A woman who allegedly had a sexual relationship with Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler when she was a teen in the 1970s has recently filed a lawsuit for sexual assault, sexual battery, and intentional infliction of emotional distress. Her name is Julia Holcomb, and the lawsuit does not identify Tyler by name, but the allegations align with comments made by the rocker in his 2011 memoir Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?
According to Rolling stone, Julia Holcomb filed the lawsuit just days before the Dec. 31 deadline for California’s Child Victims Act, which lifted the statute of limitations on reporting childhood sexual abuse crimes.
Holcomb alleges that in 1973, she attended an Aerosmith concert and was taken back to Tyler’s hotel room where she was “powerless to resist” his “power, fame, and substantial financial ability.” She claims that their relationship continued after Tyler convinced her mother to grant guardianship over her when she was 16 years old, which provided a means for the star to have a sexual relationship with her allegedly.
In his 2011 memoir, Tyler wrote he “almost took a teen bride” because “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.”
When Holcomb became pregnant in 1975, Tyler allegedly convinced her to obtain an abortion, telling her that a recent apartment fire would have harmed the baby due to smoke inhalation and a lack of oxygen. She eventually left Tyler and returned home to Portland after the abortion, and has since shared her experience on the “far-right, anti-abortion website Lifesitenews” and in the 2021 documentary Look Away.
“I became lost in a rock and roll culture,” Holcomb wrote in 2011, per Lifesitenews “In Steven’s world it was sex, drugs, and rock and roll, but it seemed no less chaotic than the world I left behind. I didn’t know it yet, but I would barely make it out alive.”
“I want this action to expose an industry that protects celebrity offenders, to cleanse and hold accountable an industry that both exploited and allowed me to be exploited for years, along with so many other naïve and vulnerable kids and adults,” Holcomb said in a statement.
Tyler’s representative has not returned a request for comment, and the suit will be put to the test if it goes to trial.
