Marilyn Manson sues Evan Rachel Wood for defamation over rape and abuse allegations
Marilyn Manson attends the 2020 Vanity Fair Oscar Party. (Axelle/ Bauer-Griffin/ FilmMagic)
Marilyn Manson has filed a defamation lawsuit against Evan Rachel Wood, who alleges he “horrifically abused” her for five years.
Wood claims that Manson, real name Brian Warner, sexually abused her from 2006 until 2011.
Having previously spoken about an unnamed abuser, in February 2021 Wood named Manson and wrote in an Instagram post: “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.”
On Wednesday (2 March), the rock singer filed a defamation suit against Wood in the Los Angeles superior court, describing Wood’s allegations as “a malicious falsehood that has derailed [his] successful music, TV, and film career”.
Following Wood’s abuse allegations, at least 15 women have accused Manson of sexual assault. He has denied everything.
Manson’s lawsuit makes multiple claims against Wood and her partner Illma Gore.
He alleges that the couple “created a fictitious email account to manufacture purported evidence that Warner was emailing illicit pornography” and impersonated an FBI agent by forging letters “to create the false appearance that Warner’s alleged ‘victims’ and their families were in danger, and that there was a federal criminal investigation of Warner ongoing”.
The lawsuit also claims that Wood and Gore “provided checklists and scripts to prospective accusers, listing the specific alleged acts of abuse that they should claim against Warner”, and that they “knowingly false statements to prospective accusers (which have since been repeated by those accusers in court filings), including the defamatory claim that Warner filmed the sexual assault of a minor”.
In her new documentary, Phonenix Rising – Part I: Don’t Fall, Wood made further allegations against Manson, claiming that she was “essentially raped on-camera” by the singer in his explicit 2007 music video “Heart-Shaped Glasses”.
But Manson’s attorney Howard King told Deadline that filmmakers had not been named in the defamation suit because they had been “duped into making a documentary based on false claims and fraudulent documents”.
King continued: “We’re filing this now because we have been able to gather an overwhelming trove of evidence – including both documents and witness statements – which proves that the stories that Evan Rachel Wood and her co-conspirator Illma Gore have been falsifying and spreading are both vindictive and demonstrably untrue.
“It’s incredibly important to differentiate between the character of ‘Marilyn Manson’ and the man Brian Warner.
“Wood’s claims may resonate because of the intentionally ‘shocking’ character of ‘Marilyn Manson’ but they simply do not reflect the truth. The manufactured facts these conspirators scripted a decade after the event never happened.”
Manson’s suit shows he is going after unspecified damages and “an order enjoining Wood and Gore from engaging in further wrongful conduct toward” him.
PinkNews contacted Evan Rachel Wood comment. Deadline, which first reported the lawsuit, said Wood and Gore did not respond to a request for comment.
