NEW YORK – For the second time in the past year, Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler has been accused in a lawsuit of sexually assaulting a teenage girl in the 1970s, when his rock band were rising to fame.
In the new lawsuit, which was filed in New York on Thursday, Ms Jeanne Bellino accuses Tyler, now 75, of assaulting her twice in a day around 1975, when she was about 17 years old and a model living in Queens. He would have been in his late 20s at the time.
While she was visiting Manhattan for work, the lawsuit says, a friend arranged for them to meet Aerosmith.
As she was walking down the street with Tyler and his entourage, which included his bandmates, he forced her into a phone booth, where he aggressively kissed, groped and fondled her, according to the lawsuit.
“Others stood by outside the phone booth laughing and as passers-by watched and witnessed, nobody in the entourage intervened,” the lawsuit says.
Because Ms Bellino did not have money for transport home, according to the suit, she was taken to the Warwick Hotel with Tyler and his entourage.
The lawsuit says the singer pinned her against a wall in a public area and again assaulted her. Shortly after, a door attendant at the hotel helped her get into a cab and flee.
“He never even asked me what my name was,” she said of Tyler in a news conference on Thursday.
A representative for Aerosmith did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Ms Bellino’s lawsuit was filed under a New York City law that in March opened a two-year window for people to accuse someone of gender-motivated violence that would otherwise be beyond the statute of limitations.
In a lawsuit filed in Los Angeles in December 2022, Ms Julia Misley accused Tyler of using his status and power to “groom, manipulate, exploit” and “sexually assault” her over three years, starting in 1973, shortly after her 16th birthday.
She said in her lawsuit that she had met Tyler at an Aerosmith concert in Portland, Oregon, and that the musician had persuaded her mother to let him become her legal guardian.
Tyler wrote about sexual encounters with a teenager in his 2011 autobiography, Does The Noise In My Head Bother You?, saying he gained custody of a person who nearly became his “teen bride”. NYTIMES
