The actor and singer Evan Rachel Wood, who has spoken publicly for years about being a survivor of sexual and physical violence, alleged on Monday that she had been abused by the rock musician Marilyn Manson.
"The name of my abuser is Brian Warner, also known to the world as Marilyn Manson," Wood claimed in an Instagram post. "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."
Wood, who is 33, was nominated for a Golden Globe in 2017 for her role in Westworld and voiced Queen Iduna in Frozen 2. She began acting as a child, receiving her first Golden Globe nomination early in her career, for her portrayal of a volatile adolescent in the 2003 drama Thirteen.
Her relationship with Manson became public in 2007, when she was 19 and he was 38. The two were briefly engaged. Manson’s management company and record label did not respond on Monday to requests by the New York Times and Guardian for comment. Last year Manson’s representatives issued a statement to Metal Hammer, a music magazine, in response to questions about his relationship with Wood and her testimony before Congress about being a victim of domestic violence.
“Personal testimony is just that, and we think it’s inappropriate to comment on that,” Manson’s representatives told Metal Hammer. “You then go on to talk about Manson being accused of ‘terrible things’ by unnamed ‘critics’ but offer no guidance on who these critics are and what these things are, so it’s not possible to comment.”
In an Instagram post today, however, Manson wrote: "Obviously, my art and my life have long been magnets for controversy, but these recent claims about me are horrible distortions of reality. My intimate relationships have always been entirely consensual with like-minded partners. Regardless of how – and why – others are now choosing to misrepresent the past, that is the truth."
Several other women have also accused Manson of having abused them. In 2018 the actor Charlyne Yi accused Manson of harassment in a series of tweets that have since been deleted. In September 2020 Dan Cleary, who said that he had worked as an assistant to Manson for several years, claimed on Twitter that he had witnessed the singer being abusive.
Four other women – Ashley Walters, Sarah McNeilly, Ashley Morgan and Gabriella (with no surname given) – have also alleged abusive behaviour via public Instagram posts.
Loma Vista, the label that released Marilyn Manson's latest recording, said on Monday that it would stop promoting it and would not work with him in the future. "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," it said in a statement posted on Twitter. "Due to these concerning developments, we have also decided not to work with Marilyn Manson on any future projects."
Wood, who supported a California law that extended the statute of limitations on domestic abuse, testified before the state senate in 2019 that a man whom she did not identify by name had groomed her when she was 18. “He cut me off from my close friends and family one by one, by exhibiting rage in some form or another when I was in contact with them,” she said in her testimony. “He had bouts of extreme jealousy, which would often result in him wrecking our home, cornering me in a room and threatening me.”
She said that she felt terrified for her life, and that he broke her down through starvation and sleep deprivation, and by threatening to kill her. When she tried to leave him, he would call her house incessantly, she said.
Manson told Spin magazine in 2009 that he had called Wood 158 times one day after a breakup. “I have fantasies every day about smashing her skull in with a sledgehammer,” he said. His representatives said last year, in response to questions by Metal Hammer, that Manson’s comment in Spin was “obviously a theatrical rock star interview promoting a new record.”
Manson described his views on women in a 2015 interview with Dazed, a style magazine. “Girls should always present themselves to you when you come home,” he said. “‘Hi honey, I’m home,’ and she’s wearing lingerie, legs akimbo. ‘Come and get it, honey.’”
Wood told Rolling Stone magazine in 2016 that she had been raped “by a significant other while we were together. And on a separate occasion, by the owner of a bar.” In recent years, especially after the birth of her son in 2013 and the start of the #MeToo movement, she was galvanised to become an advocate for survivors of domestic abuse, she told the New York Times in a 2018 interview. “If you’re going to be famous, for me it has to mean something, or be used for something, because otherwise it just freaks me out,” she said in the interview.
That February she testified before the United States Congress about what she had endured. “So often we speak of these assaults as no more than a few minutes of awfulness, but the scars last a lifetime,” she said in her testimony, in which she detailed an episode in which she thought she might die at the hands of her abuser. “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. I was too afraid to run; he would find me.”
For years afterwards, she said, she "struggled with depression, addiction, agoraphobia, night terrors," and made two suicide attempts; she said she was eventually diagnosed with long-term post-traumatic stress disorder. Before her congressional hearing about the survivor's bill of rights, which expanded access to medical care and more for survivors of sexual assault, Wood said she had hardly uttered the full scope of her trauma to anyone. She had barely processed it herself, she said in the 2018 interview, until she was cast in Westworld, the sci-fi drama in which she plays an innocent who slowly awakens to the darkness around her.
Wood has said that she did not report her abuser to authorities because the statute of limitations had long since passed, and that she chose not to name him because she felt she had to come to terms with her own story first. “It took me so long to process everything and to get to a place where I felt even safe enough to speak about the abuse. And it’s scary,” she said in Harper’s Bazaar in 2019.
Giving survivors more time was part of her motivation in working on the phoenix act, the California bill for which she testified. It passed in 2019, and took effect last year. It lengthens the statute of limitations for domestic-abuse felonies to five years, and expands training for officers working on domestic-violence cases.
In response to Wood’s allegations Monday, Susan Rubio, the California state senator who proposed the legislation, and who is herself a survivor of domestic abuse, called for Manson to be investigated. She said Wood had been instrumental in getting California’s laws changed. “When survivors speak up, they help victims realise they are not alone and empower them to come out of the shadows,” she said. “The more stories we share, the less power we give our abusers.” – New York Times, with additional Guardian reporting
