A judge has dismissed the majority of a child sexual assault lawsuit filed against Aerosmith‘s Steven Tyler by a woman who alleged he sexually assaulted her as a minor.
Julia Misley alleged that Tyler had “groomed” and “manipulated” her as a teenager decades ago, and claimed that he had admitted as much by referring to her as his “teen bride” in his memoir.
But in a ruling given on Tuesday (April 28), Los Angeles judge Patricia A. Young said that much of the decades-delayed lawsuit was barred by the statute of limitations in Massachusetts, where the pair lived throughout their three-year relationship.
However, Judge Young ruled that Misley can sue over an alleged sexual encounter during a brief trip to California – where time limits do not apply because of a special sexual abuse law – but dismissed accusations concerning the rest of their relationship.
“This is a massive win for Steven Tyler,” his lawyer, David Long-Daniels, said in a statement to Billboard. “Today, the Court has dismissed with prejudice 99.9 per cent of the claims against Mr. Tyler in this case. The court has decided that only one night, 50-plus years ago, out of a three year relationship is allowed to remain. We look forward to trying this case on August 31.”
Misley (formerly Holcomb) sued Tyler back in 2022, claiming she was the unnamed teenager he referred to in his memoir, claiming he had abused his fame to win control over her — which resulted in signing an agreement with her parents to take legal guardianship — and sexually assaulted her for three years starting in 1973, when she was just 16-years-old.
Tyler’s lawyers have characterised that period as a consensual “romantic relationship” between a man “in his mid-twenties at the time” and a woman “between the ages of 16 and 19”, and have argued that it was legal under the age of consent.
In the recent ruling, Judge Young said even if Misley’s claims were valid, the case had been filed far too late under that state’s statute of limitations. “Plaintiff’s suit was filed more than 35 years after the alleged acts and more than 35 years after she turned 18,” Judge Young wrote. “To be timely, this suit must have been filed within seven years.”
Those same time restrictions do not apply in California, given it’s Child Victims Act – a 2020 statute that opened a “lookback window” in which alleged victims could bring lawsuits that would otherwise be barred by the statute of limitations. The age of consent in the state was also 18 at the time of Tyler and Misley’s relationship.
“The parties travelled to California on one occasion and engaged in sexual relations here during that trip,” the judge wrote. “The age of consent in California is, and was at all relevant times, 18. Thus, it was against the law for plaintiff and defendant to engage in sexual relations with each other in California because plaintiff was legally incapable of consenting.”
The judge also dismissed accusations relating to conduct in Washington and Oregon, where the pair also briefly travelled, for the same statute-of-limitations reasons.
In his 1997 memoir, Tyler wrote of a teenage romance, not naming Holcomb but referencing the sexual relationship and guardianship. “She was 16, she knew how to nasty, and there wasn’t a hair on it,” he wrote, discussing how he became her guardian in order to be able to travel with her across state lines.
“With my bad self being 26 and she barely old enough to drive and sexy as hell, I just fell madly in love with her,” he wrote. “She was a cute skinny little tomboy dressed up as Little Bo Peep. She was my heart’s desire, my partner in crimes of passion.”
In a 2011 essay, Holcomb said of the alleged experience: “I became lost in a rock and roll culture. 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 could not believe he was even asking me to have an abortion at this stage. He spent over an hour pressing me to go ahead and have the abortion. He said that I was too young to have a baby and it would have brain damage because I had been in the fire and taken drugs.”