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Aerosmith lead singer Steven Tyler is being sued for alleging sexually assaulting a 17-year-old model in the mid-’70s.
The lawsuit, filed Thursday in New York, claims that Jeanne Bellino traveled with a friend to New York for a fashion show sometime in or around 1975. The friend had arranged for the two of them to meet Tyler and the rest of Aerosmith at the Warwick Hotel.
After the two friends met Tyler, who would have been about 27 at the time, they and the rest of the band went for a walk down Sixth Avenue, according to the lawsuit. At some point, Tyler allegedly forced Bellino into a phone booth, stuck his tongue down her throat and groped her, “moving and removing clothing and pinning her against the wall of the phone booth,” the suit states.
“As Tyler was mauling and groping Plaintiff, he was humping her pretending to have sex with Plaintiff,” the lawsuit reads. ”Others stood by outside the phone booth laughing and as passersby watched and witnessed, nobody in the entourage intervened.”
Bellino could tell Tyler was erect through his pants, according to the lawsuit. The suit says that Bellino pulled Tyler’s hair and raised her knee and Tyler left the booth, and Bellino ran out “in shock and fear.”
Bellino continued traveling to the Warwick Hotel with Tyler and the group because she didn’t have the “means or manner of transportation or the money to go home,” but she felt “helpless and panicked,” the suit says. At the hotel, Tyler again allegedly pinned Bellino against a wall, put his tongue down her throat and humped her to simulate sex.
The suit says Bellino escaped Tyler by doing the same thing she did in the phone booth. He allegedly whispered in her ear, “I’m going in my room to do something quick.”
According to the suit, Tyler left Bellino in the lobby, where she wept until Tyler called a lobby phone and told her to come to his room. She fled and took a cab home, the suit says, where she told her sister what had happened.
Earlier this year, another woman accused Tyler of sexually assaulting her when she was a minor. Julia Misley said in a lawsuit that Tyler “performed various acts of criminal sexual conduct” against her in the 1970s, when she was 16 and Tyler was 25.
In 1974, Misley’s mother granted Tyler legal guardianship of Misley. Misley became pregnant at 17. Misley’s lawsuit claims that Tyler told her to get an abortion or he would cut her off financially.
Tyler said the relationship was consensual and that he couldn’t be sued because he was Misley’s legal guardian at the time.
Representatives for Tyler did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Need help? Visit RAINN’s National Sexual Assault Online Hotline or the National Sexual Violence Resource Center’s website.