As we explore the accusations made against Marilyn Manson please keep in mind that the purpose here is to evaluate everything individually. With someone like Marilyn Manson that has deliberately been pushing the edge of entertainment for 30 years and has not been secretive about his wild and obscene lifestyle, it's very easy to take things he has published or done over this time and point to them to try to confirm allegations. A soundbite here, or a sentence there. He is definitely an easy target.
It is for these reasons I have decided to take the approach to covering this that I have, to try to replicate the context and environment around the work and the accusations so that we are not retroactively punishing someone for yesterday's actions on today's morals based merely on allegations. This happened to Nolan Bushnell by the #MeToo movement and despite them being totally in the wrong they have never even apologized and in my books that is abuse, too.
Now I deliberately left off where I did in the last post as I did not want to begin exploring the accusations in part 1 of this piece. The majority (99%) of the accusations take place between 2006 and 2014 which fits my analysis so far. One accusation takes place during the Smells Like Children tour. Now before we cover this one accusation I do want to make the point that there are a lot of stories from this point in time floating around.
This was the time when numerous rumors about his concerts were occurring, not to mention intense scrutiny. He was reported to have had a rib removed (due to the cuts on his stomach from performances). Rumors were made that they sacrificed animals, and that he killed Trent Reznor's dog Maisie, and these rumors are still circulating and being accepted as fact today despite all being false. Also at this time Manson was not the powerhouse and protected or the household name he is today.
The other aspect on this I would like to point out is that at the time a lot of crazy stuff was happening at his concerts, and he was certainly having sex with a lot of women, that only 1 potential story about this time has come out while numerous from the 2006-2014 era have come out is definitely noteworthy.
Marilyn Manson has always reveled in confusion and in multiple interviews that took place later he is fond of saying art is a question mark. This also unfortunately makes it difficult to determine what is real, and what is false. Information from the time is not very accurate, the internet was not around and most reporting at the time was either mainstream, or word of mouth.
That being said it's also not hard to see this accusation being true and in one of the interviews in the last post Manson mentions how parents are paying him to manhandle their 14 year old boys and girls. Was this a reference to his shock value or something more? I can not say. The accuser does claim to have physical evidence but has not shared it.
The accusation is made by actress Bianca Allaine and is reported to have started happening at his Dallas Texas concert in 1995.
A post was also made by her directly on Facebook, which a Twitter user screenshot:
— Kelly (@kellyblaus) February 7, 2021
Obviously the most concerning part of this accusation is that he was sleeping with numerous underage women. The sex parties and such are not surprising, nor are the drugs, as he has admitted to those frequently and while unfortunate she does say in her post she thought it was consensual, at the time, though if she were underage her consent is not actually granted. One other noteworthy thing she says is that "Marilyn Manson is a sadist".
There is room for both concern and doubt of this accusation given how serious it is but with no other stories to go by from this era except those fabricated by Manson himself (we will get into that a bit later when we cover the autobiography) I will be excluding this accusation from the overall analysis until more details are available.
Understanding sex in the "goth" culture at the time is also important, here is a good overview.
(Also just FYI I was never personally a "goth", I liked the punk and grunge scenes)
One of Marilyn Manson's most infamous shows took place during this tour in San Francisco. The Smells like Children tour had a new set list from Portrait of an American Family, along with one of my favorite covers Gary Numan's Down in the Park and of course Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This). It also featured some early renditions of music that would go on to Antichrist Superstar.
The experimentation, rumors, and antics of the Smells Like Children tour would set the stage for some of his wildest performances during the Antichrist Superstar era.
The process of writing Antichrist Superstar was chaotic, he has described the mountains of cocaine, sleep deprivation, pain, that the band subjected themselves to. This is the extent that Marilyn Manson has gone to put into his albums and performances. An interesting note in one article that describes the process. Please do read the full article but for the sake of later aspects I'll be addressing I feel this needs to be pointed out specifically here.
6. Sometimes even Manson wonders why he's doing the shit he's doing
As Manson's image of debauchery and inhibition grew, so did his sense that he needed to live up to that image. As a result, he sometimes found himself engaging in behavior that he wasn't even into at all, just to be "dirty." By way of illustration, the rocker shared the following lovely story in The Long Road out of Hell. One night, Manson went to the nightclub The Hideout with his then-girlfriend, Missi, and bumped into a girl who had given him oral sex the year before. When he drunkenly left the bar to take a leak, the woman slipped into the bathroom with him, rushed to the toilet and urinated. Manson looked away but she urged him to take a look at a ring inserted through the hood of her clitoris. She said she got the piercing when she was 15 and he wrote that he was disgusted by the "reddened, infected flesh" around it. Then, she took out a small Ziploc baggie of shitty cocaine and Manson snorted a bunch. What followed was motivated by neither love, nor lust, but rather sheer perversity. "I thrust my hand down her pants and violently yanked the ring on the hood of her clitoris, making her yell in pain, surprise or delight," he wrote. "Then I thrust my thumb inside her, bending my middle finger around her and ramming it up her asshole. 'Why am I doing this?' I thought to myself. I wasn't trying to turn her or myself on. I was just trying to be dirty. The situation seemed to call for it. I could have just as easily stuck my hand in a garbage can and accomplished the same thing."
His girlfriend at the time Missi is mentioned several places and would overlap with the time of the accusation by Bianca Allaine. A number of other bad events occurred for Manson in this time also described in that article pushing him towards more experimentation with pain "to test my pain threshold because my emotional one had already been crossed."
(continues in part 3...)
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Richard Fantin is a self-taught software developer who has mostly throughout his career focused on financial applications and high frequency trading. He currently works for CenturyLink
Nazayh Zanidean is a Project Coordinator for a mid-sized construction contractor in Calgary, Alberta. He enjoys writing as a hobby on topics that include foreign policy, international human rights, security and systemic media bias.
