[UPDATE 4:45 p.m ET]: Following allegations of abuse from five women including actress Evan Rachel Wood, shock-rocker Marilyn Manson has been dropped by his record label, Loma Vista Recordings.
“In light of today’s disturbing allegations by Evan Rachel Wood and other women naming Marilyn Manson as their abuser, Loma Vista will cease to further promote his current album, effective immediately,” the label said in a statement. “Due to these concerning developments, we have also decided not to work with Marilyn Manson on any future projects.”
Manson has released two albums through the record label, including 2020’s We Are Chaos.
This is a developing story
[Originally posted 12:35 p.m. ET]: Actress Evan Rachel Wood on Monday named shock-rocker Marilyn Manson as the man who had allegedly abused her during a past relationship. Wood, the Emmy-nominated star of Westworld, has spoken about her past experience with sexual assault and abuse on various occasions and in 2018 testified before a House Judiciary Subcommittee in support of efforts to get the Sexual Assault Survivors’ Bill of Rights passed in all 50 states, but has never before publicly named her alleged abuser.
“The name of my abuser is Brian Warner, also known to the world as Marilyn Manson,” Wood wrote in a note posted to her Instagram account. “He started grooming me when I was a teenager and horrifically abused me for years. I was brainwashed and manipulated into submission. I am done living in fear of retaliation, slander, or blackmail. I am here to expose this dangerous man and call out the many industries that have enabled him, before he ruins any more lives. I stand with the many victims who will no longer be silent.”
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In the wake of her post, several other women have come forward with their own allegations of sexual abuse by Marilyn Manson. You can read their statements via Vanity Fair here.
Evan Rachel Wood detailed the abuse she had endured at the hands of a former romantic partner in her testimony to a House Judiciary Subcommittee in 2018. “My experience with domestic violence was this,” she said, “the toxic mental, physical and sexual abuse which started slow but escalated over time, including threats against my life, severe gaslighting and brainwashing, waking up to the man that claimed to love me, raping what he believed to be my unconscious body.”
“The worst part,” she continued, “sick rituals of binding me up by my hands and feet to be mentally and physically tortured until my abuser felt I had proven my love for them. In this moment, while I was tied up and being beaten, and being told unspeakable things, I truly felt like I could die, not just because my abuser said to me, ‘I could kill you right now,’ but because in that moment I felt like I left my body, and I was too afraid to run.”
Wood also spoke about her experiences to the California state legislature in a show of support for the Phoenix Act, a piece of legislation that altered the statute of limitations for crimes involving domestic violence.
Evan Rachel Wood Testifies Before House Judiciary Subcommittee About Experience With Abuse – 2/27/18
[Video: TIME ]
According to a court filing obtained by The Hollywood Reporter during the height of the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements in 2018, “Marilyn Manson, aka Brian Warner, had a police report filed against him in May for unspecified sex crimes dating back to 2011. The district attorney declined that case because the statute of limitations had expired and ‘absence of corroboration.'” As Manson’s attorney, Howard E. King, noted at that time, the “allegations made to the police were and are categorically denied by Mr. Warner and are either completely delusional or part of a calculated attempt to generate publicity…. Any claim of sexual impropriety or imprisonment at that, or any other, time is false.”
It is unclear whether or not the 2011 filing was linked to Wood’s allegations, though the timeline of her relationship with Manson could place her allegations within that timeframe. Manson and Wood began dating publicly in 2007 when Wood was twenty years old and the couple was briefly engaged in 2010 before separating later that year. Representatives for Marilyn Manson have yet to comment on the allegations.
The abuse allegations brought by Evan Rachel Wood against Marilyn Manson and the various women who have followed suit in solidarity evoke memories of a similar wave of accusations toward rocker Ryan Adams in 2019 by several of his former love interests and collaborators including ex-wife Mandy Moore and ex-girlfriend Phoebe Bridgers. Seven women, including Moore and Bridgers, came together to blow the whistle on Adams’ predatory grooming behaviors in a bombshell feature in The New York Times.
This story is developing.