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With his blue eyes twinkling and rock star swagger on full display, the crowd watched as Jared Leto invited a teenage girl up on stage to swoon over him while he purred into his microphone with a guitar on his lap.

It was 2013 and Leto was already an established Hollywood player at the peak of his career and touring the world with his band, Thirty Seconds to Mars. 'And how old are you?' the actor and frontman murmured.

'17? Come here,' he motioned with his finger for the girl to join him on stage. 'Give me a hug first of all,' he told her, before pressing his body into hers.

When he finally let go and with the girl off stage, Leto turned to the audience at Emeryville, California and chuckled: 'That's what I like about high school girls. I keep getting older, they just stay the same age.'

Far from an isolated incident, plucking female fans from the crowd was a frequent move for the A-list star – one of the few to have had a long successful career as an Oscar-winning actor and a chart-topping musician.

But it all looks set to come crashing down for Leto, now 54, whose forthcoming British gigs in London and Manchester are hanging in the balance following a series of sensational allegations of sexual assault and misconduct against him.

Organisations involved in the shows have been locked in crisis talks this week, including music giants SJM and Live Nation who are said to be poised to scrap the shows altogether following the broadcast of the BBC's documentary this week, Jared Leto: Hollywood's Dark Secret, sources tell the Daily Mail.

Thirty Seconds to Mars had been set to perform to a crowd of 20,000 at London's O2 Arena on April 28 next year, followed by a show at Manchester's Co-op Live on April 29.

Oscar-winning actor, Jared Leto, has been accused of criminal sexual conduct by four women in a BBC documentary

The Thirty Seconds to Mars frontman performs at a concert in Vienna, Austria, in 2018

A portrait photograph of Leto for the American teen drama, My So-Called Life taken in the 1990s

'The organisers are planning to scrap the shows and held crisis talks the morning after the documentary [on Wednesday night],' said a music industry insider.

'Those involved in bringing the shows to the UK had no idea about the allegations Jared is facing and are ready to pull the plug on their dealings with him, though there have been murmurings of a 'dark' past for a while.'

In the unflinching documentary, which hears testimony from several alleged victims, a woman named Clara claimed that Leto had underage sex with her in California when she was 17.

Her age at the time would have made the alleged incident statutory rape in the US state, a fact she claims to have discussed with him and that he 'shrugged' off.

Isabel said she too was 17 when Leto sexually assaulted her in a motel bathroom.

Another woman, Alex, said she was 19 when he allegedly threatened to assault her at a hotel in London's Shoreditch after he'd invited her to a concert at the O2.

A woman called Etta claims to have been 16 when she received a series of sexually explicit phone calls from the actor, after which she was sent a non-disclosure agreement to sign, but refused.

When she was just 14, Taylor said she felt 'taken advantage of' when Leto made an inappropriate comment about her breasts in front of her mother during an autograph-signing session.

Leto and his co-star Claire Danes pictured on the set of the cult classic series

Pictured: Leto spreads his arms during a Thirty Seconds to Mars gig in Meico City in 2023

Leto in Tron: Ares alongside Greta Lee and Arturo Castro which was released in 2025

Leto denies every allegation and said in a statement: 'I have never sexually assaulted anyone in my entire life. These claims are absolutely and categorically false.'

It was against the backdrop of his music career that many of these alleged incidents took place, with Leto using his concerts as a hunting ground to procure young women, the documentary claims.

One anonymous former member of his staff told the programme that they had been tasked with bringing girls backstage to meet Leto, as well as booking whole rosters of models to attend his gigs.

Another said Leto was 'one of the worst people I've ever worked for in any way, shape or form.'

Music industry insiders say that organisers of the gigs are 'very, very keen' to avoid any controversy, citing the fact that Live Nation was forced to cancel this year's Wireless Festival following a backlash over its decision to book Kanye West as headliner for a fee of £11million.

West was refused entry to Britain following a series of antisemitic pro-Nazi statements.

Another industry source said everyone involved in the concerts was taking the allegations in the documentary 'very seriously' and 'weighing up all options'.

The band's European tour, also stopping in Dublin, Paris and Berlin, was promoted by Leto to his 11.3million Instagram followers.

The BBC documentary comes after a spate of allegations against Leto surfaced on the internet last year, prompted by a post made by Los Angeles DJ, Allie Teilz, who claimed to have been sexually assaulted by him when she was 17.

And there are more allegations in the offing, with several women poised to come forward, we have learned.

But, so far, they have had little impact on the career of man who won an Oscar in 2014 for playing an HIV-positive transgender woman in Dallas Buyers Club.

He appeared as Skeletor in this summer's He-Man film Masters Of The Universe, and last year had the starring role in the big-budget sci-fi Disney film Tron: Ares.

He is also a long-time brand ambassador for (and the face of) the Gucci Guilty perfume/fragrance line.

Apart from a four-year relationship with Cameron Diaz in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Leto has rarely had a public romance and is currently single.

As of this week, he is still represented by the powerhouse talent agency William Morris Endeavor, which appears to be standing by him.

He was active on his Instagram account a few days ago, sharing videos of himself shopping during a trip to Europe.

The strangely boring videos show Leto perusing supermarkets and telling the camera: 'When I'm on tour I love a grocery store, I love a health food store.' One had more than 50,000 likes.

In a world which sees celebrities 'cancelled' at the drop of a hat, he appears to have 'gotten away with it', one of his alleged victims told the documentary.

This reluctance to cancel the actor may be due to a protective layer of Hollywood power players with a vested interest in his success, one commentator on the programme suggested.

Or perhaps, as the documentary's director Alice McShane said, it's the combination of a general malaise over the #MeToo movement, 'cooled' outrage and the rise of the manosphere.

'He's also an incredibly good-looking man, and there is an element of 'pretty' privilege here,' she told Variety.

But it seems the tide is finally turning for Leto. The cancellation of arena concerts in Britain could just be the first move against a man who has been a Hollywood asset for more than 30 years.