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--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Hey there. Before we get started, I want to warn you, this episode includes adult language as well as discussions of sexual assault, rape, domestic abuse, and violence.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: This is In Conversation from Apple News Today. I'm Duarte Giraldino. Every weekend, we're taking you deeper into the best journalism on Apple News.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: We hate love! We love hate! We hate love! We love hate!
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Marilyn Manson came on the music scene in the late 80s, early 90s. From the start, he bucked norms. He dressed in black, leather, with dark, demon-like makeup.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: He went on to call himself an agent of chaos, an anti-Christ superstar. He tore up Bibles on stage, and he put up his middle finger to the world.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: For a generation of disaffected youth, Manson was speaking right to them. This person who almost seemed, especially to me as a teenager, this larger-than-life figure in the way that Alice Cooper felt, in the way that Bowie felt, you know, someone who almost isn't even human.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: That's Jason Newman. He's the news director for Rolling Stone. And here's his colleague, senior writer Corey Groh.
--:-- Jason Newman: I was certainly a fan. I mean, I remember when his first single came out, the Get Your Gun. And I thought, hey, this is pretty cool. You know, he's challenging these sort of social morals. And it was exciting.
--:-- Jason Newman: And, you know, he's sort of standing up to what seemed like conservative right and these things that seem like threats to freedom, especially to a 14-year-old like I was at the time.
--:-- Corey Groh: Manson and his band went on to release 11 studio albums. They sold tens of millions of records worldwide. They were nominated for multiple Grammy Awards, and the music industry largely celebrated Manson.
--:-- Corey Groh: But for a lot of people who knew Manson well, they say he wasn't just playing a character, and that a lot of his violent behavior and rhetoric followed him offstage.
--:-- Corey Groh: In the past year, more than a dozen women have accused Brian Warner, and that's his legal name, of psychological and sexual abuse.
--:-- Corey Groh: Many of these women say Warner was able to use his monstrous public image to hide his real-life abuses.
--:-- Jason Newman: Jason Newman and Corey Groh spent nine months reporting on the allegations against Warner for Rolling Stone.
--:-- Jason Newman: They spoke with 55 people for this story, including several of Warner's accusers.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: We began our conversation by talking about how Brian Warner first became Marilyn Manson.
--:-- Corey Groh: Brian Warner is a kid who grew up in Ohio and eventually moved with his family to Florida.
--:-- Corey Groh: And when he was sort of discovering who he was as an artist, he was attending community college.
--:-- Corey Groh: And so he was very interested in what was quote-unquote called alternative music in the late 80s and the early 90s.
--:-- Corey Groh: And decided that he wanted to be a musician himself.
--:-- Corey Groh: Now, Marilyn, of course, comes from the name of Marilyn Monroe, America's sweetheart, and Manson is Charles Manson, you know, America's boogeyman.
--:-- Corey Groh: And so he put these two things together, and the Marilyn Manson act, you know, he called himself Mr. Manson.
--:-- Corey Groh: It was Marilyn Manson and the Spooky Kids. It was very much an act in the beginning.
--:-- Corey Groh: And this is long before he, you know, was famous. This is long before even I knew who he was.
--:-- Corey Groh: He was a local musician who would be doing these sorts of spectacle-type shows in Florida.
--:-- Corey Groh: And it was all just about, like, what are the craziest things you can get away with on stage?
--:-- Corey Groh: And, you know, you would see his interest in BDSM come up on stage.
--:-- Corey Groh: He would put a woman in a cage consensually. She would agree to do this, and he would kick the cage and, you know, abuse the cage and that sort of thing.
--:-- Corey Groh: And, you know, some of the people that we spoke to that knew him in the very early days and would see this on stage said they felt uncomfortable seeing that.
--:-- Corey Groh: But very much what his idea was at the time was pushing boundaries.
--:-- Corey Groh: And the interesting thing is a lot of the people that we talked to who knew him early on saw a big separation between who Brian Warner was offstage and who Marilyn Manson was onstage.
--:-- Corey Groh: As the act got bigger and bigger, after he signed to a major label, he signed to Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor's imprint called Nothing Records.
--:-- Corey Groh: That's when he started, you know, ripping up Bibles on stage and figuring out new ways to push the buttons of the American public and get publicity.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: You talked about a lot of women in your article who accused Warner of abuse. People like Ashley Walters, his former assistant, model Ashley Morgan Smith line, Game of Thrones actress Esme Bianco, and Westworld actress Evan Rachel Wood.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And these are just a small number of names. Warner has denied all these allegations, but you spoke with a few of these women.
--:-- Jason Newman: So Esme Bianco was the first person to sue Brian Warner for sexual assault and other charges in April.
--:-- Jason Newman: It's the first of four lawsuits. Her and Brian were friends for about four years before their relationship turned romantic.
--:-- Jason Newman: One of the first meetings was Brian flying her over from the UK to the US to film a video.
--:-- Jason Newman: The video is, I want to kill you like they do in the movies.
--:-- Jason Newman: During that three-day shoot, she says that he would joke about raping her, that there was a lot of drug use, but she eventually continued the relationship.
--:-- Jason Newman: And then, according to Esme, as their relationship progressed, he would engage in sleep deprivation, in food deprivation.
--:-- Jason Newman: He would bite her. He would cut her. He would electrocute her. He would whip her without her consent.
--:-- Jason Newman: And then in their two years together you know she did allege that he had raped her multiple times
--:-- Jason Newman: She describes in the piece one incident in which Warner had wielded an axe and chased her around the apartment smashing holes in the walls, because he said that, quote, she was crowding him.
--:-- Jason Newman: And she called that a final straw moment for her. And then eventually she ended up leaving him.
--:-- Corey Groh: The thing about Esme Bianco is when they started dating, when she started dating Manson, And she wasn't famous yet.
--:-- Corey Groh: She wasn't on Game of Thrones. And it's a similar thing with Evan Rachel Wood, who was just starting out in her career at the time and wasn't super famous either.
--:-- Corey Groh: You know, there was no Westworld in sight at the time.
--:-- Corey Groh: A lot of the survivors are telling these stories about Manson selecting them, sort of, when they were very young and impressionable and maybe moldable, you know, is what they would have alleged.
--:-- Corey Groh: Model Ashley Morgan Smithline also spoke up. What is she saying? he did to her.
--:-- Corey Groh: Ashley Morgan Smithline was a model in the late 2000s who was working in Thailand, and they had met online.
--:-- Corey Groh: And it was a very similar pattern that other women have accused him of.
--:-- Corey Groh: She says that he told her, I'm the only one who understands you.
--:-- Corey Groh: Things that she says should have been warning signs, but she chalked them up in the beginning to being kindred spirits, was her quote.
--:-- Corey Groh: So he flies her to Los Angeles and she pretty soon after that moves into her apartment and says that originally, you know, they did have a consensual sexual relationship.
--:-- Corey Groh: And then at some point around 2010, she says she, quote, awoke from unconsciousness with her ankles and wrists tied together behind her back and Mr. Warner sexually penetrating her.
--:-- Corey Groh: She said that she said no multiple times and Mr. Warner told her to, quote, shut the fuck up and also be quiet.
--:-- Corey Groh: And as their relationship progressed, according to Smithline, he choked her, he strangled her, he bit her, he burned her all without her consent.
--:-- Corey Groh: He has been accused of carving his initials, MM, on part of her body.
--:-- Corey Groh: She says that he threw a Nazi knife at her and had cut her with a knife emblazoned with a swastika.
--:-- Corey Groh: She also alleged he had elbowed her in the nose, which caused a hairline fracture, and had raped her multiple times.
--:-- Corey Groh: She also said that she wasn't interested in S&M or any of those things.
--:-- Corey Groh: Those were new to her. Right.
--:-- Corey Groh: So Ashley Morgan Smithline also said that she, you know, was not into BDSM, was not into kink.
--:-- Corey Groh: And this was not something that, in that sense, started out as consensual and then went into non-consensual.
--:-- Corey Groh: She says it was non-consensual.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: So BDSM is a thing. And there are many consulting adults who enjoy this sort of bondage, discipline, domination, sadism, and masochism, that sort of sexual play.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: What is different here?
--:-- Corey Groh: Well, the fundamentals of BDSM is that it is a control relationship, and you are ceding your control to someone.
--:-- Corey Groh: And by doing that, you also have a sort of a verbal contract with somebody that, you know, there are limits, you know.
--:-- Corey Groh: if you are going to give up your control, you know, and be quote unquote abused or quote unquote taken advantage of in a BDSM relationship that, you know, there are limits to that.
--:-- Corey Groh: And so there are safe words, there are cues and sorts of things where somebody would know when to stop.
--:-- Corey Groh: And what's different here is that the women that are accusing Manson are saying that he, you know, if they did have some kind of a contract, let's say in a BDSM relationship, He violated that contract and he did not stop when he was supposed to stop.
--:-- Corey Groh: It's a thin line that I think people that don't understand the BDSM community maybe don't fully get, but there are understandings there.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: In your article, you describe Warner's apartment and something he calls the bad girl's room.
--:-- Corey Groh: It's a vocal booth, right?
--:-- Corey Groh: According to the accusers, he converts it into what is essentially just a solitary confinement cell or akin to a solitary confinement cell.
--:-- Corey Groh: You know, multiple women and multiple girlfriends have said that he would banish them to this room and sort of keep them there for hours on end.
--:-- Corey Groh: And it's a way of punishment.
--:-- Corey Groh: They said he would remove the phone. They wouldn't drink. They wouldn't eat.
--:-- Corey Groh: And because it was soundproof, you know, no one could hear them.
--:-- Corey Groh: So one of his accusers said, even if I was screaming, no one would hear me.
--:-- Corey Groh: I learned to not fight it because that was giving him what he wanted.
--:-- Corey Groh: I just went somewhere else in my head.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: The bad girl's room was not something that was that much of a secret.
--:-- Corey Groh: You know, one of his former assistants denied ever seeing any women confined in there, but he said it was common knowledge.
--:-- Corey Groh: Everybody called it that.
--:-- Corey Groh: You know, Manson in interviews would say, you know, there was one interview in 2012.
--:-- Corey Groh: They said, if anyone's bad, I can lock them in it. And it's soundproof.
--:-- Corey Groh: So he kind of cultivated that as sort of part of his bad boy shock rocker mystique.
--:-- Corey Groh: And what it turns out, according to multiple women who dated him, was that he would use it as a way to sort of psychologically torture his accusers.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: When I read this description, I couldn't help but be struck by how much of a metaphor this bad girl's room is for this character where everyone can see straight into it, see what it represents, and yet it's allowed to exist.
--:-- Corey Groh: You know, one of the ideas that Corey and I discovered in our reporting was the idea of, quote, that's Manson being Manson, or that's just Manson, where it was almost, according to the accusers, so open that it almost became acceptable.
--:-- Corey Groh: And I think that's what allowed, you know, sort of him to perpetuate this, at least according to the women that have accused him of abuse.
--:-- Corey Groh: He would joke about these things all the time.
--:-- Corey Groh: Like Phoebe Bridgers tweeted out that he joked about like, oh, that's the rape room.
--:-- Corey Groh: And she took it as a joke at the time.
--:-- Corey Groh: And it's one of these things that after women started coming forward, she tweeted that she started thinking of him differently again and that she's no longer a fan of his.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: So it's something that he always sort of couched a lot of this darkness in humor or irony or sarcasm.
--:-- Corey Groh: But it something that a lot of the survivors have told us that he was kind of allowed him to hide these things in plain sight by talking about these things and joking about them
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: To be clear what is his response to these allegations
--:-- Corey Groh: Warner has denied all claims of sexual assault
--:-- Corey Groh: He has called it quote a coordinated attack by former partners and associates of him who have weaponized the otherwise mundane details of his personal life and their consensual relationships.
--:-- Corey Groh: You know, in court filings and through his lawyer, he has said that his accusers are trying to, quote, conflate the imagery and artistry of his shock rock stage persona, Marilyn Manson, with fabricated accounts of abuse.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: So he has, since the allegations rose in February, has denied everything.
--:-- Corey Groh: Warner joked about abusing women in his interviews.
--:-- Corey Groh: And in your article, I learned that he was also abusing some men.
--:-- Corey Groh: You describe a pretty horrific scene with a young man.
--:-- Corey Groh: When Marilyn Manson was on tour in 1995, and just, you know, I want to preface this by saying this is all in his memoir, all in his book.
--:-- Corey Groh: He's very, been very open about this since his book was published in 1998.
--:-- Corey Groh: He befriended the bus driver for the headlining band, which was Danzig.
--:-- Corey Groh: And he claims the bus driver taught him the ways of debauchery.
--:-- Corey Groh: And so they would rig up things to make fans confess.
--:-- Corey Groh: So if a groupie wanted to go backstage and spend time with them, they would create these sort of experiments.
--:-- Corey Groh: And there was a young man that he wrote about again in his book and said that we stripped him naked and we put him to this device that would strangle him if he moved the wrong way.
--:-- Corey Groh: And we would have him tell us all of his deepest, darkest secrets.
--:-- Corey Groh: And they recorded some of these and they were supposed to end up on one of his EPs, Smells Like Children EP, but the label eventually said, no, this is going way too far. We can't release this.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: You spoke with several people who worked with him, and they recounted stories like the one you just told me, where he was reportedly incredibly violent.
--:-- Corey Groh: This has been going on for decades.
--:-- Corey Groh: Why wasn't his behavior taken more seriously or criticized?
--:-- Corey Groh: I think it ties into what we were talking about earlier, where he had this whole sort of bad boy persona where you sort of want these rock stars to live up to the legend.
--:-- Corey Groh: I think that there's an idea that in rock and roll, like if you go backstage, then you know what you're getting into.
--:-- Corey Groh: You know, I think that, you know, there's an essence of victim blaming a lot, I think, in rock and roll that like, if you're going to go backstage and talk to the roadies, you should know what's going to, you know, what you're going to have to do to get to the artists.
--:-- Corey Groh: So it's not just with Marilyn Manson. I'm sure it's with several people that people have been able to operate unchecked for decades.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: I think it's worth adding that there were accusations that he had physically assaulted members of his own band throughout the years.
--:-- Corey Groh: You know, one person who goes on the record in our story is Dan Cleary, who was a former keyboard and guitar tech and assistant for Manson later on.
--:-- Corey Groh: And he says that during one show, you know, Warner came up and just punched him in the back of the head and didn't explain or anything like that.
--:-- Corey Groh: He said he was just laughing about it.
--:-- Corey Groh: You know, and when we presented that to him, you know, as part of our list of allegations, a spokesperson for him didn't deny it happened, but said, quote, it's important to note the events in question happened on stage during a rock and roll show, as if to justify sort of that behavior.
--:-- Corey Groh: And that is sort of one incident among a number of incidents in which, you know, former band members have either accused him of being abusive, you know, one person had been hospitalized, Ginger Fish, who's a former drummer.
--:-- Corey Groh: And so to that extent, there is an alleged pattern of physical abuse and even emotional abuse.
--:-- Corey Groh: You know, there are band members who had said that, you know, he had emotionally abused them throughout the years and they either decided to take it or they felt it was worth it or they would just leave the band, you know, but I think that's certainly, you see a pattern there.
--:-- Corey Groh: Rock has always given a wide birth and going back to what we talked about earlier is, you know, one of the ideas that rockers and rappers are held up as deities is this idea that they can get away with things that the average mortal like me and Corey can't.
--:-- Corey Groh: And so I think when you take that idea and extrapolate it out to a much bigger degree, it can lead to what many women are accusing him of now.
--:-- Corey Groh: Something a lot of the sources told us, especially ones that worked, you know, not the women, not the survivors, but the people that worked with him in an artistic or creative capacity is that he was a fan of the word chaos and a fan of the idea of chaos.
--:-- Corey Groh: And he wanted to be an agent of chaos. And even the last record that he put out, I believe, was called We Are Chaos.
--:-- Corey Groh: One person who was present during the sessions for his Mechanical Animals album told us Manson is the kind of person who looks for weakness in people.
--:-- Corey Groh: He'd find something that would wind someone up so hard that they were getting visibly shaken and upset.
--:-- Corey Groh: And that would be the thing that he would use any time he addressed them.
--:-- Corey Groh: It was very manipulative and it was very unpleasant.
--:-- Corey Groh: Like I said, people would claim that he was just trying to wind them up and just push them as far as he could just to see what would happen.
--:-- Corey Groh: One of his accusers, Sarah McNeely, you know, she had a quote in our piece where she says, I don't know what kind of pain he's in, but he just wants to make people feel that pain over and over again.
--:-- Corey Groh: And I thought that was a very powerful quote, this idea of, according to her, not just getting pleasure in other people's pain, but just this idea of, you know, that's, according to his accusers, that's where his pleasure center was.
--:-- Corey Groh: This idea of other people being in pain because of something that he caused.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Rolling Stone put Marilyn Manson on its cover in 1997.
--:-- Corey Groh: Do you believe that the magazine in some way amplified or glamorized Marilyn Manson?
--:-- Corey Groh: I believe in some way we amplified and glamorized We 100 amplified and glamorized
--:-- Corey Groh: I agree with Jason A big part of Marilyn Manson's mythology came from his Rolling Stone cover stories.
--:-- Corey Groh: You know, it was the biggest platform. It was the biggest music magazine.
--:-- Corey Groh: In a Rolling Stone cover story, he said that he had what he considered to be a very strange relationship with his mother because it was abusive on his part.
--:-- Corey Groh: It's worth adding the headline of our story in the late 90s was Sympathy for the Devil.
--:-- Corey Groh: One of his cover stories was Love, Drugs, and Redemption in the Hollywood Hills.
--:-- Corey Groh: So, I mean, there's no question that we as an outlet and media as a whole loved it.
--:-- Corey Groh: Like, of course we glamorized it because that's the, like we said before, that was sort of the platonic ideal of what we wanted in a rock star without knowing, as we know now, what the accusations were, of course, specifically.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Since these allegations came to light, the record label that distributed two of Warner's recent albums stopped working with him.
--:-- Corey Groh: Warner's booking agency and his longtime manager dropped him as their client.
--:-- Corey Groh: Warner is not facing any criminal charges, but he is facing four civil suits based on domestic abuse allegations.
--:-- Corey Groh: And in California, there's an ongoing investigation into his conduct.
--:-- Corey Groh: So the L.A. Sheriff's Department opened up a domestic abuse investigation about two and a half weeks after the allegations first surfaced in February.
--:-- Corey Groh: They raided his home in L.A. They said that they had taken media devices and other things, but they have not revealed specifically sort of what the extent of or the update of the investigation was other than it was still an active investigation.
--:-- Corey Groh: There's currently four civil lawsuits against him.
--:-- Corey Groh: As we said before, there's Esme Bianco's, there's Ashley Walters, who is a former assistant of his.
--:-- Corey Groh: There's Ashley Morgan-Smithline, who we had talked about.
--:-- Corey Groh: And there's a fourth accuser, Jane Doe, who has accused him of sexual assault and other things.
--:-- Corey Groh: And those are still going through the courts at the moment.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: In this article, you explain how the women didn't want to publicly talk about their allegations. Why not?
--:-- Corey Groh: And what's changed?
--:-- Corey Groh: It speaks to why women would not come forward and speaks to a lot of the defenders, I think, of, well, if it was so bad, why didn't you go to the police immediately?
--:-- Corey Groh: There's that sort of line of thinking, which sort of feeds into the pattern of victim blaming when it comes to sexual assault.
--:-- Corey Groh: There are women who have said that they have received death threats from his fans.
--:-- Corey Groh: There are women that have said that they have seen cars outside their home.
--:-- Corey Groh: And just to be clear, there was no allegation that Warner had anything to do with that.
--:-- Corey Groh: And so, you know, for a lot of these women who come forward publicly, they're living in fear on a daily basis.
--:-- Corey Groh: Living in fear on a daily basis, not knowing what the outcome could be of these cases.
--:-- Corey Groh: So, you know, there's certainly a lot of good reasons why someone would not want to report anything like this.
--:-- Corey Groh: And, you know, some women choose to do.
--:-- Corey Groh: So what are we to do about this?
--:-- Corey Groh: You make the case that in some way the media and American culture helped elevate this man, this character, Marilyn Manson.
--:-- Corey Groh: Do we change the way we appreciate art?
--:-- Corey Groh: Do we accept this violence and misogyny in art as if it doesn't exist in real life?
--:-- Corey Groh: I think that what it means is that people just need to examine or question what they're looking for in art more.
--:-- Corey Groh: I don't want to impugn artists who are transgressive or doing transgressive things.
--:-- Corey Groh: I don't want to say that all artists are like this.
--:-- Corey Groh: Certainly, that's not the case.
--:-- Corey Groh: In the case of Marilyn Manson, it just seemed like from what the survivors told us, it seemed like a lot of the survivors told us he was telling us who he was all along.
--:-- Corey Groh: Adding to that, Jim DeRogatis, who is the foremost reporter on R. Kelly's allegations, He said that, and paraphrasing, you can separate the art from the artist until the art talks about the misdeeds in which someone is accused of.
--:-- Corey Groh: And with R. Kelly, you know, would talk about his transgressions in his songs.
--:-- Corey Groh: And I think Manson is a fair analog to that, that that's the point where it gets much harder to separate art from artist when it's being discussed as the art.
--:-- Corey Groh: So is he just one off extreme example of something?
--:-- Corey Groh: Or is his behavior, is Marilyn Manson indicative of something bigger within the music industry?
--:-- Corey Groh: You know, if you look at the history of people who have been accused of this, you will find a, frankly, depressing history and record of the music industry protecting, if not uplifting their own.
--:-- Corey Groh: Certainly, the allegations of R. Kelly go back to the early 90s.
--:-- Corey Groh: What I find interesting in general is in other industries in which things like this happen, you will find that within days or weeks, there will be either an independent investigation or the organization will, in effect, police its own.
--:-- Corey Groh: The music industry is not like that.
--:-- Corey Groh: You know, as someone who reports on it on a daily basis, there are not a lot of profiles encouraged in the music industry.
--:-- Corey Groh: We can forgive a lot if it is continuing to enrich our bottom line.
--:-- Corey Groh: You know, I think that's one of the things that sort of has been endemic in the industry for a long time and is sadly one of the hallmarks of it.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Thank you both for being on Apple News today.
--:-- Corey Groh: Thank you so much for having us.
--:-- Corey Groh: Thank you very much.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Jason Newman and Corey Groh's investigation for Rolling Stone is available now on Apple News.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: You can find the link on our show notes page.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: If you or someone you know is experiencing relationship abuse, you can call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-SAFE or chat online at thehotline.org.
