A second woman has come forward with allegations that Steven Tyler sexually assaulted her when she was a teenager, according to a new lawsuit filed in New York on Thursday.
Jeanne Bellino, a former child model who claimed to have met the singer in New York in 1975, claimed that in her suit that Tyler violently assaulted her twice the only day the had ever met. At the time, the singer was 27 years old.
The cause of the action listed in the suit is gender-motivated violence, and the plantiff is seeking unspecified damages to be determined by the court.
Bellino claims that she met Tyler after a friend had arranged for them to meet Aerosmith at the Warwick Hotel following a fashion show Bellino was working in Manhattan.
After she and her friend met Tyler and several other unnamed members of the entourage, the group walked down Sixth Avenue together. While walking, Bellino allegedly asked Tyler a question about a specific song lyric that frustrated Tyler, resulting him forcing her into a phone booth.
“While holding her captive, Tyler stuck his tongue down her throat, and put his hands upon her body, her breasts, her buttocks, and her genitals, moving and removing clothing and pinning her against the wall of the phone booth,” the suit alleges. “As Tyler was mauling and groping Plaintiff, he was humping her pretending to have sex with Plaintiff. Others stood by outside the phone booth laughing and as passersby watched and witnessed, nobody in the entourage intervened.”
Bellino further alleges in the suit that “Tyler’s penis was erect and it was evident to her as he rubbed it against her that he was not wearing underwear and wearing thin pants.” Eventually, the suit says, she freed herself and left the phone booth after raising up her knee and pulling on Tyler’s hair. She allegedly ran out of the phone booth “in shock and fear.”
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“Tyler’s bandmates and members of the entourage watched, laughed and did nothing to intercede,” the suit says. The suit alleges this was Bellino’s first sexual experience. Confused and in shock, the suit alleges, Bellino stayed with Tyler and the entourage because she claimed she was relying on her friend for transportation.
According to the suit, the group went back to the Warwick Hotel where Tyler allegedly kissed Bellino and grinded against her. In the suit, Bellino claims she resisted. Tyler then allegedly whispered into her ear he was “going to my room to do something quick,” and that he would call her to come to the room after.
Tyler had called down to the lobby and an associate allegedly told her she could go up to his room. Per the suit, Bellino says she was so afraid that she “couldn’t talk and was paralyzed.” She shook her head to the associate and “bolted toward the door,” where a doorman who she says saw the previous act “flung her” into a cab outside the hotel and yelled for the driver to go. Upon getting home, according to the suit, Bellino says she immediately told her sister all the allegations.
Since the alleged incident, Bellino “has suffered and will continue to suffer, great pain of mind and body, severe and permanent emotional distress, physical manifestations of emotional distress, embarrassment, humiliation, physical, personal & psychological injuries,” the suit said. In addition, the lawsuit said that she was hospitalized and medicated as a result of the incident and still needs medication “to cope with the sexual assault and has suffered long-term physical injury associated with the trauma” nearly five decades later.
The suit comes just a year after Julia Misley, formerly known as Julia Holcomb, filed a lawsuit in Los Angeles accusing Tyler of sexually assaulting her when she was also a teenager in the 1970s.
Misley claims that Tyler persuaded her parents to grant him guardianship over Misley, she alleged, so that she could travel across state lines with him without criminal prosecution. The woman also claims that she was pregnant with Tyler’s child back in 1975 at the age of 17, and that he persuaded her to get an abortion.
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“I want this action to expose an industry that protects celebrity offenders, to cleanse and hold accountable an industry that both exploited and allowed me to be exploited for years, along with so many other naïve and vulnerable kids and adults,” Misley said last year when her suit was filed. “Because I know that I am not the only one who suffered abuse in the music industry, I feel it is time for me to take this stand and bring this action, to speak up and stand in solidarity with the other survivors.”
