Outside the Honda Center in Anaheim in early September, a group of a dozen or so protesters shouted at black-clad Marilyn Manson fans as they filed into the arena.
This was Manson’s first tour in years, after at least four women alleged in civil suits and other court filings that the singer 55, sexually and physically assaulted them. Manson, born Brian Warner, has denied all their claims.
“You’re supporting a rapist!” one female protester yelled. “He tortures and rapes women!”
“It’s just brazenly siding with an accused rapist,” said Caroline Heldman, an activist who organized the protest outside Manson’s Honda Center show this month. “I’ve never seen a more blatant example of profit over decency.”
(Leanne Lagoyda)
“They were asking for it!” A male Manson fan yelled back, perhaps in jest, but with enough fury that a shoving match broke out between him and the crowd outside.
Since 2021, Manson’s old record label and agency cut ties, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department raided his L.A. home and at least a dozen women came forward with claims against him. The famously transgressive artist was, to many rock fans, now synonymous with real violence.
Manson is no longer going away quietly.
On Nov. 22, he’ll release a new album, “One Assassination Under God – Chapter 1.” His return has sparked outrage from women who have alleged abuse and activists who are aghast that Manson is performing in arenas again.
“It’s so wild that Manson’s on this tour and he already has a new record label,” said Caroline Heldman, an activist who organized the protest outside Manson’s Honda Center show this month. “It’s just brazenly siding with an accused rapist. I’ve never seen anything like it, or a more blatant example of profit over decency.”
“I wonder what it is about Manson that makes it hard for people to give him up,” Heldman asked. “It really speaks to depths of how little we care about sexual violence in this culture, and how little his fans care.”
Manson’s attorney, Howard King, described the allegations to The Times as “lurid claims” with “three things in common — they are all false, alleged to have taken place more than a decade ago and part of a coordinated attack by former partners and associates of Mr. Warner who have weaponized the otherwise mundane details of his personal life and their consensual relationships into fabricated horror stories.”
“Mr. Warner vehemently denies any and all claims of sexual assault or abuse of anyone,” King added.
Marilyn Manson and Evan Rachel Wood (Photo by Eric Charbonneau/WireImage for Disney Pictures)
(E. Charbonneau)
Most prominent among Manson’s accusers has been “Westworld” actor Evan Rachel Wood, who was in a romantic relationship with Manson for three years. After she came forward, Manson sued the actor for defamation. In an anti-SLAPP filing this year, Wood alleged: “For years, Plaintiff Brian Warner raped and tortured Defendant Evan Rachel Wood and threatened retaliation if she told anyone about it.” A judge threw out portions of Manson’s defamation suit in August, though the suit is ongoing.
In 2021 actor Esmé Bianco sued Manson, alleging sexual assault, sexual battery and human trafficking. The two settled Bianco’s lawsuit in 2023. The same year, Manson settled a suit with a Jane Doe alleging “forced oral and vaginal rape.”
Manson’s former assistant, Ashley Walters, recently revived a lawsuit against Manson alleging sexual assault and harassment. Hearings are scheduled for 2025.
In November 2021, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department raided Manson’s home after a nearly two year investigation into the assault allegations. In 2022, the Sheriff’s Department gave its investigation to the Los Angeles County district attorney, though Manson has not been charged.
Wood and Bianco’s claims of abuse helped to spur the passage of California’s Phoenix Act, which extends the statute of limitations on domestic violence to five years, so survivors have more time to come forward. Two recent documentary series, Wood’s own “Phoenix Rising” and “Marilyn Manson: Unmasked,” explore the many claims against him.
Nonetheless, Manson’s comeback is underway.
After his old label, Loma Vista, dropped and disavowed him, he signed to the underground metal label Nuclear Blast and released new music. On this arena tour, he opened for the hard rock group Five Finger Death Punch.
For the women who have accused Manson of assault, seeing him back onstage playing to adoring crowds is frightening and demoralizing.
“If he doesn’t go to prison or get in any trouble for what he’s done, how do other survivors feel?” said Bianca Kyne, who alleged in a 2023 lawsuit that Manson sexually assaulted her multiple times in the 1990s, beginning when she was a minor. “If the most obvious case gets off scot-free, this must destroy the hope of women who have been assaulted by other people in the music industry.”
“If he doesn’t go to prison or get in any trouble for what he’s done, how do other survivors feel?” asked Bianca Kyne, who has sued Marilyn Manson alleging sexual assault. Manson has denied all claims.
(Anderson Advocates)
Manson is “as vile and violent as he is cunning,” said Jeff Anderson, Kyne’s attorney in her lawsuit against Manson. “He’s a predator that presents more of a danger to youth than few I’ve encounters in 40 years of working with survivors.”
Manson attorney Howard King said, in a statement about Kyne, that “Brian Warner does not know this individual and has no recollection of ever having met her 28 years ago. He certainly was never intimate with her. She has been shopping her fabricated tale to tabloids and on podcasts for more than three years. But even the most minimal amount of scrutiny reveals the obvious discrepancies in her ever-shifting stories as well as her extensive collusion with other false accusers.”
Kyne spoke before the Anaheim City Council and unsuccessfully asked officials to stop Manson’s show. “That one of hardest things I’ve ever done. I prepared a speech, but I broke down in tears when trying to tell them how I felt,” Kyne said. ”It’s sad, I felt like maybe I was heard, but it wasn’t going to make a difference.”
The Anaheim protesters were met with a small group of live-streaming counter-protesters, who held signs calling the allegations against Manson a ”#MeToo hoax.”
Kristen Lacefield, a YouTuber known as Colonel Kurtz, called the claims against him “a longstanding hoax that’s been perpetuated for almost four years,” citing former Manson accuser Ashley Morgan Smithline recanting her allegations.
“The persona of Marilyn Manson is different from the real person,” Lacefield said. “This man is not guilty of what he’s being accused of.”
In Anaheim, Manson fans seemed aware of the myriad allegations, lawsuits and criminal investigations against him. Most were conflicted but said their love for his music outweighed qualms about his conduct.
NEW YORK – JUNE 1995: Marilyn Manson performs on the last episode of the “Jon Stewart Show” in June 1995 in New York City, New York (L-R: Ginger Fish, Marilyn Manson, Madonna Wayne Gacy, Daisy Berkowitz). The band were the musical guests on the show. (Photo by Catherine McGann/Getty Images)
(Catherine McGann/Getty Images)
“My first concert was seeing him in 1999 at this venue,” said Ozma Stasinski, of Long Beach. “I’m a steadfast fan. I know there’s some controversy, but things are never as they seem. If he was like ‘Hey come back to my place for drinks,’ I’d probably say, ‘Maybe not.’ But he’s had his issues and he’s come back, he looks beautiful. I can separate the art from the artist.”
Jeff Witt, of Fullerton, first saw Manson in 1994 at the Universal Amphitheater. “The way society is now, everyone’s guilty before they’re tried,” he said. “This guy’s been crucified. I know he has a bad reputation, but I can’t say anything bad about him until he’s been proven guilty.”
Even younger female fans said they weighed the allegations against the impact of his art.
“I don’t think anything excuses [abuse],” said Alyssa, a young fan in a Manson T-shirt who declined to give her last name. “But Chris Brown beat the f— out of Rihanna and people still love him. I do believe that Manson has good music, and I’m going to listen to good music. When you have someone into the shock factor, you’ve got to expect the shock.”
When Manson took the Honda Center stage before strobe-lit inverted crosses, he snarled and strutted as he sang “We Know Where You F— Live,” a menacing recent single (one that his accusers said they found unnerving). Between songs, he staked his claim on his fans: “Nobody’s gonna take you away from me, I’m not f— disposable!” he yelled before playing “Disposable Teens.”
Later, before his ‘90s hit “Tourniquet,” he alluded to the allegations, telling the crowd that, “After all the hatred and lies beating me down, there’s one thing I can believe in, and that’s you.”
Laina Dawes, a metal scholar and author of “What Are You Doing Here?,” said that Manson correctly intuited that his fans would welcome him back.
“Right now is the best time for disgraced heavy metal musicians to come back into the limelight,” metal scholar Laina Dawes said. “We’re now in a post-Me Too era, when people are retracting from taking issues like assault seriously.
(Leanne Lagoyda)
“Right now is the best time for disgraced heavy metal musicians to come back into the limelight,” Dawes said. “We’re now in a post-Me Too era, when people are retracting from taking issues like assault seriously. If you listen to Manson’s new song ‘Raise the Red Flag,” It’s him saying ‘You need to apologize not me, I’m not apologizing to you.’ ”
The song’s lyrics are clear: “I don’t give a f— if you say you’re sorry / I won’t accept your surrender,” he sings. “It’s time to beat up the bullies / And wash the bull’s-eye off my back / My red flag is your white one soaked in blood.”
Manson cast his latest backing band with a female guitarist, Reba Meyers of the Grammy-nominated band Code Orange. Representatives for Code Orange did not respond to requests for comment on the Manson tour, though Meyers wrote on Instagram, “I’m proud to represent the growth, confidence, forgiveness, humanity, and change that comes with this, and to be up there with such talented mother—. Everyone is aiming for growth and not stagnation. World needs that attitude right now.”
Musical artist Marilyn Manson, whose legal name is Brian Hugh Warner, sits in Belknap Superior Court, Monday, Sept. 18, 2023, in Laconia, N.H. Manson, who was charged with charged with two misdemeanor counts of simple assault, was accused of approaching a videographer at his 2019 concert in New Hampshire and allegedly spitting and blowing his nose on her.(AP Photo/Charles Krupa)
(Charles Krupa / Associated Press)
Dawes said that Manson hiring Meyers was a smart, if cynical, move for both.
“I don’t know what that woman was thinking,” Dawes said of Meyers. “She’s a very talented woman, one of very few in underground metal who has made a name for herself, and that’s so disappointing. This elevates her as a musician, but why put yourself in that position? Why tie your young career to [him]?”
It’s unclear what market remains for Manson as a headliner and festival act.
Dave Brooks, Billboard’s senior director of live music and touring, said that based on ticket sales, this Live Nation-promoted tour with Five Finger Death Punch was doing “OK at best. Manson has done really well in California historically, especially as part of package tours, so the fact that some of these shows are tanking is not great for him.”
Yet Kanye West, another controversial artist and a Manson ally, has returned to touring and headlining festivals like Rolling Loud. Brooks believes that many promoters “will take a chance on anyone if they think they will sell tickets,” he said.
Manson’s tour may best thrive among revanchist, Me Too-skeptical crowds in the red-leaning areas he once scandalized.
“I don’t think talent buyers and promoters and venues care that much about Me Too,” Brooks said. “But it’s really hard to tell where fans are at. Until he does a small headline show or a real co-headline run, its hard to know.”
For the women who allege they were assaulted and abused by Manson, his return to stages underscores fears that the music industry does not listen to them, and will support artists that make money no matter what they’re accused of.
“He’s never changed. The only thing left that he’s truly afraid of,” Kyne said, “is going to prison.”
