with this history, the National Museum of the U.S. Navy in Washington, D.C., states unambiguously on a plaque with its atomic bomb exhibit: “The vast destruction wreaked by the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the loss of 135,000 people made little impact on the Japanese military. However, the Soviet invasion of Manchuria … changed their minds.” But online the wording has been modified to put the atomic bombings in a more positive light — once again showing how myths can overwhelm historical evidence.

Seven of the United States’ eight five-star Army and Navy officers in 1945 agreed with the Navy’s vitriolic assessment. Generals Dwight Eisenhower, Douglas MacArthur and Henry “Hap” Arnold and Admirals William Leahy, Chester Nimitz, Ernest King, and William Halsey are on record stating that the atomic bombs were either militarily unnecessary, morally reprehensible, or both.

No one was more impassioned in his condemnation than Leahy, Truman’s chief of staff. He wrote in his memoir “that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender …. In being the first to use it we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages.”

MacArthur thought the use of atomic bombs was inexcusable. He later wrote to former President Hoover that if Truman had followed Hoover’s “wise and statesmanlike” advice to modify its surrender terms and tell the Japanese they could keep their emperor, “the Japanese would have accepted it and gladly I have no doubt.”

Before the bombings, Eisenhower had urged at Potsdam, “the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.”

The evidence shows he was right, and the advancing Doomsday Clock is a reminder that the violent inauguration of the nuclear age has yet to be confined to the past. :: Rebecca Solnit

[lenbryant]

Damn dam. (LATimes)

William Mulholland brought water to L.A. He failed to stop a disastrous flood

By Christopher Goffard, Staff Writer 

The call that might have averted disaster came into William Mulholland’s office that morning. Stubborn, single-minded and tireless, lionized and controversial, the Los Angeles water boss was 72. Fifteen years earlier, he had opened the great aqueduct that carried Sierra snowmelt to the San Fernando Valley and made the metropolis possible.

Now, on March 12, 1928, a supervisor at the St. Francis Dam was calling to say there might be a problem. Water was seeping from under the structure. It looked muddy, which might indicate real trouble — erosion in the foundation.

Mulholland grabbed his assistant and told his chauffeur to head there. The curved concrete gravity dam towered 1,835 feet above sea level in the San Francisquito Canyon, about 30 miles northwest of L.A. The reservoir recently had filled to its 12.4-billion gallon capacity for the first time.

It was Mulholland’s 19th and final dam. He had willed it into existence in his characteristic way, fast and without faultfinding inspectors to impede his vision. He gave the construction job to city workers, rather than invite bids (and complications) from contractors beyond his control.

With little formal education, Mulholland had left his native Ireland in his teens, worked steamer ships on the Great Lakes, labored in lumber camps and prospected for gold. He stowed away on a ship to reach the Pacific Coast but was thrown off and forced to cross the Isthmus of Panama by foot. 

In 1877, he got to Los Angeles, then a 10,000-person backwater, and began working for the water company as a ditch-digger. He studied hydraulics, civil engineering and Shakespeare at the public library and impressed everyone with his pluck and problem-solving prowess.

The St. Francis Dam reached its capacity before its collapse right before midnight on Mar. 12, 1928. 

“He could do what he wanted ... After the aqueduct was built, he resisted anyone supervising him,” said Donald C. Jackson, co-author (with Norris Hundley Jr.) of “Heavy Ground: William Mulholland and the St. Francis Dam Disaster.”

Mulholland wanted to guarantee L.A.’s water supply against the threat of drought and saboteurs. The St. Francis Dam, part of the larger aqueduct system, was meant to store surplus water. No fanfare had attended its completion near what is now Santa Clarita in 1926, the better to avoid attention from Owens Valley vigilantes, who were known to dynamite aqueduct pipes as protest against the diversion of their river water. (The guile and skulduggery behind the aqueduct’s birth is a famous story, and famously mythologized.)

On the east side, the dam was build atop an ancient landslide of mica schist, a type of rock vulnerable to fracturing that would allow moisture to seep inside. On schist foundations, cautious engineers knew to build in safety features like a series of cut-off trenches and drainage pipes — a step Mulholland had neglected.

There was nothing to fear, Mulholland declared as he inspected the water leaking from the dam that morning. The muddiness? That was from the water spilling over a dirt road, not from internal erosion. The czar returned to L.A.

“Like all dams, there are little seeps here and there,” Mulholland would later testify at a coroner’s inquest. “Of all the dams I have built and of all the dams I have ever seen, it was the driest dam of its size I ever saw in my life.”

William Mulholland came to California with little formal education and became a respected civil engineer.

(Courtesy of University of Southern California Libraries/California Historical Society)

“No sir,” Mulholland answered. “It never occurred to me that it was in danger.”

And if he had known?

“I would have sent a Paul Revere alarm up and down the Valley,” he said.

At 11:57 that night, the eastern portion of the dam gave way. Water had saturated the mica schist and reactivated the old landslide.

Soon, the entire 208-foot-tall structure collapsed, unleashing a 10-story wall of water and obliterating cabins in its path. Among the first to die was the man who had alerted Mulholland to the seepage — Tony Harnischfeger, who lived just below the dam with his 6-year-old son. Their bodies were never found.

March 14, 1928: Remains of homes in Santa Paula following the collapse of St. Francis Dam.

It took about 45 minutes for the reservoir to empty, but the death continued for hours. On its 53-mile path to the Pacific Ocean, water ripped through orchards, uprooted orange groves and flipped cars. It tore nightclothes from people who had been sleeping moments before. Some bodies were carried for miles. Many were trapped beneath tangled tree limbs. 

Near L.A. County’s border with Ventura, in a makeshift tent city for Southern California Edison employees who were building a transmission line, the water hit around 1:20 a.m. and killed 84 more. 

Warnings were slow to arrive. Many people didn’t have phones. In some towns, they just didn’t believe the urgent instructions to clear out — they had no idea they were in a flood path.

Searchers picked through mud and debris, and bodies were carried to makeshift morgues. 

Seven coffins containing victims of the 1928 St. Francis Dam collapse are prepared for burial in the Santa Clara River Valley.

People hurried to identify victims before they decomposed, in an era before refrigeration. Animal carcasses filled the Santa Clara River. To prevent disease, stray dogs that fed on them were shot.

More than 400 people died. Many of the missing never were found, and a precise death toll never was agreed on. The Ventura County district attorney said his county “has borne the brunt of the greatest disaster of its kind in the history of the State” — and he was clear on who deserved the blame. The dam, he said, “was the creature of the city of Los Angeles.”

It was easy to identify the individual most responsible for bringing the creature into existence. Death threats poured into Mulholland’s office. The Los Angeles Record demanded: “Resign Now!”

He offered to quit, but the city wouldn’t let him. He slumped with his face in his arms and “sobbed like a brokenhearted child,” according to a witness account in Gary Krist’s “The Mirage Factory: Illusion, Imagination and the Invention of Los Angeles,” which identifies Mulholland as one of three seminal figures in the city’s creation.

“This inquiry is a very painful thing for me,” Mulholland testified at an L.A. County coroner’s inquest two weeks after the disaster. “The only ones I envy about this thing are the ones who are dead.”

At first, Mulholland seemed to dodge blame. He suggested that perhaps dynamite might be the culprit. He said the site was “vulnerable to human aggression.” He even suggested it might be cursed — “There is a hoodoo on it.”

The California governor, C.C. Young, launched a commission to look into the dam failure. The report, completed within weeks, laid the blame on “defective foundations,” concluding that gravity dams were safe if built on bedrock. 

It was hard not to see politics at play. The concrete mega-structure that would become the Hoover Dam needed congressional approval, and Mulholland was a strong advocate. It was not prudent to destroy him.

With the state report complete, and vigilante sabotage ruled out, Mulholland retook the inquest stand. He was given the chance to blame underlings. Wasn’t it true, a juror asked, that he had taken to delegating tasks to subordinates in recent years?

Mulholland replied that he had taken just one vacation in 50 years and that, at 72, he was working as hard as ever: “There are a very few beat me in the office in the morning.” 

The man responsible for one of the greatest engineering marvels of his time, the 233-mile aqueduct that gave a semiarid region a world-class city, now admitted responsibility for one of the greatest engineering disasters in American history.

March 13, 1928: Flood-twisted railroad track in Castaic on the Santa Paula-Montalvo branch of Southern Pacific following the dam’s collapse. 

It was never clear how closely he had supervised the dam’s design, which he’d given to draftsmen to execute. But he had ordered the structure built on an unstable foundation, without consulting independent geologists or engineers. He had raised the dam’s height mid-construction, without widening the base to support the extra water pressure.

Dam safety laws allowed municipalities with their own engineering departments to operate without state oversight, and Mulholland had taken advantage of this loophole.

He certainly had been guilty of hubris, concluded Jackson, the historian. But had he committed a crime? The inquest, which lasted three weeks, was supposed to decide. The assistant district attorney assigned to the case spoke to jurors in terms that seemed to guarantee Mulholland’s exoneration.

“It would be monstrous to place a man upon trial for the crime of manslaughter or murder, who just merely made an error of judgment,” the prosecutor said.

The jury blamed “the very poor quality of the underlying rock structure” and decided Mulholland had broken no law.

The Times, a longtime Mulholland booster, blamed “a faulty system which loads upon any man’s shoulders, no matter how broad, responsibilities that are too heavy for any man to bear.” When he resigned seven months later, the newspaper added: “The tragedy, which was keenly felt by the ‘Chief’ as he is called at the water department, has aged him.”

He died in 1935, at age 79, at his home on St. Andrews Place. His Times obituary was headlined “Death Calls Aqueduct Builder.” It did not mention the collapse of the St. Francis Dam. 

Nor did the city want to remember. A memorial plaque to Mulholland praised his “prophetic vision” as the builder of the great aqueduct, describing him as “a penniless Irish immigrant boy, who rose by the force of his industry, intelligence, integrity and intrepidity, to be a sturdy American citizen, an engineering genius, a whole-hearted humanitarian …”

“Los Angeles never wanted to talk about it again,” Jackson said. “He was given a lot of deference, so long as he quietly moved along.”

The city paid an average of about $5,000 per victim for 172 death settlements. Ray Rising, who had lived with his family at the compound for hydroelectric plant workers, lost his wife and three children when the flood hit their wooden bungalow.

After Rising sued, the city’s attorney argued that the dam collapse was “an act of God,” even though Mulholland admitted responsibility. A jury gave Rising $30,000.

In the aftermath of the disaster, dam construction laws were tightened. The great slope of Mulholland’s concrete gravity dam in the Hollywood Hills — a model for the one that failed — was covered with dirt to disguise its terrifying height.

For about a year, towering remnants of the St. Francis Dam stood eerily in the empty canyon, a reminder of the disaster, before the city had them dynamited.

Sources for this report include “Heavy Ground: William Mulholland and the St. Francis Dam Disaster” by Norris Hundley Jr. and Donald C. Jackson; “The Mirage Factory: Illusion, Imagination, and the Invention of Los Angeles” by Gary Krist; and Times archives.

[letowatch]

Jared Leto ‘absolutely’ denies women’s accusations of sexual misconduct when they were teens

Los Angeles Times

Alexandra Del Rosario - 29th July 2026

Musician-actor Jared Leto has been accused of criminal sexual conduct by several women who say the incidents occurred when they were teenagers.

“I have never sexually assaulted anyone in my entire life,” Leto said in a statement shared Wednesday. “These claims are absolutely and categorically false.”

Jared Leto faces allegations of criminal sexual conduct by several women who allege the sexual incidents with the musician and Oscar-winning actor occurred when he was in his 30s and 40s and they were teenagers.

In a BBC documentary titled “Jared Leto: Hollywood’s Dark Secret,” a total of 10 women spoke about their alleged experiences with the “House of Gucci” star and Thirty Seconds to Mars frontman, some detailing allegations of inappropriate text messages, sexual assault and statutory rape from 2002 to 2016. Among the allegations, one woman said she was 17 years old when Leto sexually assaulted her in a motel bathroom. Another woman alleges Leto continued to sexually pursue her in Los Angeles despite knowing she was 17 years old, younger than the age of consent in California.

Leto, 54, in a statement shared with The Times on Wednesday, denied the allegations raised by the BBC documentary: “I have never sexually assaulted anyone in my entire life,” he said. “These claims are absolutely and categorically false.”

Journalist and documentarian Jessica Sartenaer said in the segment published Wednesday that the BBC began its investigation into allegations against Leto after noting an Instagram story from a prominent DJ based in Los Angeles. In a since-expired Instagram story, DJ Allie Teilz resurfaced a 2012 Facebook post in which she accused Leto of trying to “force himself” onto her backstage at a concert. Teilz captioned her repost: “Jared Leto was a creep then..still a creep now, going on 15+ years of being Hollywood’s most persistent predator,” according to the BBC documentary.

Numerous social media users reportedly responded to Teilz’s posts with their own claims about Leto’s alleged predatory behavior, many alleging they were subject to Leto’s misconduct when they were teens. A woman identified as “Etta” told the BBC she was 14 when Leto approached her outside of a modeling agency and invited her to an Oscars party. Etta provided email correspondences to the outlet and said the “Morbius” actor encouraged her to stay in contact via text after the invite. Text messages turned into phone calls and conversations about her modeling career quickly turned sexual, according to the documentary. Leto allegedly asked Etta about her virginity, her kinks and sexual capabilities.

Etta said in the documentary that Leto’s legal team allegedly contacted her and urged her to sign a nondisclosure agreement about her relationship with the actor, though she never did.

The documentary portrays Leto as a celebrity who leveraged his fame to connect with young fans and control them. The woman who alleged she was sexually assaulted by Leto at age 17 in a motel bathroom told the BBC she met Leto in 2002 at a mall in Las Vegas. Leto would have been in his early 30s at the time. She alleges he invited her to meet him at a nearby motel. She waited in the room while he stepped into the shower, but he eventually called her over and began kissing her, according to the BBC. The woman, identified as “Isabelle,” accused Leto of forcing her hand to his genitals and using her hand to masturbate. Isabelle pulled away and moved to leave the room, but Leto allegedly looked outside the motel room for any potential bystanders before letting her out, she recalled to the BBC.

The BBC also published allegations by “Clara,” the woman who said Leto knowingly had sex with her when she was 17 — he was 34 at the time — at his house in California. Clara said she connected with Leto after his associate requested her phone number. She and her friend were invited to spend time with the band at the Chateau Marmont in West Hollywood, where the age of consent of California became a topic of conversation. Leto, who allegedly shrugged off the conversation, invited Clara and her friend back to his home and told the friend to wait in another room while he had sex with Clara. Clara visited Leto’s home a total of three or four times, according to the BBC. She also alleged that Leto often requested that she call him “daddy” and that she pretend to be a little girl.

Leto in 2013 allegedly invited another woman, named Alex, to his band’s concert at London’s O2 and to an after-party. She was 19 at the time but told Leto she was younger out of a need to protect herself, the BBC reported. Leto allegedly replied: “Age is just a number, and anyway, we’re in Europe.” Alex alleges Leto threatened to sexually assault her in a hotel room later that evening.

Of the 10 women, four also reportedly alleged they received sexual calls from Leto when they were younger.

The BBC also spoke to men who worked closely with Leto’s band, Thirty Seconds to Mars. One man alleged that Leto was often texting girls to invite them to spend time with the band. Leto also allegedly asserted control by ignoring the girls he invited and speaking to them rudely. The man also said that Leto took one fan, who was dropped off by her parents, “off to the bedroom” and afterward, she called her parents to pick her up.

Leto has long faced quiet scrutiny for his alleged behavior with women and girls. In 2005 the New York Post published a story accusing the actor of “aggressively pursuing many” teen models. Last year Air Mail published accusations against Leto of impropriety by nine women, though he denied those claims at the time.

Still, the actor-musician has moved on from those allegations seemingly unscathed. Leto, who won his Oscar in 2014 for “Dallas Buyers Club,” most recently appeared in “Masters of the Universe” and is set to tour with his band next year.

[unladyboss]

ALSO, IT'S A JAYO AYOMY DAY. THE BEAR

Sooooo

[letowatch]

Team behind Jared Leto doc wants to continue sexual assault investigation

Los Angeles Times

Emily Zemler - 31st July 2026

After a year and half of research and interviews, the BBC on Wednesday aired an explosive new documentary in which multiple women accused Oscar winner Jared Leto of sexual assault.

Directed by Alice McShane, “Jared Leto: Hollywood’s Dark Secret,” which debuted Wednesday in the U.K., revealed new claims of criminal sexual conduct by the 54-year-old actor and musician from four women, including a possible instance of statutory rape in California. In the film, a total of 10 women recount allegations of sexual assault, along with inappropriate text messages, phone calls and behavior that occurred from 2002 to 2016. Leto has denied the allegations.

To ensure the integrity of the documentary, the hour-long program was not announced ahead of time.

“Everything came out at once,” says producer Jessica Sartenaer, speaking from London over Zoom alongside McShane on Friday morning. “That was all very much part of the strategy because we didn’t want to leak anything before the investigation came out.”

McShane began working on the film after Los Angeles-based DJ Allie Teilz reshared in April 2025 her Facebook post from 2012 in which she accused Leto of trying to “force himself” onto her backstage at a concert. Teilz described the actor as “Hollywood’s most persistent predator.” About 40 women contacted Teilz with their own allegations, according to Sartenaer. In June 2025, weekly newsletter Air Mail published accusations of impropriety against Leto by nine women, which he denied.

“I began ringing around trying to find the women who’d written into Allie,” McShane says. “When I was speaking to women, I realized there were other journalists on the trail. So I did think there was going to be something published relatively quickly, which we can’t compete with because we have a whole different set of considerations. It takes a lot longer to make.”

Social media was the main resource for finding people willing to speak on the record. The filmmakers say they discovered more than 120 separate allegations online.

“But that doesn’t necessarily mean these are all women who want to speak about their experiences,” McShane says. “They’ve posted anonymously for a reason. It was a lot of hours spent digging through hundreds of people from across Leto’s life and career — people who had worked with the band, people in his acting life, his fashion life. We had an enormous spreadsheet. It was a really in-depth process.”

Ultimately, 10 women agreed to be interviewed on camera. The filmmakers offered each various options of anonymity depending on their level of comfort. None are completely anonymous, although only three used their real names. All of their real voices are heard, which McShane says is unusual.

Sartenaer adds, “The courage it takes to come forward and come up against a powerful man like Leto is immeasurable. It’s absolutely incredible what these women have done, and the anonymity decision is a very personal one. Right away, [the women had] this gut instinct about the level of anonymity that they would like.”

McShane drew on her past experiences, including making the 2023 Channel 4 documentary “Russell Brand: In Plain Sight,” which investigated comedian Russell Brand’s treatment of women, to guide the interview process.

“You really learn from a duty-of-care perspective how to best look after the women,” she says. “There’s always this balance of wanting to investigate the story, but also understanding these are people who have gone through incredibly painful experiences and they’re sharing very personal things with you. You never want to push. They are in control. You can never make these things happen. It has to come from the women.”

The initial investigation began in London and the filmmakers visited Los Angeles twice in the months that followed. The first interview was with a woman named Alex last fall. In the documentary, the former model recalls being invited to a 30 Seconds to Mars concert at London’s O2 in 2013 (Leto is the band’s frontman). She says his female assistant then brought her to an afterparty at the members’ club Shoreditch House. Although she was 19 at the time, she told Leto she was 17 to protect herself. She says the musician, then 41, replied, “Age is just a number, and, anyway, we’re in Europe.”

Alex was sent by Leto’s assistant to another afterparty at a nearby hotel, but Leto was the only one there, she says. Alex asked for a phone charger and cash for a taxi home, but was denied. When she asked if she could crash on the sofa in the hotel room, she says Leto threatened to rape her.

“Right from when we started investigating and started hearing from these women, [we were] noticing these patterns of behavior,” McShane says. “[Alex] is an extraordinary communicator. The women we were speaking to, all of them, are amazing storytellers, and resolute about telling their stories. Each time we spoke to somebody it reinforced the importance of getting it out.”

Sartenaer says Leto’s seeming fixation with women of a young age was something “we were interested in investigating right off because of the pattern we noticed in the reposts from Allie Teilz.”

“Many of them did mention that they were teenagers at the time of the alleged offenses,” she says. “We knew that was a thread to follow right from the beginning.”

One woman, named Clara in the documentary, spoke about having sex with Leto for the first time when she was 17 and he was 34. The encounter took place at his home in California. In the film, she describes having a conversation with Leto about the age of consent in the state. “He just kind of shrugged it off, like it wasn’t a huge concern for him,” she says.

As the documentary points out, the age of consent in California is 18. An adult having sex with someone underage can constitute statutory rape. The filmmakers can’t comment on the law or whether there will be any legal repercussions for Leto. However, Mike Radford, executive producer at BBC Current Affairs, says what distinguishes “Jared Leto: Hollywood’s Dark Secret” from prior investigations is that the film showcases alleged criminal conduct.

“That’s a different level of potential wrongdoing,” Radford says, speaking on the phone from London. “From that point of view, it becomes a more serious story, and it goes beyond misunderstanding to something more worrying.”

“I have never sexually assaulted anyone in my entire life,” he said. “These claims are absolutely and categorically false.”

The documentary combines the interviews with reenactments and archival footage. Sartenaer says they had a “wealth of material” to pull from.

“There is so much content about him,” McShane adds. “And he’s so overtly sexual on the public stage. We’ve got examples in the film of him, like when he’s in the press room at the Oscars. Everything is packed with innuendo. There are examples where he’s being very inappropriate with young women on the stage. All of that placed next to these interviews can be so chilling and there were countless examples of that available to us.”

The filmmakers worked with a limited budget and a small team of three: McShane, Sartenaer and cinematographer Theo Tennant. In total, they spent a year and half working full time on “Jared Leto: Hollywood’s Dark Secret.”

The biggest challenge was the fact that “Hollywood is an impenetrable world,” Sartenaer says. The documentary features interviews with two people who worked with Leto speaking completely anonymously, but they were difficult to find and get on the record.

“It really took a very, very long time to have a breakthrough on the insider front [and] to actually get people to start talking with us,” Sartenaer says. “Hollywood is such a precarious place and it’s difficult to get into Hollywood, and I think once people are in, it’s probably a terrifying prospect. One foot stepped wrong could see them catapulted out of it again. We saw that nervousness in trying to speak with people. There’s a real culture of secrecy.”

Despite that, there are hopes that “Jared Leto: Hollywood’s Dark Secret” will encourage other potential victims to speak out.

“The investigation is ongoing,” Sartenaer says. “What these women have done by coming forward [is commendable]. We think their courage will encourage other women to speak their truth, whoever it is about.”

Radford says the BBC is continuing its investigation into the allegations surrounding Leto.

“We would hope that should our investigation continue we would have enough material to make a subsequent documentary,” he says. “We’re not working on a documentary now because I’m not commissioned to do so. But it is our intention.”

At present, the BBC doesn’t have plans to air “Jared Leto: Hollywood’s Dark Secret” in the U.S. It was offered to the U.S. market while in production, according to Radford, but not picked up for distribution.

“There was no legal reason it isn’t airing there,” Radford says. “In fact, the legal threat is much greater in the U.K. because the libel laws are tougher in the U.K. So there was no fear around putting it out in the U.S.”

McShane and Sartenaer have been heartened by the immediate response to the documentary. But they also hope the momentum will continue.

“I hope we keep seeing the reverberations and I hope the conversation doesn’t die,” McShane says. “Ten years ago at the height of #MeToo this would have really punched through. The general outrage has cooled a little bit when stories of this nature are published. But we hope the conversations stay strong because it’s really important people keep talking about this.”

[coeurdeverre82]

la times aug 16 1985