#Tracing Marilyn Manson’s Blurred Lines Between Shock Rock and Alleged Abuse

While Marilyn Manson’s artistic persona has long hinged on shock value, at times glimpses of reality have slipped through, some of which suggested that perhaps your parents were right to be concerned about him, after all. By far the most serious accusation emerged this week, when actor Evan Rachel Wood, 33, named the 52-year-old Manson, her former fiancé, as her alleged abuser. “He started grooming me when I was a teenager and horrifically abused me for years,” Wood’s statement reads. “I was brainwashed and manipulated into submission.”

Manson has denied the allegations, maintaining that his relationships have always been “entirely consensual.” Last year, his team suggested that some of his more outrageous previous remarks about Wood were essentially made in character, as a “theatrical rock star.”

It would indeed be inappropriate to conflate Manson’s art with real life. But Manson has a long history of public pronouncements and legal cases that blur the lines between Marilyn Manson, the persona, and Brian Warner, the person. And claims of willful provocation and boundary-pushing do not diminish the seriousness of Wood’s allegations. Below is a brief timeline of how Manson’s larger-than-life caricature and real-life behavior have intersected, from his early flush of 1990s notoriety to recent allegations.

February 1998: Manson publishes an autobiography, The Long Hard Road Out of Hell. As critiqued by music journalist Jim Derogatis in the Chicago Reader, the book depicts Manson “generally mistreating one or more women per page.” The most notorious chapter, “Meating the Fans / Meat and Greet,” relates an encounter with an admiring deaf woman, who gets covered in meat, has sex with multiple band members, and is urinated on by Manson and another band member. The scene is presented in the book as consensual, but subsequent critics acknowledge it is “unseemly.” Elsewhere, the book describes hosting women for backstage contests to see who can hold in an enema the longest.

November 1998: Manson is involved in an altercation with Craig Marks, then executive editor of SPIN. In a lawsuit, Marks alleges that Manson threatened to kill him and his family in a dispute over the magazine’s cover. In an interview years later with Rolling Stone, Manson claims that he “got arrested for putting a gun in the mouth of an editor of SPIN” and “hid from the law” at Trump Tower. Manson was not in fact arrested, as Rolling Stone noted. The lawsuit is eventually settled out of court.

August 2001: Manson is charged with assault and sexual misconduct after allegedly rubbing his crotch on a Detroit security guard’s head. He eventually pleads no contest to lesser charges of disorderly conduct and assault and battery, for which he receives a $4,000 fine. He also settles a lawsuit filed by the security guard.

December 2001: Manson is sued by a Minneapolis security guard who claims that Manson rubbed his crotch against this guard’s head as well. A jury later finds Manson not liable in the civil suit, which alleged battery and emotional distress.

April 2002: Manson is sued for wrongful death by the mother of a woman who died in a car accident after he allegedly gave her drugs. Manson calls the lawsuit “completely without merit” and denies the allegation that he provided the woman with drugs. Paper later reports that the matter is settled out of court.

May 2007: Wood stars alongside Manson in a sexually suggestive video for his song “Heart-Shaped Glasses (When the Heart Guides the Hand).” It’s public knowledge that Wood is dating Manson, who’s in the midst of a divorce from dancer Dita Von Teese. The following year, Manson and Wood split.

June 2009: In an interview published by SPIN, Manson says he self-harmed after his breakup from Wood, and that he fantasizes about hurting her. “I have fantasies every day about smashing her skull in with a sledgehammer,” he is quoted as saying. His camp later claims he was not serious and that he made the remarks in a spirit of theatrical exaggeration.

July 2009: Manson apparently threatens violence toward music journalists. “I am far different than the soon-to-be-murdered-in-their-home press has decided to fabricate,” he writes, in a blog post that is no longer online, responding to a disparaging media mention. “If one more ‘journalist’ makes a cavalier statement about me and my band, I will personally or with my fans’ help, greet them at their home and discover just how much they believe in their freedom of speech.”

November 2009: Manson releases the video for his song “Running to the Edge of the World,” which contains a staged scene of him appearing to brutally beat a female character who, several critics note, seems to resemble Wood.

January 2010: Having reconciled, Manson and Wood are reportedly engaged; he proposes while on stage. Within months, they split up again.

November 2016: In a Rolling Stone interview, Wood speaks publicly for the first time about being raped “by a significant other while we were together.” She also refers to her “physical, psychological, [and] sexual” abuse by a partner. She does not elaborate on the alleged perpetrator’s identity.

October 2017: Manson’s longtime bassist, Twiggy Ramirez, is accused of rape. Manson, after saying he “knew nothing about these allegations until very recently” and was “saddened” for the alleged survivor’s “obvious distress,” parts ways with Ramirez. Ramirez issues a statement claiming that he has “only recently been made aware of these allegations from over 20 years ago,” and maintains, “I do not condone non-consensual sex of any kind.”

February 2018: Comedian and actor Charlyne Yi accuses Manson of harassing women and making racist comments on the set of the TV drama House. Manson doesn’t comment on the claims.

The same month, again without naming names, Wood details experiences of sexual assault and domestic violence in testimony before Congress. “My experience with domestic violence was this,” she says, “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.”

August 2018: The Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office says in a court filing that it has declined to pursue a case against Manson. According to the filing, a police report filed against Manson earlier that year accused him of unspecified sex crimes going back to 2011. In the filing, the district attorney’s office says it has declined to pursue the case because the statute of limitations has expired and due to the “absence of corroboration.” Through his lawyer, Manson “categorically” denies the claims, calling them “completely delusional.”

April 2019: Wood testifies about her experience with domestic violence again, this time before a California Senate panel. Again, she declines to name her alleged abuser. “The fear of being judged by society is debilitating and the fear of retaliation from my abuser is paralyzing,” she says. “I have been diagnosed with complex PTSD, including disassociation, panic attacks, night terrors, agoraphobia, impulse control, chronic pain in my body, among other symptoms.”

November 2020: Manson is asked about Wood’s testimonies in an interview with Metal Hammer. He hangs up on the interviewer. In response to a list of questions, Manson’s UK press representative says it would be “inappropriate” to comment on Wood’s “personal testimony.” Regarding Manson’s 2009 interview remarks about self-harm and violence toward Wood, the rep says: “The comments in SPIN where Manson had a fantasy of using a sledgehammer on Evan and he cut himself 158 times was obviously a theatrical rock star interview promoting a new record, and not a factual account. The fact that Evan and Manson got engaged six months after this interview would indicate that no one took this story literally.”

February 2021: Wood alleges on Instagram and in a statement to Vanity Fair that Manson groomed and “horrifically abused” her for years. Vanity Fair also publishes accounts of four more women who came forward about experiences with Manson. Loma Vista, Manson’s most recent record label, says it is cutting ties with him. Manson shares the following statement: “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.”

If you or someone you know has been affected by sexual assault, we encourage you to reach out for support:

RAINN National Sexual Assault Hotline
http://www.rainn.org
1 800 656 HOPE (4673)

Crisis Text Line
http://www.facebook.com/crisistextline (chat support)
SMS: Text “HERE” to 741-741