July 30, 2026

Jared Leto has been accused of serious sexual misconduct by several women in a new BBC documentary. Four women allege that he committed sexual offenses against them when they were teenagers, during incidents said to have occurred between 2002 and 2016. The wider documentary reportedly includes accounts from ten women. Leto has denied the allegations absolutely, stating that he has never sexually assaulted anyone. The BBC says it corroborated the women’s accounts; the Associated Press was unable to verify them independently. These remain allegations, not findings of guilt.

This follows an Air Mail investigation published in June 2025, in which nine women accused Leto of various forms of sexual impropriety, including conduct that some said began while they were underage. His representatives denied those allegations as well.

Those are the facts presently available to me. Now comes the strange part: I do not care about Jared Leto.

I do not mean that I am indifferent to women who say they were assaulted, exploited or frightened. Their experiences matter, and the distinction is essential. I mean that Jared Leto himself occupies almost no territory in my imagination. To me he has always seemed like an irrelevant, late-period Hollywood actor who does not so much perform as arrange his face before a camera while an expensive melodrama takes place around it. He belongs to that peculiar class of celebrity whose fame arrives in advance of any reason I might have for feeling something about him.

Yet here he is in my morning.

This is one of the characteristic experiences of the twenty-first century. A person I never invited into my consciousness undergoes a public crisis, and the machinery of American media immediately demands that I manufacture an emotional position. I am expected to recognize the face, remember the films, review the accusations, experience the appropriate mixture of horror and fascination, and then contribute my little thimbleful of opinion to the worldwide sewage-treatment plant of discourse.

Meanwhile, I have an actual life.

This morning I used artificial intelligence to respond.

That fact interests me more than Jared Leto does.

I did not devote an hour of my life to studying his career. I did not sit through a montage of his performances, inspect his facial expressions or cultivate an intimate disgust for him. I asked a machine to gather the current reporting, distinguish accusations from established facts and help me construct this public statement. The process insulated me from the degrading sensation that Hollywood had successfully seized my attention again.

AI became an airlock between my inner life and the celebrity-industrial atmosphere.

There is something wonderfully cold about this. Hollywood sends out another cloud of publicity, scandal, accusation, denial and crisis management; I send out a technological antibody. The system produces an actor I barely recognize and demands a response. Another system produces the response for me. The exchange can occur almost automatically while the human being—me—retains his attention for matters that possess actual inward meaning.

Perhaps this is one legitimate function of artificial intelligence: not to think instead of us, but to perform the compulsory clerical labor imposed upon us by an increasingly impersonal culture. It can summarize what we are socially expected to know without requiring us to surrender our whole nervous system to knowing it.

There is, however, an uncomfortable symmetry here. Hollywood turns human experience into content, and AI can do the same. The women making these allegations must not disappear into my clever meditation on media saturation. Their accounts concern possible acts of real violence and exploitation. They are not symbols placed here to improve my argument. Using technology to preserve my attention does not excuse me from maintaining elementary moral clarity.

The challenge is to refuse both forms of manipulation: the celebrity machine’s demand for emotional enthrallment and the algorithm’s temptation to make every human event weightless.

I can say that these women deserve to be heard and their allegations investigated seriously without pretending that Jared Leto is a central character in my psychic universe. I can recognize the gravity of what has been alleged without joining another fandom, even an inverted fandom organized around hatred. Loathing a celebrity can consume exactly as much attention as worshipping one.

[Human note: I hadn’t thought of this before, this is really fascinating!]

So this post is not my admission into the Jared Leto story. It is my notice of departure.

I have registered the allegations. I have registered his denial. I have done what a responsible person can do from a distance: distinguish reports from conclusions, refuse reflexive dismissal and decline to convert uncertainty into gossip.

Now the little parcel of Hollywood unpleasantness can continue down the conveyor belt without me.

The machine has answered the machine.

I am returning to my morning.