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Teenage Dream Video Star’s Allegations Against Katy Perry As Police Launch Investigation
The male lead from Katy Perry’s Teenage Dream music video has made bombshell allegations against Katy Perry as a police investigation is launched.
When Josh Kloss appeared in Katy Perry’s Teenage Dream music video in 2010, he was an unknown model handed the opportunity of a lifetime — a starring role alongside one of the most famous women in the world, in a video that would become one of the most watched in pop music history.
The experience, he would later claim, was something else entirely. His allegations, made in 2019, barely registered at the time.
This week, as Australian police launch a criminal investigation into Perry following Ruby Rose’s s**ual assault allegations, Kloss’s story has found an entirely different audience — and a very different reception.
The expanding storm
To understand why this week has felt so seismic, it helps to understand the scale of what is now under scrutiny.
Katy Perry is one of the best-selling musicians in history. Born Katheryn Hudson in Santa Barbara, California in 1984, she broke through in 2008 with I Kissed A Girl and went on to become a dominant force in mainstream pop for the better part of two decades, with hits including Roar, Firework, Teenage Dream, and Dark Horse.
She has served as a judge on American Idol, accumulated a fanbase numbering in the hundreds of millions, and extended her profile into fashion, television, and advocacy.
More recently, she has been in the public eye following her split from actor Orlando Bloom — with whom she shares a daughter, Daisy — and her subsequent relationship with former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
She was photographed alongside Trudeau at Coachella last weekend, in images that went viral for reasons that had nothing to do with the music.
It was at Coachella that the current controversy ignited.
The comment that changed everything
On Sunday, April 12, Complex Music posted content about Justin Bieber’s headline set at Coachella — a performance that drew widespread criticism for what many saw as a lack of effort, with Bieber streaming his own YouTube videos and singing along to them.
Perry, who was at the festival, commented on the post: “Thank God he has Premium. I don’t wanna see no ads.”
Australian actress Ruby Rose — best known internationally for Orange Is The New Black and Batwoman — replied directly beneath Perry’s comment. Her response was brief and incendiary: “Katy Perry assaulted me at Spice Market nightclub in Melbourne. Who gives a s**t what she thinks?”
What followed was a rapid and very public escalation. Rose expanded on her allegations in a series of posts on Threads, providing explicit and graphic details of what she claims occurred at the Melbourne venue in 2010, when she was in her early twenties.
She described staying silent for nearly two decades in part because, she claimed, Perry had helped her obtain a US visa by writing letters of recommendation, giving her a reason to stay quiet.
“So I kept it a secret,” she wrote. “But I did tell ya’ll she wasn’t a good person.”
Perry’s representatives issued an immediate and categorical denial. “The allegations being circulated on social media by Ruby Rose about Katy Perry are not only categorically false, but they are also dangerous, reckless lies,” the statement read.
The response also referenced what it described as Rose’s history of making public allegations against various individuals.
Rose pushed back: “I have never, ever, made serious public allegations on social media like this.”
On April 13, Rose filed a formal complaint with Australian police. The following day, Victoria Police confirmed that detectives from the S**ual Offences and Child Abuse Investigation Team — SOCIT, a specialist unit dedicated to serious and sensitive cases — were investigating a historical s**ual assault reported to have occurred in Melbourne in 2010.
No charges have been filed. Rose has since said she will not speak publicly about the matter while the investigation is active, describing the restriction as ‘quite the relief.’
The allegations that came before
Rose’s allegations did not emerge in a vacuum. They arrived alongside — and have since drawn attention back to — a series of earlier incidents and claims that are now being revisited in an entirely different context.
In 2018, while serving as a judge on American Idol, Perry kissed 19-year-old contestant Benjamin Glaze on the lips without warning after he told the panel he had never been kissed.
Glaze fell to the floor in visible shock. Perry high-fived her fellow judges, saying: “Yeah, I got him.”
Glaze later said he had been ‘uncomfortable immediately,’ had wanted to save his first kiss for a relationship, and had been raised in a conservative family.
He was clear, however, that he did not consider himself s**ually harassed by Perry, and later posted publicly that he was ‘not complaining’ about the moment.
The incident drew significant criticism at the time, with many noting that a male judge who kissed a female contestant without warning would have faced a far more serious public reckoning.
Also in 2018, young mother Sara Beth Liebe auditioned for the show and was subjected to what she later described as ’embarrassing’ and ‘hurtful’ comments from Perry relating to her age and the fact that she had children.
When Liebe mentioned she was a mother, Perry performed theatrical shock, pretending to fall onto the judges’ table. She followed it with the remark: “Honey, you’ve been laying on the table too much.”
Liebe subsequently quit the competition live on stage, and later posted a TikTok video describing Perry’s remarks that received tens of thousands of likes.
Also resurfacing is a 2014 clip of actress Anna Kendrick on Conan, in which she described a ‘weird night’ at the Grammy Awards and told a story about Perry touching her in a way she described as ‘aggressive’ — framing the account entirely as comedy at the time.
The studio audience laughed. The clip disappeared from cultural memory almost immediately.
This week, it has been watched millions of times. The moment is now being discussed as something considerably more unsettling than a harmless celebrity anecdote, particularly given that Kendrick herself used the word ‘aggressive’ to describe the interaction.
Kendrick has not made any new statements about the situation and has filed no complaint.
Then there is Tina Kandelaki, a Georgian-Russian television presenter who in 2019 told a Russian media outlet that Perry — whom she described as ‘pretty tipsy’ — approached her at a private party, attempted to kiss her without consent, and then moved on to someone else after being physically rebuffed.
Perry did not publicly respond to Kandelaki’s claims.
The Teenage Dream model
Which brings us to Josh Kloss, whose allegations are receiving the most intense renewed attention of all as the police investigation unfolds.
Kloss, now 45, appeared as the love interest in Perry’s Teenage Dream music video in 2010 — one of the defining pop videos of that era, watched hundreds of millions of times and considered among the most successful music marketing moments of the decade.
His involvement seemed, at the time, like the beginning of something. By his own account, it was something else entirely.
In 2019, Kloss published a lengthy Instagram post in which he described the experience of working on Teenage Dream as ‘one of the most confusing, assaulting and belittling jobs’ he had ever done.
He alleged that after the video’s success, he was placed under tight control by Perry’s team — that her representatives ‘lorded’ non-disclosure expectations over him, warned him not to discuss ‘a single thing about anything regarding Katy publicly,’ and even ‘edited and answered’ interview questions on his behalf, presenting a carefully curated version of him to the media.
But the central allegation — the one that is now circulating widely and being discussed in the context of the Ruby Rose investigation — concerned a birthday party held for stylist Johnny Wujek in 2012, two years after the video’s release.
Kloss claimed that he attended the event and encountered Perry, and that the two greeted each other warmly.
Then, as he turned to introduce a friend to her, he alleged she grabbed his tracksuit waistband and pulled his shorts and underwear down as far as she could — exposing him to a group of her male friends and the crowd around them.
“She pulled my Adidas sweats and underwear out as far as she could to show a couple of her guy friends and the crowd around us my p***s,” he wrote.
“Can you imagine how pathetic and embarrassed I felt? I just say this now because our culture is set on proving men of power are perverse. But females with power are just as disgusting.”
He framed his decision to speak out around the approaching tenth anniversary of Teenage Dream, saying the timing felt right. “So, happy anniversary to one of the most confusing, assaulting and belittling jobs I’ve ever done,” he wrote.
The response at the time was divided. Some dismissed the allegations, questioning why it had taken nearly a decade for Kloss to come forward. Others pointed out that delayed disclosure is extremely common among people who have experienced misconduct, particularly when power dynamics are involved.
Kloss responded to the skeptics directly, per Sydney Criminal Lawyers: “I have not lied or exaggerated whatsoever. You people who are bullying, please think twice about how stupid and dangerous your comments truly are.”
Perry’s friend hit back
The most significant pushback against Kloss’s allegations came from Johnny Wujek himself — the man whose birthday party provided the alleged setting.
Wujek responded online in 2019 with a forceful and personal rejection of the account, accusing Kloss of harboring an ‘ongoing obsession’ with Perry dating back to the day of filming, the IB Times reports.
“Oh hell no. I’m not about to let you make accusations against my friend like this,” Wujek wrote. “Katy would never do something like that. We all know about your ongoing obsession with her since the day of filming that video.”
He described Perry as someone who had ‘done nothing but uplift and inspire others’ and told Kloss to ‘focus on your life and your daughter and move on.’
Perry herself did not address Kloss’s claims publicly. In the absence of any other statement from her side at the time, Wujek’s response was the only on-record rebuttal.
That rebuttal now sits in an awkward position, alongside Ruby Rose’s allegations, an active criminal investigation, and a growing body of resurfaced accounts that are being reassessed with fresh eyes.
None of the allegations made by Kloss, or any of the other individuals named above, have been tested in court.
There is no independent corroboration of his specific account. Katy Perry has denied the most serious allegations categorically.
The Victoria Police investigation is at its earliest stages. But the story that Kloss told in 2019 — the one that barely registered at the time — has found the audience it never had before.
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