Steven Tyler performing live in 2017. Photo Credit: Abog
74-year-old Steven Tyler is reportedly facing a sexual assault lawsuit for allegedly abusing a minor nearly half a century ago.
Outlets including Rolling Stone just recently reported on the complaint against Steven Tyler, which was filed in Los Angeles by one Julia Holcomb. Though Tyler isn’t directly named as a defendant – the case is currently being levied against “Defendant Doe 1 and Does 2 through 50,” per the mentioned report – Holcomb has long spoken of the alleged abuse that the Aerosmith frontman is said to have inflicted upon her.
“I met Steven when I was 16 years old, at a concert,” Holcomb communicated in one interview, with Steven Tyler having been about 26 years old at the time of the initial meeting. “We began a relationship that lasted about three years. I was underage, and he became my legal guardian.
“I lived with him in Boston, and I traveled with him on tour. At first I didn’t think that it would be a long-term relationship. I just knew that I cared a great deal for him. I thought he was about the best thing that had ever happened to me. I idolized him,” proceeded Holcomb.
Predictably, given the present lawsuit and the aforesaid public comments from Holcomb, the union ultimately fell apart – but not before Tyler allegedly asked his decidedly young partner, who dropped out of high school, to marry him.
“After we had been together for some months,” said Holcomb, “he asked me if I was open to the idea of having a family, a child. I was on the birth-control pill at the time, but he said he wanted a family, and he wondered if I wanted a child. … I told him absolutely I wanted a child.
“We were in a hotel, and he threw my birth-control pills off the balcony. And within about a year, I became pregnant. I remember coming to him and telling him I was really excited. I wanted my baby so much, and I thought – I couldn’t wait to tell him. And he also seemed happy when I first told him that I was pregnant. And within a few months, he asked me to marry him.”
However, Tyler’s parents “expressed concern” about these plans and “were not as supportive as I had hoped,” which, per Holcomb’s account of the “trainwreck,” set in motion the deterioration of the ill-advised relationship.
“It seemed that he [Tyler] had a change of heart. He didn’t want to get married any longer, and I was very angry, and I was not shy about telling him that I felt that he had really betrayed my trust. We returned to Boston, where we had our apartment, and we were just kind of in limbo. I didn’t really know how it was all going to work out. I just thought, ‘I’ll have the baby, and we’ll just live together.’
“He left on tour, and he decided to leave me there at the apartment because I was about five months pregnant. I don’t know for sure how far along I was because I had not seen a doctor. … I had no education, I dropped out of high school, I didn’t have a driver’s license, I couldn’t go anywhere, I had no money of my own, and I had had no pre-natal care.”
Tyler is said to have called to check in during evenings, but “after about two weeks the food in the apartment was running low,” at which point the vocalist purportedly enlisted early Aerosmith member (and childhood friend) Ray Tabano to take her grocery shopping.
“I was so excited because I had been cooped up in that apartment for two weeks, and I was gonna get to get out of the house. I sat there by the window just waiting for Ray to come. He arrived, I let him in, and I don’t remember what happened after that. But I woke up in a fire.
“Ray was gone, and the apartment was on fire – there was smoke everywhere. I could not see anything but smoke. I knew that I had to get out of there quickly because I couldn’t breathe. … I made my way to the front door, and it was locked. There were three locks on that door; all three of them were locked. And the bar lock was jammed.”
With flames and smoke having rendered the other exits inaccessible, according to Holcomb, she “crawled into the fireplace,” which is ostensibly where the responding firefighters found her.
“When I woke up in the hospital, I had smoke inhalation, and the doctors had thought I wouldn’t survive because they had checked my oxygen levels and they were very low. They said if I lived, I would have brain damage. But I was fine; I woke up, I was able to answer their questions.
“And I was in the hospital for several days, and Steven came to me and he said that I needed to have an abortion. That was where I was when he introduced the idea of my abortion. … His words to me were that I had to have the abortion right now or the doctors wouldn’t do it because I was so far along. He wanted me to have that abortion before I left the hospital.
“I just kept saying ‘no’ until he placed the decision between him and the baby – that I was going to have to go home if I decided to keep my baby. I just couldn’t imagine my life without him [Tyler],” continued Holcomb.
Holcomb also described the abortion in graphic detail, further claiming that Tyler had been “snorting cocaine” by her side while it was taking place. Though there are two sides to every story, it goes without saying that the above-described catastrophe (and the alleged abuse therein) remains front of mind for Holcomb some five decades later.
The alleged victim’s complaint specifically accuses Tyler of sexual assault, sexual battery, and intentional infliction of emotional distress, per Rolling Stone, and maintains that his memoir depicts their time together as a “romantic, loving relationship” as opposed to an abusive ordeal.
Meanwhile, Holcomb claims that she was subjected to “involuntary infamy” with the publishing of Tyler’s memoir, which contains an acknowledgement for (among a multitude of others) a “Julia Halcomb.”
“But toward the end things started to derail. We got so messed up on drugs and were so out of control that the dark side started taking over,” Tyler wrote in his autobiography, readily acknowledging that the alleged victim’s parents (rather carelessly) “signed papers over for me to have custody, so I wouldn’t get arrested if I took her out of state.”
“And while I was on the road, our apartment almost burned down and she wound up in the hospital with smoke inhalation,” reads Tyler’s version of events, which were published after Aerosmith’s autobiography described the topic in far different terms. “I went to see her in the hospital and that’s when reality slapped me in the face. When you love somebody, set them free. And I just had to let her go. She went back to her parents, but I can still see her in the songs we sang together.”