After a series of hearings, a judge said Wednesday that the California-based claims in the child sex abuse lawsuit brought by Julia Misley against Aerosmith singer Steven Tyler would survive a challenge and proceed to trial. But in a partial victory for Tyler, the judge said she would toss out Misley’s separate claims tied to alleged abuse in Oregon, Washington, and Massachusetts.
“I have clearly signalled how I intend [to rule],” Los Angeles County Judge Patricia A. Young said from the bench, promising a written decision in the coming days. “I’m not moving the trial.”
The judge was so explicit about her views that Misley’s lead lawyer at one point suggested that his side could simply file an amended complaint limited to claims arising in California, in an effort to “streamline the process.” But the judge said she was more inclined to grant Tyler’s motion to terminate the non-California claims, which would bar them from being refiled. She asked for additional time, explaining that she needed to craft a tailored ruling that could narrow the lawsuit’s causes of action — sexual battery, sexual assault, and intentional infliction of emotional distress — without dismissing them altogether. Such rulings typically dismiss entire causes of action, not portions of them.
In her lawsuit initially filed in December 2022 and first reported by Rolling Stone, Misley claimed that Tyler sexually abused her for years beginning in 1973, when she was a high school sophomore, and he was 25. Tyler denied the claims and asked the court to dismiss the entire lawsuit, arguing that he lived with Misley in Boston for the vast majority of their relationship, where the age of consent was 16. He argued that Massachusetts law governed the relationship even when he traveled with Misley, born Julia Holcomb, in other states.
Misley and her lawyers successfully argued that Tyler had to respect the laws against child sex abuse in each state. They also argued Misley’s claims were revived when she filed her lawsuit in the final days of California’s Child Victims Act, a 2019 law that temporarily lifted the statute of limitations and gave survivors of childhood sexual abuse a three-year window to bring claims. The judge agreed with them in part, saying Misley’s claim that Tyler sexually abused her at a hotel in California was strong enough to proceed.
“I’m completely on board with that. Even if it’s legal in Massachusetts, California has an interest in saying, ‘OK, that’s fine, but it’s illegal here. Don’t come within our borders and do it here,’” Judge Young said at Dec. 18 hearing on the matter. “California absolutely has an interest in people coming into our state, committing a crime here, such as childhood sexual abuse, and then leaving again.” But, in a loss for Misley, the judge said the statutes of limitations in the other states had run and were not revived by the California legislation.
Misley claimed in her lawsuit that Tyler invited her backstage when they first met in Portland in 1973, a month after her sixteenth birthday. She said he had sex with her that night. They had sex again in Seattle, at the next stop on his concert tour, she claimed. The age of consent in Oregon and Washington at the time was 18.
Misley further claimed Tyler brought her to California for an awards show and dragged her naked onto an elevator so he could have sex with her in a pool. She alleged she was groomed into a three-year relationship in which Tyler became her legal guardian.
“I was treated like a sex toy. I was treated like a pet, like a thing, and it was humiliating,” she said in deposition testimony excerpted in a court filing. Misley alleged that strangers saw her naked during the “degrading experience,” and the incident was part of her claim for emotional distress damages.
In his 2011 memoir, Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?, Tyler recalled the guardianship arrangement, noting their age difference. “I was so in love, I almost took a teen bride. I went and slept at her parents’ house for a couple of nights, and her parents fell in love with me, signed papers over for me to have custody, so I wouldn’t get arrested if I took her out of state,” he wrote.
Tyler recounted having sex with Misley on a red-eye flight from Los Angeles to Boston. He also described the incident that Misley says took place at the Beverly Hills hotel. He wrote that he and Misley were naked in the hotel elevator after having sex in a hot tub, and “when the doors opened, there was an Amish family staring at us like figures in an oil painting.”
In his initial answer to Misley’s lawsuit in 2023, Tyler said Misley’s claims were barred in part “because of immunity to defendant as caretaker/guardian.” One legal expert told Rolling Stone that defense was “fucking insane.” Tyler later abandoned it. According to one of Misley’s filings, Tyler “now testifies that he does not recall the guardianship.”
In her own public comments leading up to her lawsuit, Misley described her family trauma leading up to her relationship with Tyler. She described feeling abandoned by her parents and becoming “lost in a rock & roll culture.” Holcomb further alleged she was pregnant in 1975 at 17 years old, but that Tyler insisted she terminate the pregnancy following an apartment fire. She left Tyler in 1977 and eventually married. She went on to have seven children and write about the abortion on the far-right, anti-abortion website Lifesitenews.
