The Marilyn Manson accusations are disturbing – but they are a grimly familiar story for the music industry

Actor Evan Rachel Wood’s recent allegations against her ex-partner make for disturbing reading. Fiona Sturges examines the culture of silence that pervades the music industry

Marilyn Manson’s ghoulish appearance may have proved to be the ultimate disguise (Frazer Harrison/Getty Images)

If you thought that all the creeps and abusers had been unearthed in the aftermath of #MeToo, think again; the well is deep and monsters still lurk in the shadows. This week has brought news of another man in the entertainment business accused of using his considerable power to abuse and control women.

Actor Evan Rachel Wood’s allegations on Instagram that her ex-partner Marilyn Manson had abused her throughout their relationship in the late 2000s, make for disturbing reading, whether or not they are true. Wood claims that Manson began grooming her from her teens and that she “was brainwashed and manipulated into submission”. The singer, who is 52, has denied the allegations as “horrible distortions of reality”. Following Wood’s statement, four more women, among them Manson’s former personal assistant, Ashley Walters, and the artist Sourgirrrl, have made claims about his treatment of them. The accusations include verbal abuse, coercion, violence and rape. All four say they have since suffered from PTSD.

Their stories will be grimly familiar to anyone who has worked in or has an interest in the music business. Two years ago, allegations were made about the singer Ryan Adams’ abusive behaviour towards his ex-wife, Mandy Moore, and the singer Phoebe Bridgers, with whom Adams had a relationship. He denied the allegations. The Def Jam founder Russell Simmons has been accused of sexual assault by multiple women dating back decades (he denies any wrongdoing). Last year, Mariah Carey claimed that her former husband, the producer and music executive Tommy Mottola, coerced her and cut her off from friends and family. “Captivity and control come in many forms, but the goal is always the same,” she wrote in her book, The Meaning of Mariah Carey. “To break down the captive’s will, to kill any notion of self-worth and erase the person’s memory of their own soul.” He also refutes the claims.

It is easy to look at a figure like Manson, for whom images of depravity have been central to his creative output and who styles himself as the “God of F***”, and imagine he might be a less than honourable human being. But his ghoulish appearance may have proved to be the ultimate disguise, a pantomime villain costume under which it was assumed lived a perfectly ordinary man called Brian Warner. It’s possible that Manson has – to use that depressingly common phrase – been hiding in plain sight. In the mid 1990s, his live shows featured him pulling girls around on a leash and simulating sex with them. A passage in his 1998 book, The Long Hard Road Out of Hell, recounts him talking a young deaf fan into allowing him and his band to urinate on her and cover her in meat (she has said the encounter was consensual); another records him, another records him, alongside Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor, blindfolding a drunk woman and playing a game called “Guess Who’s Touching You?”. In 2009, talking about Wood, Manson said: “I have fantasies every day about smashing her skull with a sledgehammer.”

Actor Evan Rachel Wood has made allegations on Instagram that her ex-partner Marilyn Manson had raped and abused her throughout their relationship in the late 2000s (Getty Images)

With hindsight, these would appear to be the actions and statements of a dangerous misogynist, but it is not so clear cut. Provocative behaviour has long been encouraged in an industry that prizes outrage and invention, and, in the pantheon of shock-merchants, Manson was the most shocking of them all. His entire career has been a blending of life and art, his stories of darkness and degradation part of the theatre of this most extreme and subversive performer – or so it was thought. I interviewed Manson in 2003 and he seemed to do his utmost to intimidate me by turning the lights out in his hotel suite, drawing the curtains and sitting so close to me that I could feel his breath on my face. It was uncomfortable, but I expected nothing less from a singer who subsisted on his scary reputation and exhorted fans to chant “Kill God” at gigs.

That Manson was also engaged in a fight to defend artistic freedom made him a sympathetic figure. In the late Nineties, he was middle America’s worst nightmare and the sworn enemy of a religious right who saw his cadaverous get-up as evidence of devil-worship and deviancy. After the Columbine High School killings in 1999, when two boys from Littleton, Colorado, shot and killed 12 of their classmates and a teacher before turning their guns on themselves, a media frenzy followed in which Manson was held directly responsible (rumours that the killers listened to his music proved unfounded). In the Oscar-winning documentary Bowling For Columbine, the documentary-maker Michael Moore interviewed Manson. He came over not as an emblem of evil but a perceptive social and political observer, and a victim of hard-right hypocrisy.

Clearly, if the claims turn out to be true, another picture has now emerged – that of a man seemingly capitalising on his celebrity and provocateur status to allegedly abuse and silence women, and using art as a smokescreen for unacceptable cruelty. In an Instagram post last year, before Wood had accused Manson by name, a Twitter user, who worked with Manson first as a touring tech and later as his personal assistant, claimed to have witnessed the singer’s abusive behaviour first-hand. Referring to Manson’s now-wife Lindsay Usich, Dan Cleary wrote, “He would threaten to kill her, cut her up, embarrass her to the world. Making her cry and fear him made him feel good.” He added: “Everyone in his immediate circle knows this. But everyone (including myself) is afraid to say anything because of ‘the code’. It’s frowned upon to tell people’s private business.”

The troubling claims stretch beyond the dark picture Cleary paints of Manson’s sadistic behaviour to include the culture of silence surrounding the musician. Whatever turns out to be the truth in these claims against Manson, if #MeToo has shown us anything, it’s that “the code” that protects abusive men in the music industry needs to go and a system put in place to allow employees to lodge complaints without fear of reprisal. Because right now, those who turn a blind eye, or view abusive behaviour as par for the rock-star course, are part of the problem.