Miley Cyrus has opened up about her first sexual experiences on comedy sex podcast, Call Her Daddy. In an episode that aired last night, she said that her first sexual experiences were with women, but the first time she had sex with a man she was 16 and ended up marrying him.
‘I didn’t go all the way with a dude [until] I was 16,’ she told podcast host Alexandra Cooper. ‘It wasn’t Nick Jonas, but I ended up marrying the guy so that’s pretty crazy. I lied and said he wasn’t the first so I didn’t seem like a loser.’
Given that she has only been married once, to actor Liam Hemsworth, it’s pretty clear she’s talking about her now ex-husband. However, fans are raising concerns about the timeline of events given that Liam is 2 years, 10 months and 10 days older than Miley. Making him 18, nearly 19, when he and 16-year-old Miley first had sex.
‘If Miley was 16 and lost her v-card to Liam, that means he was 18 or 19 at the time,’ one TikTok user commented on the news with a shocked emoji. Questioning the legality of that, the comment section descended into a debate around whether or not Liam would be guilty of statutory rape.
According to Shouse California Law Group’s website, ‘anyone under the age of 18 cannot legally consent to sexual intercourse.’ They state that in order to convict someone of statutory rape in California the prosecutor must prove ‘that the defendant had sexual intercourse with another person (any amount of penetration, regardless of how slight, constitutes sexual intercourse…even if there is no ejaculation),that the persons involved in the act were not married to each other at the time (the fact that the minor is married to someone else or used to be married does not excuse liability for this offense ), and that the alleged victim was under eighteen years old at the time of the offense. ‘
However, the age difference matters when it comes to the statutory rape being considered a misdemeanour or a felony. ‘Any person who engages in an act of unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor who is not more than three years older or three years younger than the perpetrator, is guilty of a misdemeanour,’ the website states.
As mentioned above, Liam is two years, 10 months and 10 days older than Miley. The couple apparently met on the set of The Last Song in June 2009, hitting it off immediately it seems as Miley would’ve only been 16 for another five months at this point.
Of course, whether fans are debating the legality or not, it’s clear that no charges were pressed in this incident. It does give us a glimmer of hope though for the level of education on consent when young fans online are picking up on the issue of statutory rape and questioning whether adults' relationships with minors are appropriate.
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