The woman suing Steven Tyler with claims the Aerosmith singer sexually abused her in the Seventies when she was 16, and he was in his mid-20s, is firing back at his latest attempt to dismiss her lawsuit ahead of a looming trial.
In new court filings obtained by Rolling Stone, Julia Misley says the court must deny Tyler’s bid to thwart her lawsuit before their Oct. 1 trial date because it has a “fatal” flaw. She claims Tyler — a California resident who allegedly sexually assaulted her in Oregon, Washington, Massachusetts, and at the Beverly Hills Hotel in California when she was still a minor — waited too long to claim that he can’t be sued under California’s Child Victims Act because he and Misley lived together in Boston for most of their relationship, and the Massachusetts age of consent is 16 years old.
Misley argues Tyler “waived” that purported defense, which she describes as a “choice of law and application” defense, by not raising it in his prior answers to her complaint. Beyond that, “public policy doesn’t support rewarding someone who intentionally brought a child to a state with less protection,” she and her lawyers add in their new filing ahead of an Aug. 28 hearing on the dismissal motion, known as a motion for summary judgment.
According to Misley, Tyler also failed to “properly plead” the statutes of limitations of the other states outside California as a defense. She argues that her allegations of assaults “in multiple states” were known to Tyler when he filed his amended answer on April 4, 2025, but he never listed the exact “section numbers” of the statutes in Oregon, Washington, or Massachusetts he’s now invoking. “Therefore, he cannot raise these issues now, and the court should deny the motion,” the filing states.
Reached by phone Thursday, Tyler’s lawyer said the defense hasn’t forfeited anything. “It’s there. We challenged the statute of limitations,” attorney David Long-Daniels tells Rolling Stone. According to Long-Daniels, Tyler’s fifth affirmative defense listed in the April answer, which claims the lawsuit is barred by “the applicable statute of limitations,” is enough to cover all their pending arguments.
In his motion for summary judgment, Tyler, 77, essentially asked the court to toss Misley’s lawsuit altogether because, according to him, she’s a non-California resident wrongly invoking California’s childhood sexual assault revival statute to sue over a “consensual relationship” that took place while they were living together legally in Massachusetts. He said that if the court rejects that argument, at the very least, the case should be limited to alleged conduct in California, because any possible claims in the other states have expired.
In her lawsuit initially filed in December 2022 and first reported by Rolling Stone, Misley alleged Tyler sexually assaulted her for the first time shortly after her 16th birthday in 1973. She said he invited her backstage at a concert in Portland, Oregon, had sex with her that night, and groomed her to engage in a three-year relationship in which he became her legal guardian. She claimed that at one point during the relationship, while she was still a minor, pregnant, and staying with Tyler at the Beverly Hills Hotel, the musician dragged her onto an elevator while she was “stark naked” so he could have sex with her in a pool.
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“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 her latest filing. Misley alleged people saw her naked during the “degrading experience,” and the incident is part of her claim for emotional distress damages.
Tyler has denied any wrongdoing, claiming he and Misley were in a consensual, loving relationship. He described the relationship in his 2011 memoir, Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?, recalling the guardianship arrangement and 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 the 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 called that defense “fucking insane” in a comment to Rolling Stone.
Tyler has since abandoned that defense. According to Misley’s filing this week, Tyler “now testifies that he does not recall the guardianship.”
A hearing on Tyler’s motion for summary judgment is set for Aug. 28 in Inglewood, California. In her opposition, Misley and her lawyers argue that her case qualifies for the California revival statute, and Tyler’s alleged actions throughout their relationship should be fair game. She says it would be “impossible” to separate her claims into “four cases in four states.”
“To split plaintiff’s claims by state defies public policy and provides a windfall to divide the damages Defendant caused when he engaged a child in sexual conduct,” her new filing reads. “The damages here are indivisible, and defendant cites no authority as to how damages could be apportioned.” She says California “has great interest in applying its law to deter the sex torts a resident committed upon a child.”
Long-Daniels said if the case reaches a trial in early October, the defense is ready. He said Tyler, whose legal name is Steven Tallarico, plans to attend the proceeding in person. “Absolutely, he’ll be there,” the lawyer says. “We feel very good about the case. We’ll try the case. We’re preparing.”
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 and roll culture.” After a fire at the Boston apartment in 1975 and the abortion, she left Tyler in 1977 and eventually married. She went on to become the mother of seven children.
From Rolling Stone US
