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This story has been updated to include a statement from Jared Leto.

Multiple women accuse Thirty Seconds To Mars frontman and Oscar-winning actor Jared Leto of sexual misconduct in a new BBC documentary.

The programme, Jared Leto: Hollywood’s Dark Secret, airs tonight (July 29) at 9pm on BBC Three and 10:45 on BBC One. It reports that the alleged offences took place between 2002 and 2016, when the accusers were in their teens and Leto was in his 30s and 40s.

One woman, using the pseudonym Isabel, claims that the actor/musician sexually assaulted her in a motel bathroom in 2002, when she was 17 and he was in his early 30s.

“I don’t think there was many words exchanged and he opened the shower curtain and started kissing me,” she claims. She says that he then grabbed her hand and used it to masturbate himself.

Another woman, Alex, says he threatened her with sexual assault when they were alone in a London hotel room in 2013, when she was 19 and he was 41. She claims she “felt the need” to pretend that she was 17 to protect herself, to which Leto allegedly answered: “Age is just a number, and anyway, we’re in Europe.”

She adds that, when she asked if she could sleep on the room’s chaise longue, he told her, if she did, she’d wake up “with a dick in her ass”.

A third accuser, Clara, alleges that she had sex with Leto at his California home when she was 17 and he was 34, which constitutes statutory rape. “He told me, ‘I would like you to call me daddy.’ And it was either pretend to be a little girl or ‘my little girl’,” she tells the BBC.

When Clara attempted to start a conversation about the age of consent in California being 18, Leto allegedly “shrugged it off, like it wasn’t a huge concern for him”. It was the first of three or four visits to his home, according to Clara.

A fourth woman, Taylor, says that, when she was attending a signing with her mother aged 14, Leto made a lewd comment about her breasts. “He chose to sign my shirt across my breasts, and he told me, ‘You have a nice rack,’” she claims.

He then allegedly told a security guard to take Taylor backstage. After Taylor’s mother confronted Leto, “he looked at her and said, ‘It’s still a nice rack,’” the accuser says.

Other women allege that they received often sexual messages and phonecalls from Leto when they were younger. One, using the pseudonym Etta, says that she met Leto when she was 16, when she walked into a modelling agency in Los Angeles with her mother in 2014.

Etta claims that Leto asked for her email address and that the nature of their online conversations quickly turned sexual. He allegedly asked “Are you a virgin? Do you have any kinks?” and “did at least once mention him and I having sex at some point”.

She adds that she was presented with a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) in 2016 but refused to sign it. The BBC says it has seen the NDA, as well as multiple text messages that corroborate Etta’s claims.

The BBC has made repeated attempts to contact Leto regarding the allegations, but he has not responded.

Leto rose to prominence as an actor in the 1990s, appearing in Fight Club (1999), Girl, Interrupted (1999) and American Psycho (2000). His performance as a drug addict in 2000’s Requiem For A Dream was critically acclaimed and is regarded as his breakout role. For his performance as a trans woman in Dallas Buyers Club (2013), he won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.

His band Thirty Seconds To Mars have won multiple awards and gone Platinum in several countries. Their albums Love, Lust, Faith And Dreams (2013) and America (2018) were top-10 hits in the US.

Leto was accused of sexual misconduct by nine women in an article published by Air Mail last year. One woman accused Leto of being completely naked in front of her when she was 17 and masturbating in front of her when she was 18. A representative of Leto “expressly denied” the accusations.

Update: Jared Leto has responded to the accusations, telling the Associated Press, “I have never sexually assaulted anyone in my entire life. These claims are absolutely and categorically false.”

• How to watch BBC iPlayer from anywhere: Stream music documentaries, Glastonbury festival and more

Peter Gabriel‘s latest single, the nine-minute epic-sounding One By One, reintroduces his Mozo character to his modern-day i/o and o\i world.

Mozo is a recurring, fictional outsider character that Gabriel used in early songs such as Here Comes The Flood and Down The Dolce Vita from his 1977 debut album and On The Air and Exposure from 1978’s Peter Gabriel 2/Scratch. Gabriel returned to the character on 1986’s So, with both Red Rain and That Voice Again.

“This is another song that comes out of the brain show that I am working on and the character has been effectively torn apart and is trying to reassemble himself one piece at a time. I needed a character for the story and I’d always wanted to do a little more with Mozo, who I had introduced many years back, and I thought, well, let’s give him another blast here. He’s been brought back from the dead.

“What was interesting for me about Mozo was that he was not fully of the world and not fully outside it. For the original second album narrative, he was found on this waste tip, and there was a reference to alchemy, and how you only really get the opportunity to create gold out of the lowest material; shit. In Japanese culture, they also have kintsugi (kin: gold, tsugi: repair) where a broken cup is repaired with gold or precious metals and the repaired cup with its faults showing ends up more valuable than the original. It’s a beautiful symbol for humanity, because we’re remarkably easy to break and trying to reassemble self, psyche and sanity, is really the journey of the song.

“There are two or three story songs on the record, and I actually like the length of time they occupy, and I like the fact that you have to stay in it for the ride to understand the story. It’s like when you arrive in some hut in the woods, and it takes a while just to settle in and get yourself tuned in to the pace of that place. I wanted a bit of that in the song. If people are on for the full ride, they’re going to take it through to the end. It’s a long journey, but I think its place in the show, which is percolating in my head, it’ll be towards the end, if not the end.”

As he did with 2023’s i/o album, Gabriel is releasing a new track every full moon. One By One is the eighth track he’s released ahead of his upcoming album, o\i, which is due out later this year.

He’s also highlighting the work of an artist he admires with every release. For One By One, it’s Pieces by Canadian sculptor David Altmejd, which you can see below. Gabriel had discovered David Altmejd’s work through his 2022 piece, 9x9x9, and then asked him to create a new work in response to the music.

“One of the things I loved about what David does is that he seems to get these images and ideas and then cuts them up and reassembles them,” says Gabriel. “Almost like moments of time or maybe like an old-fashioned flick book where you get just an incremental movement from one image to the other. It looked like David had a similar direction in that he’s taking the same thing and cutting it up and reassembling it. That worked perfectly for this song and I was excited that David was happy to be part of this project.”

“One By One evokes a kind of spiritual evolution by piecing together the broken parts of oneself,” adds Altmejd himself. “This resonates deeply with me because I understand my sculptures as being made the same way. They start by forming themselves in matter, then they are destroyed, and finally reassembled in a way that makes them transcend materiality.”