Lawsuit Accuses Steven Tyler Of Sexual Assaulting A Minor Decades Ago

JC Olivera/Getty Images

Lawsuit Accuses Steven Tyler Of Sexual Assaulting A Minor Decades Ago

JC Olivera/Getty Images

In a new lawsuit, a woman named Julia Holcomb has accused Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler of sexually assaulting her in the ’70s, when she was a minor. Holcomb has filed that lawsuit in California in the final days of the Child Victims Act, a 2019 law that voided the statute of limitations, giving a three-year window for victims of child sexual abuse. (The deadline for the Child Victims Act is tomorrow.) The lawsuit accuses Tyler of sexual assault, sexual battery, and intentional infliction of emotional distress.

As Rolling Stone reports, Julia Holcomb’s lawsuit doesn’t specifically name Steven Tyler as its defendant. Instead, it names Does 1 through 50, though it also quotes from Tyler’s memoir. The suit claims that Steven Tyler convinced her mother to make Steven Tyler her legal guardian when she was 16 years old. Holcomb says that she met Tyler at a Portland Aerosmith concert in 1973, when she was 16 and he was 25, and that they were together for about three years. Holcomb claims that Tyler asked about her age on the first night they met and that he performed sexual activities on her and bought her a plane ticket to the next Aerosmith show so that he wouldn’t be legally liable for taking a minor across state lines.

In her lawsuit, Julia Holcomb says that Steven Tyler talked her mother into granting him guardianship by 1974. Tyler allegedly told Holcomb’s mother that she’d get better support with him than she would at home, promising to put her in school and give her medical care. According to the lawsuit, Tyler “did not meaningfully follow through on these promises and instead continued to travel with, assault and provide alcohol and drugs to Plaintiff.” The lawsuit also claims that Tyler pressured Holcomb into having an abortion when she was 17, threatening to cut her off if she had the baby.

Julia Holcomb claims that Steven Tyler revived the pain of her buried memories when he wrote about her in his 2012 memoir Does The Noise In My Head Bother You? Stories in Tyler’s book do seem to line up with Halcomb’s lawsuit. In his book, without identifying the girl, Tyler writes that he “almost took a teen bride” and that “her parents fell in love with me, signed a paper over for me to have custody, so I wouldn’t get arrested if I took her out of state. I took her on tour with me.” He also writes lasciviously about her in the book, and that Rolling Stone article has some truly gross quotes. The acknowledgments of Tyler’s book reportedly include “Julia Halcomb,” which is presumably a misspelling of Holcomb’s name; Holcomb claim that this further hurt her anonymity.

After her experience with Steven Tyler, Julia Holcomb apparently got married and converted to Catholicism. She’s previously made her allegations in interviews with various right-wing and anti-abortion media outlets and in Look Away, a 2021 documentary about sexual abuse in the world of rock music. You can read the full Rolling Stone story here.

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