According to a new interview in The Daily Beast, Lou Reed was anything but a stand up guy. The Velvet Underground frontman is the subject of Howard Sounes’ latest biography, Notes from the Velvet Underground: The Life of Lou Reed. Sounes reports that Reed was “a monster” who regularly abused women and casually used harsh racial slurs.

Lou Reed Insults The Beatles, The Doors In Newly-Discovered Interview

The accusations stem from interviews with more than 140 of Reed’s friends, past girlfriends, wives, family members and associates. “He would, like, pin you up against a wall,” his ex-wife Betty Kronstad explained. “Tussle you. Hit you… shake you… And then one time he actually gave me a black eye.” An old friend from school furthered the allegations, speaking about an incident in which he brought a girlfriend to dinner. “She would say something. He’d get pissed off at what she said and smash her around the back of the head,” he said.

Other aggressive acts came in verbal form. An old friend of Reed’s told Sounes that he had called Bob Dylan a “pretentious kike.” He had also openly told a journalist “I don’t like n—-rs like Donna Summer.”

Read the complete interview in The Daily Beast. Notes from the Velvet Underground comes out October 22nd.