Evan Rachel Wood claims Marilyn Manson ‘essentially raped her’ in Heart-Shaped Glasses music video
Hollywood actor explores her relationship with the disgraced musician in a new documentary
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Evan Rachel Wood has accused Marilyn Manson of “essentially [raping her] on-camera” during the filming of his 2007 video for “Heart-Shaped Glasses”.
The Golden Globe-nominated actor details her relationship with Manson, real name Brian Warner, in new documentary Phoenix Rising, which premiered last night (Sunday 23 January) at Sundance Film Festival.
Wood has accused Manson of abusing her “for years”, after she became involved with him when she was 18 and he was 38, between 2006 to 2011.
In the music video for “Heart-Shaped Glasses”, from Manson’s sixth studio album Eat Me, Drink Me, the rock musician dressed Wood in sunglasses identical to those seen on the poster from Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 film Lolita, about a man who becomes sexually obsessed with an underage girl.
The video shows Manson appearing to have sex with Wood while the couple are drenched in fake blood.
“[The glasses are] so iconic and it was meeting someone who had the sense of humour to know that, OK, people are going to make fun of the fact that it’s a Lolita-esque friendship/relationship, whatever the case might be,” Manson toldSpin magazine in 2007.
“It’s nothing like I thought it was going to be,” Wood says in the documentary, via multiple US media reports. “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,” she continues. “No one was looking after me. It was a really traumatising 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.”
Wood says in the documentary that she was “coerced into a commercial sex act under false pretences”.
“That’s when the first crime was committed against me,” she says. “I was essentially raped on-camera.”
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Wood claims that Manson was clear about how she should describe the making of the video in interviews: “I was supposed to tell people we had this great, romantic time and none of that was the truth. But I 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.”
Manson’s lawyer, Howard King, told The Independent: “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.”
King added: Brian did not have sex with Evan on that set, and she knows that is the truth.”
Read the full response here.
Wood alluded to being a domestic abuse and sexual assault survivor in several interviews over the years, but did not publicly accuse Manson by name until February last year.
“The name of my abuser is Brian Warner, known to the world as Marilyn Manson,” she wrote in a post to Instagram. “He started grooming me as a teenager and horrifically abused me for years.”
The same day that Wood shared her allegations, four other women accused Manson of mental, physical and emotional abuse, and sexual and physical violence. He has now been accused of abuse by more than 12 women, including Game of Thrones actor Esme Bianco.
Manson has denied all claims of abuse, calling them “horrible distortions of reality”.
In a 2009 interview with Spin, conducted shortly after his breakup with Wood, Manson claimed that he called Wood 158 times while self-mutilating and then blamed her for it.
“I wanted to show her the pain she put me through,” Manson said at the time. “It was like, 'I want you to physically see what you've done.’”
In the same interview, he said he had fantasies “every day about smashing [Wood's] skull in with a sledgehammer”.
Following an investigation by Rolling Stone, which spoke to a number of Manson’s accusers and those who have known him over the years, his home was raided and “media storage devices” seized by the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department in November 2021.
Part one of the two-part Phoenix Rising airs in full later this year on HBO. Elsewhere in the documentary, Wood said that Manson had an “obsession” with Hitler and called the Nazi leader “the first rock star”.
If you have been raped or sexually assaulted, you can contact your nearest Rape Crisis organisation for specialist, independent and confidential support. For more information, visit their website here.
If you or someone you know is experiencing domestic abuse, you can call the 24-hour National Domestic Abuse Helpline, run by Refuge, on 0808 2000 247, or visit their website here.