Marilyn Manson faces new lawsuit over sexual assault of a minor
A new lawsuit dating back to the 1990s accuses Marilyn Manson of grooming and abusing a then-16 year old girl
Aux News Marilyn Manson
Marilyn Manson’s legal troubles continue. The controversial artist recently dodged multiple lawsuits from women who accused him of sexual misconduct, ranging from assault to sex trafficking. (One suit was settled out of court, while another was dismissed on a technicality and may be re-filed.) Now, Rolling Stone reports that Manson faces a new lawsuit, this time concerning the sexual assault of an underage girl in the 1990s.
The lawsuit, filed on Long Island, New York by an anonymous plaintiff under the name “Jane Doe”, names Manson (under his legal name, Brian Warner) and his former labels Interscope and Nothing Records as defendants. Per Rolling Stone, the filing “includes counts of sexual battery and intentional infliction of emotional distress against Warner, and negligence and intentional infliction of emotional distress, among other charges, against the labels.”
Jane Doe is alleged to have met Warner after a concert in Dallas in 1995, when he invited her and another girl onto his tour bus and specifically asked for their ages, school grades, home addresses, and phone numbers. Doe was 16 years old at the time; the age of consent in Texas was (and is) 17.
“While on the tour bus, Defendant Warner performed various acts of criminal sexual conduct upon Plaintiff, who was a virgin at the time, including but not limited to forced copulation and vaginal penetration,” the suit states (per RS). “One of the band members watched Defendant Warner sexually assault Plaintiff. Plaintiff was in pain, scared, upset, humiliated and confused. After he was done, Defendant Warner laughed at her. … Then Defendant Warner demanded Plaintiff to ‘get the fuck off of my bus’ and threatened Plaintiff that, if she told anyone, he would kill her and her family.”
The suit goes on to allege that Mason groomed Doe over the course of the next several years, causing her to spiral into substance abuse. The filing describes a familiar pattern of emotional and psychological manipulation and sexual violence from Manson. He is said to have controlled who she could see and coerced her into having sex with him and with others, including “other band members or his assistant at the same time.” He also allegedly engaged in “hostile and verbally abusive behavior” including that he “openly called her racial slurs and called her fat.”
The suit further alleges that his labels “were well-aware of Defendant Warner’s obsession with sexual violence and childhood sexual assault.” Interscope and Trent Renzor’s Nothing Records never had “a reasonable system or procedure in place to investigate, supervise, or monitor its staff and/or agents, including Defendant Warner, to prevent pre-sexual grooming and sexual harassment, molestation, and assault of fans, including minors and women,” the filing reads.
“Defendants Interscope and Nothing Records were aware of Defendant Warner’s practice of sexually assaulting minors, and aided and abetted such behavior,” the suit goes on. “As a result of Brian Warner’s sexual abuse and assault, enabled and encouraged by Defendants Interscope and Nothing Records, Plaintiff has suffered severe emotional, physical, and psychological distress, including shame, and guilt, economic loss, economic capacity and emotional loss.”
Jeff Anderson, a lawyer well known for his fight against sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church, is one of the attorneys representing Doe in the case. “This suit by this survivor is a giant step in bringing light and heat to an industry that has been hiding perils in plain sight. It’s time to face the music. New laws give survivors the time to take real action for justice and protection,” he says in a statement to Rolling Stone. “Powerful new laws in New York and California give adult survivors the chance to take legal action against predators and those that protect and profit from them. We are grateful to the survivors and so many others who now align with us to expose the predators and those in the music industry that have … permitted, promoted, and profiteered from his violence against the vulnerable.”
The full lawsuit can be read here at Rolling Stone.
If you or someone you know is suffering from sexual abuse, contact the RAINN National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-4673.
31 Comments
I don’t think there’s much better to say than ‘what a piece of shit, I hope they put him away forever’
These aren’t criminal complaints, but if he gets sued enough times he’ll probably get arrested for sticking up a Taco Bell. The guy’s a twerp.
Dont doubt it. I saw MM on that ‘95 tour, caught them at the Philly show. This was before the Sweet Dreams cover, before they blew up, and they were either opening for NIN or playing medium/small venues, like the TLA in south street Philly.During the set he brought a young woman/girl on stage and had her sit on the speaker while he asked her age (I think it was 15, or 16) and then asked her to say some pretty disgusting things, like calling him Daddy and some explicit stuff that I won’t repeat here. It was shocking, and my 17 year old brain was convinced that’s all it was, because I couldnt fathom he’d commit a crime after doing something out in the open. But sure enough, after the show, some dude from backstage found her outside and invited her back in. We all just sort of stared at each other wide eyed and asked questions like “who is driving her home? are her parents coming?”We ended up moving on, but I think about this every once and a while
I think we’ve all had moments like that. Where someone does something obviously wrong and the fact that they’re doing it openly catches us by surprise so we don’t step up in the way we maybe imagine ourselves doing (not that there was a lot you personally could have done). We get to this place where we justify the motivations of the offender, thinking we must be in the wrong for being so boring and conventional. Warner is an absolute master at exploiting that dynamic, implicating his audience in his misdeeds. It’s what abusers like him count on: everyone else not being secure enough in their own stance so they can scream about hypocrisy while raping kids. The absolute worst kind of gadfly. He was pretty open about it at the time too, said who he was and what he was about. We just thought it must be a character. It’s not your fault for being normal. It just means we have to keep this garbage at the front of our dialogue so we have the awareness and vocabulary to recognize and deal with it when we have to.
By the late 90s there was an understanding that everything he did was an elaborate ruse, and only humorless Christians took it seriously. It was perfect insulation, since you could point to any instance of self-awareness as the “real” person, and dismiss every instance of him being terrible as just the act. Since it was so hard for women to come forward at the time, people could ignore that “the act” was how the guy lived his life. And anybody expressing outrage at his obvious misogyny got lumped in with the humorless Christians. Regardless whether his memoir is true or not, he was talking about sexually humiliating women 20 something years ago, but at the time people were willing to take it in stride. In hindsight it’s gross and sad but not surprising.
Yeah, I was never a MM fan but I admit that I enjoyed the way he flummoxed the tightey whiteys.A whole internet age later: we’ve all seen that if you can pretend to be anybody you want to be seen as, for purposes as big as a showbiz career or as small as a comment section schtick, and what you choose is a sentient glass of date rape, you’re probably a total piece of shit and “blarrrrrgh, I’m such a shitbag” is not funny anymore.
Depending on how you look at it, the culture both left him behind and caught up with him. What a terrible thought.
I think the backlash against Manson really worked in his favor, too. After you heard all those Tipper Gore-types going on about how his music caused the Columbine shootings, how could you take anyone seriously if they said anything more disparaging about him than “That guy’s music sucks?”This Onion article was legitimately funny at the time it was published: https://www.theonion.com/marilyn-manson-now-going-door-to-door-trying-to-shock-p-1819565904
Arguably, that contingent of noisy scolds validated the very things they were railing against. They made defending mediocre-to-bad popular culture a noble fight again st censorship. I notice that it’s very hard to say “video games are too obsessed with gun violence, and they’re part of toxic American gun culture” without someone bringing up the moral panic of the 90s to dismiss the whole idea.
The bystandard effect is truly terrifying.
They wouldn’t have been opening for NIN in 1995.Nine Inch Nails began the Self Destruct tour in 1994 where Marilyn Mason did open for them, but he only played shows in 1994, with his final concert appearance being at the Patriot Center in Fairfax, VA on August 11, 1994. As an additional note, that whole giant NIN tour had only one stop in Philadelphia at the CoreStates Spectrum on December 11, 1994, but Mason wasn’t with them at that show.After that, NIN would continue to tour without Mason, which is likely due to some scheduling conflicts he had with the Danzig 4p Tour (which would also be Korn’s first major tour as an opening act). However, Danzig’s headlining 1995 tour with Manson never had a show in Dallas, TX or in Philadelphia, PA.Later into 1995, Manson would headline the (now horribly named) Smells Like Children Tour, and would play just one show in Dallas at the Deep Ellum Live on September 15, 1995. That would have to be when the introduction to Jane Doe occurred. I’m not sure what the TLA is in Philly, but I can say that his one and only Philadelphia show for his solo tour was at the Electric Factory on November 5, 1995.So as a question of curiosity, did you happen to see Manson purposefully cut himself on stage during the show you saw?
Yes i saw them open for nin i think in dec 93 or 94, in 95 they were touring alone-ish.
Meanwhile The AV Club is working on a loving, glowing, slideshow of all the children David Bowie raped.
If your point is that people are harder on musicians they like than musicians they don’t like, congratulations – you the whole thing wide open.
Yeah, he keeps trying to drum up some kind of following based on David Bowie. It’s some kind of strange labyrinth of the mind, I suppose?
hey fuck you
Just another gentle reminder about how sad mid to late 90s music truly was.
But they were doing it all for the Nookie . . . oh, right. . .
I have a coworker who keeps saying Marilyn Manson is innocent of any of these changes. He’s the most obxnous person who smokes weed and doesn’t do work. Honestly, the man led a band where everyones stage name was a serial killer and a sex symbol. Of course he was a scumbag.
lol So the cool guy at work who smokes weed really gets you, the wannabe assistant manager, really mad huh? Cool story bro.
I’d just like to state in a statement: everyone who smokes weed and doesn’t do work isn’t a raping monster or apologist.
Oh of course. Honestly the guys number 1 personality trait is being an Alice Cooper fan, having two different shirts he wears, and loudly talking about said music with the only other person at work who likes him.
Glen Buxton fucking rocked it.
I will definitely agree with that.
I’m sure he pegged his personality to defending Marilyn Manson 25 years ago, and he ain’t learning a new trick. Anyway, as people are pointing out on other threads, he was kind of hiding in plain sight. His public persona was so noxious that fans in the 90s assumed it must all be an act.
God you are so right it hurts. Also yeah, its either people don’t want to believe or its all too much and people think its all an act like Alice Cooper.
The suit goes on to allege that Mason groomed Doe over the course of the next several years, causing her to spiral into substance abuse. *Manson
So do you think the label and distribution company actually aided, abetted and encouraged Manson in his crimes or did the lawyers toss them in the suit because they’re well aware Manson has little to no money? Seems like the company encouraging this would be difficult to prove even to a civil standard, especially after so much time has passed. I could see them turning a blind eye, certainly. But he wasn’t ever a big enough star for a record label to have someone follow him around handing out envelopes of cash to his victims in return for their silence.
Obligatory “but he always seemed so normal!!!111”
I’m wondering when the hair metal bands are going to get sued. Although, only a few still have money these days. I knew girls in high school who made it their mission to sleep with band members from just about any popular band that rolled through Long Island and MSG. The bands knew how old they were (16) but still had sex with them. Roadies had no problems getting blow jobs for backstage passes from underage girls. Gn’R played MSG for a couple nights in a row and a friend (16) slept with (and had picture proof) Duff and Gilby the first night, then Axl and Slash the next.
A friend and I were approached by Poison’s personal security and he said, “Brett wants me to bring you two to him after the show. How old are you?” I was 16 and my friend, 17. He was ok with that. The only thing he wasn’t ok with was that my friend had a boyfriend (after asking) and Brett didn’t want to get into anything “messy like that.” Neither of us wanted to have sex with the guy, my friend was a huge Poison fan and wanted to meet him, that was all. I was there to see Damn Yankees. But, the boyfriend was a dealbreaker for Brett, not the teenage girls.