In 2005, a gossip column in the New York Post made a claim that most editors would have buried without ceremony: that actor Jared Leto was, in its own careful phrasing, "aggressively pursuing underage objects of desire" at a New York hotel. The item ran, was noted by a handful of readers, and then — as so many such warnings do — quietly disappeared into the archive. Nearly two decades later, the BBC documentary *Jared Leto: Hollywood's Dark Secret* has retrieved that warning and surrounded it with something far harder to dismiss. The film, directed by Jessica Sartenaer and released simultaneously on YouTube and the BBC to reach the widest possible audience, documents allegations stretching across what are described as decades of systematic misconduct against teenage girls.

The women who agreed to speak on camera allege sexual assault, threatened sexual assault, sexualised grooming, and statutory rape. Their accounts are corroborated by anonymous male former colleagues who claim to have witnessed, firsthand, the machinery that Leto reportedly constructed to procure underage girls from his concerts — a detail that transforms individual testimony into something that resembles a pattern. What makes the documentary particularly difficult to set aside is the accumulating evidence that the world had already been given opportunities to look. By 2018, actor Dylan Sprouse and director James Gunn were trading sardonic jokes about Leto's preferences on social media, as though the matter were an open secret rather than a crime.

Last year, journalist Elena Clavarino spoke to nine women for *Air Mail*, each of whom described encounters — explicit phone calls, indecent exposure, unwanted contact — that had occurred while they were minors. Leto's representatives issued a denial; his promotional schedule continued undisturbed.