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A second woman has alleged that Steven Tyler sexually abused her when she was a teenager, according to a lawsuit filed Thursday in New York.
Jeanne Bellino, a former child model who claimed to have met Tyler in New York in the summer of 1975 when she was 17, claimed in the lawsuit that Tyler, then about 27, met her on the only day they met were violently attacked twice. The cause of action listed in the lawsuit is gender-based violence, and the plaintiff is seeking unspecified damages to be determined by the court.
Bellino claims she met Tyler after a friend arranged to meet Aerosmith at the Warwick Hotel following a fashion show Bellino was working on in Manhattan. After meeting Tyler and several unnamed members of his entourage, Bellino and her friend all walked down Sixth Avenue together. While leaving, Bellino claims she asked Tyler a question about a song lyric, which frustrated Tyler and led to him forcing her into a phone booth.
“While holding her captive, Tyler stuck his tongue down her throat and placed his hands on her body, breasts, buttocks and genitals, moved and removed her clothing, and pushed her against the wall of the phone booth,” the suit alleges . “While Tyler abused and groped Plaintiff, he fucked her and pretended to have sex with Plaintiff. Others stood laughing in front of the telephone booth, and while passers-by watched and witnessed, no one in the entourage intervened.”
Bellino further claims in the lawsuit that “Tyler’s penis was erect and she realized as he rubbed it against her that he was wearing no underwear and thin pants.” Eventually, the lawsuit states, she freed herself and left phone booth after lifting her knee and pulling Tyler’s hair. She allegedly ran out of the phone booth “shocked and frightened.”
“Tyler’s bandmates and entourage members watched, laughed and did nothing to intervene,” the lawsuit says. The lawsuit alleges that this was Bellino’s first sexual experience. Confused and shocked, the lawsuit says, Bellino stayed with Tyler and the entourage, claiming she was dependent on her friend for transportation. (An attorney for Tyler and a representative for the band did not immediately respond to requests for comment.)
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According to the lawsuit, the group went back to the Warwick Hotel where, again near the hotel’s bar area, Tyler allegedly forcibly kissed Bellino and rubbed himself against her. Here too, the lawsuit says, Bellino resisted. Tyler then allegedly whispered in her ear that he was “going into my room to do something quick” and that he would call for her to come into the room.
While Bellino claimed she was sobbing and shaking, Tyler eventually called the lobby and a staff member allegedly told her she could go to his room. The lawsuit says Bellino was so scared that she “couldn’t speak and was paralyzed.” She shook her head at the staff member and “stormed for the door” where a doorman, who she said had seen the previous act, “threw” her into a taxi outside the hotel and shouted at the driver to leave. According to the lawsuit, when Bellino got home, she said she immediately told her sister all the allegations.
Since the alleged incident, Bellino has “suffered and will continue to suffer great mental and physical pain, severe and lasting emotional distress, physical manifestations of emotional distress, embarrassment, humiliation, physical, personal and psychological injury,” the lawsuit states. She added that she was hospitalized and medicated as a result of the incident and, nearly five decades later, still requires medication “to cope with the sexual assault and has suffered long-term physical injuries related to the trauma.” .
The lawsuit comes nearly a year after Julia Misley, formerly known as Julia Holcomb, filed a lawsuit in Los Angeles accusing Tyler of sexually abusing her as a teenager in the 1970s. Misley alleged in her lawsuit that Tyler allegedly began assaulting her in 1973 when she was 16 years old. Tyler persuaded her parents to give him guardianship of Misley so that she could travel with him across state lines without facing criminal charges. She further claimed that she was pregnant with Tyler’s child in 1975, when she was 17, and that he persuaded her to have an abortion after she went to the hospital following a house fire.
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Tyler denied Misley’s allegations but did not deny having sex with her. In May, he filed an anti-SLAPP motion alleging that Misley consented to the sexual relationship and that her claims were barred “because of defendant’s immunity as conservator/guardian.” A lawyer who spoke to Rolling Stone at the time of filing called the immunity response “fucking crazy.”
“I want this action to expose an industry that protects high-profile offenders, to clean up and hold accountable an industry that has exploited and exploited me and so many other naive and vulnerable children and adults for years,” Misley said in her lawsuit last year was submitted. “Knowing that I am not the only one who has been mistreated in the music industry, it is time for me to speak up and take action, to speak out and stand in solidarity with other survivors.”