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A woman who says she had a sexual relationship with Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler when she was 16 is suing him in California, under a state law that has temporarily extended the statute of limitations for adults to take legal action on sexual abuse they suffered as children.
Julia Holcomb Misley, who has spoken out publicly for years about Tyler’s treatment of her as a teenager, filed a lawsuit in Los Angeles on Tuesday alleging sexual battery, sexual assault and intentional infliction of distress during a three-year period in the 1970s.
“Because I know that I am not the only one who suffered abuse in the music industry, I feel it is time for me to take this stand,” Misley, now 65, said in a statement. She said the goal of her lawsuit was to “make the music industry safer, expose the predators in it, and expose those forces in the industry that have both enabled and created 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”.
However, Misley’s lawyers named Tyler in a press release about the case. Representatives for the singer did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In the lawsuit, Misley says that the rock star met her after a concert in Portland in 1973, when she had just turned 16, and that he took her back to a hotel, where she told him her age and described her troubled family background. The musician “performed various acts of criminal sexual conduct”, and then sent her home in a taxi, according to the lawsuit.
