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Despite the fact that James Franco is playing a perverted high school soccer coach in "Palo Alto" and got caught flirting with a 17-year-old last month via Instagram, the actor insists that he is not after underage girls.




In a Wednesday interview with Howard Stern on XM Radio, Franco addressed the flirtatious Instagram messages between him and Scottish teenager Lucy Clode.




"The way that the news wants to kind of do it, because these are the flashy headlines, I am pursuing...young women," he told Stern of his encounter with Clode, who met him outside his Broadway show in New York City. "I'm not going to high schools looking for dates. I'm leaving my work and they're coming there!"




Franco suggested that he can't do anything about the age range of his fan base.




"So I'm just seeing attractive women. And look, my fan base is like 17-year-old girls," the "Palo Alto" actor explained. "If I do a book signing, it'll be 17-year-old to 30-year-old women. That's my biggest fan base. So I saw her, and she's saying on her page, 'I love James Franco, blah blah blah.'"




He claims he approached Clode with the utmost respect.




"I was a gentleman. I said, 'Do you have a boyfriend?'" Franco recalled. "And her response was, 'Not when you're around.' So that, to me, sounds like, okay, she's interested."




Franco confirmed that he doesn't have any hard feelings about Clode being star struck and telling the world of their encounter.




"I don't think she posted it knowing what was going to happen. I think she was somebody that had, you know, 100, maybe at the most 500, friends on Twitter, or followers or whatever," he said. "And she's thinking not, 'Here's a guy hitting on me,' [but] 'Here is James Franco, this image I have of James Franco, hitting on me. Oh, my god, my friends will never believe this.'"




However, Franco resents the fact that he is accused for "victim bashing."




"Now people want to say I victim-bashed her," he told Stern. "How is she a victim? I was like anybody, just trying to meet somebody. It's just that my dirty s--t gets put out internationally."