James Franco Skips Award Ceremony After Sexual Misconduct Accusations

He won a Best Actor Critics' Choice Award for his "Disaster Artist" performance.
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James Franco is lying low.

Facing sexual abuse accusations from multiple women, the actor skipped the Critics’ Choice Awards Thursday night, where he won a Best Actor accolade for his work in “The Disaster Artist.”

His award was not presented in the televised ceremony, but in an online-only segment prior to the main event in Santa Monica, California.

After Franco was spotted at Sunday’s Golden Globes wearing a Time’s Up pin ― for the campaign aimed at combating sexual misconduct following the #MeToo movement ― women called him out over social media for apparent hypocrisy. He won a Best Actor award for the same film at the Globes.

In a tweet, actress Violet Paley said Franco once attempted to force her to perform oral sex in a car. Actress Sarah Tither-Kaplan suggested Franco’s practice of encouraging women to perform fully nude was “exploitative,” and Ally Sheedy also appeared to suggest he had something to do with why she “left the film/tv business.”

In response, The New York Times canceled an event it had scheduled with the actor.

Franco denied wrongdoing in a Tuesday night appearance on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.”

“The things that I heard that were on Twitter are not accurate,” he said, “but I completely support people coming out and being able to have a voice because they didn’t have a voice for so long.” The actor added that if he has “done something wrong,” he will “fix it.”

But his accusers didn’t go silent. Five women, including Paley and Tither-Kaplan, then shared troubling experiences with Franco in an explosive Los Angeles Times article published early Thursday. Four of the women were students in Franco’s acting classes and one is a filmmaker who considered him a mentor. Together they detailed a picture of Franco attempting to coerce them into performing sexually explicit scenes.

An unnamed source “close to the situation” told People the actor is “in a really bad place” and only speaking to a “select” group of people.

“For now, he’s just hiding out,” the source said.

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