Evan Rachel Wood Alleges Marilyn Manson Raped Her In Music Video Shoot
About a year ago, the actor Evan Rachel Wood came forward to claim that her ex Marilyn Manson had physically, sexually, and emotionally abused her when the two were together. Wood met Manson when she was 18 and he was 36. They were briefly engaged. Before last year, Wood had talked about being raped and abused by an ex. In an Instagram statement last year, amidst a number of other women alleging that Warner had abused them, Wood wrote:
The name of my abuser is Brian Warner, also known to the world as Marilyn Manson. He started grooming me when I was a teenager and horrifically abused me for years. I was brainwashed and manipulated into submission.
At the time, Manson denied everything. He’s now under investigation on sexual assault charges.
As previously reported, the first part of Phoenix Rising, director Amy Berg’s two-part documentary about Evan Rachel Wood, was selected for the Sundance Film Festival, which has gone virtual this year. The film had its premiere last night, and as Rolling Stone reports, it goes into harrowing detail about Wood’s past with Manson.
In Phoenix Rising, Wood says that Manson raped her on camera in the video for his 2007 song “Heart-Shaped Glasses”:
It’s nothing like I thought it was going to be. We’re doing things that were not what was pitched to me. We had discussed a simulated sex scene, but once the cameras were rolling, he started penetrating me for real. I had never agreed to that…
It was complete chaos. I did not feel safe. No one was looking after me. It was a really traumatizing experience filming the video. I felt disgusting and that I had done something shameful and I could tell that the crew was uncomfortable and nobody knew what to do.
I was coerced into a commercial sex act under false pretenses. That’s when the first crime was committed against me. I was essentially raped on-camera.
Wood also says that she didn’t tell anyone at the time because she “was scared to do anything that would upset Brian in any way. The video was just the beginning of the violence that would keep escalating over the course of the relationship.” Both parts of Phoenix Rising will air on HBO later this year.
UPDATE: Manson’s attorney Howard King has made a statement denying Wood’s allegations, claiming that Manson “did not have sex with Evan on that set, and she knows that is the truth.”
Of all the false claims that Evan Rachel Wood has made about Brian Warner, her imaginative retelling of the making of the “Heart-Shaped Glasses” music video 15 years ago is the most brazen and easiest to disprove, because there were multiple witnesses. Evan was not only fully coherent and engaged during the three-day shoot but also heavily involved in weeks of pre-production planning and days of post-production editing of the final cut. The simulated sex scene took several hours to shoot with multiple takes using different angles and several long breaks in between camera setups.
If you or someone you know is suffering from sexual violence, please contact RAINN or call the National Sexual Abuse Telephone Hotline at 1-800-656-4673.