Aerosmith Singer Steven Tyler: A lady claims she had a sexual relationship with Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler when she was 16. She is suing him in California under state legislation that has temporarily extended the statute of limitations for adults to sue for sexual abuse they experienced as children.
Julia Holcomb Misley, who has spoken out publicly about Tyler’s treatment of her as a teenager for years, filed a lawsuit in Los Angeles on Tuesday, alleging sexual abuse, sexual assault, and intentional infliction of distress over three years in the 1970s.
“Because I know I am not the only one who has experienced abuse in the music industry,” Misley, now 65, said in a statement. She stated the goal of her lawsuit was to “make the music business safer, expose the predators in it, and expose those forces in the industry that have both fostered and established a culture of permissiveness and self-protection of themselves and the celebrity offenders among them.”
While the lawsuit does not name Tyler, referring to him only as “Doe 1”, a “well-known musician and rock star,” the complaint quotes directly from Tyler’s 2011 memoir, Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?, in which the rock star describes his sexual relationship with a 16-year-old girl he picked up after a show in 1973, including convincing her parents to give him legal custody of her, “so I wouldn’t get arrested if I took her out of state.”
Misley’s lawyers named Tyler in a press release regarding the case. The singer’s representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Misley claims in her lawsuit that the rock musician approached her after a show in Portland in 1973 when she was just 16 and took her back to a hotel, where she informed him her age and discussed her terrible family background. According to the lawsuit, the musician “committed several acts of unlawful sexual conduct” before sending her home in a cab.
He soon followed up to give her a ticket to another event, saying “he would buy the plane ticket so that she could go separately from him since she was a child and could not travel with [him] across state lines.”
According to the lawsuit, he used his authority and influence as a significant rock singer to “groom, control, abuse, and sexually assault” the adolescent “over three years in several locations around the country,” including California.
According to the lawsuit, after her sophomore year of high school, the rock musician took the youngster to reside in Boston, then urged her not to return home to school but instead to travel with him on the road. He persuaded her mother to let him become her legal guardian, promising to “enroll her in school” and give better care than her mother could, but instead “continued to travel with, assault, and provide alcohol and narcotics” to her.
When Misley fell pregnant in 1975, the rock star became “both the father of Plaintiff’s unborn child and her legal guardian,” according to the lawsuit. He advised her not to seek appropriate prenatal care for fear of “getting in trouble” with doctors.
The lawsuit claims that when she was trapped inside a blazing flat and suffered from smoke inhalation, he coerced her into having an abortion, causing her years of grief.
Misley’s association with Tyler was extensively documented: “Julia Holcomb” was mentioned in a 1976 Rolling Stone biography of the rock star as a girlfriend who was always in his company. Misley was questioned about her experiences with Tyler in a 2021 documentary, Look Away, which focused on the abuse of young women in the music industry throughout the 1970s and 1980s.
Tyler’s 2011 biography devotes several pages to his joyful and sexually detailed recollections of a three-year romance with an anonymous teenage “groupie” he compares to Kate Hudson’s role in the film Almost Famous, stating that he was “so in love I almost took a teen bride.”
“With my bad self being 26 and she barely old enough to drive and attractive as hell, I just fell madly in love with her,” Tyler wrote.
In his book’s acknowledgments, a “Julia Halcomb” is mentioned. Misley accuses the rock singer of inflicting extra mental pain on her by vividly describing her in his memoirs, which caused additional trauma and intense feelings of guilt, embarrassment, and terror in her.
Misley “was in line at a grocery shop and spotted a picture of herself on a tabloid that referred to her as DEFENDANT DOE 1’s teen girlfriend. Plaintiff’s photo was captioned, ‘She was 15 when they fell in love. “He’s described her as having “more legs than a bucket of chicken,” according to the lawsuit. The same tabloid tale made specific reference to her coerced abortion.
Misley has since become an anti-abortion advocate in the United States, speaking and writing about her experience with Tyler in the context of anti-abortion efforts, including an interview with Fox News’s Tucker Carlson and a lengthy post on an anti-abortion advocacy website.
Her lawsuit and declarations emphasized the importance of her Catholic faith, and she stated that she believed safety within the Catholic church had improved due to legal efforts to combat child sexual abuse within the church.
Misley’s case was filed only days before the end of a three-year window provided by a 2019 California law that allowed adult survivors to pursue lawsuits involving decades-old child sexual assault.
According to the Los Angeles Times, the coming deadline has resulted in a wave of new lawsuits, including over 2,000 against the Catholic church.
Leave a Reply