







TW- Rape, Domestic Violence, Abuse, Intimate Partner Violence







“If you can’t hear the whole truth, you will never know true empathy, and I believe that if we have to live through it, you have to hear it.” - ERW

Today, I saw this video of Evan Rachel Wood offering testimony to support a bill called the “Survivor’s Bill of Rights.”

Listening to her testimony caused tears to stream down my face, and my entire body to shake like an autumn leaf. Her story struck me so deeply because it reminded me of my own abusive relationship. For a moment, I was transported back into that state of indescribable fear, desperation, and helplessness that created the fabric of my reality from the years 2012-2014.

“I had no idea what to do to change my situation so I went numb. And soon I couldn’t feel anything, I wasn’t alive. My self esteem and spirit were broken. I was deeply terrified and that fear lives with me to this day. What makes me more hurt and more angry than the actual rape and abuse itself, was that piece of me that was stolen that altered the course of my life.” - ERW

It is impossible to explain to someone who hasn’t been abused what it’s like, but ERW does quite a good job. These words echoed through me, it felt like they were reverberating off my bones. When I think back on my abusive relationship, it’s hard not to believe that it ruined my life. It’s hard not to believe that it ruined me. The person I was before that, and the person I am now, are incredibly different. I have still not fully rebuilt my self esteem and spirit. I still constantly question what I think and feel because my abuser manipulated and gaslighted me to a breaking point in which I lost the ability to believe myself, and believe IN myself. Although I have made significant recovery, I know that I will never be the same.

Hearing this testimony was difficult because of my experience, but what makes it even more difficult is my certainty that she was abused by Marilyn Manson. Marilyn Manson. My everything. My greatest teacher. The person who made me who I am today more than anyone else in my life.

You see, my experience in an abusive relationship was narrated by MM. I fell in love with my abuser at a MM show. Our connection was based around our mutual love and understanding of MM. The albums Eat Me, Drink Me and THe High End of Low played on repeat throughout our time together. It wasn’t until after I began to understand my relationship as the abuse that it was, that I began to notice the abusive aspects of Marilyn Manson within these albums and some of the interviews and videos surrounding them. I began to notice a bubbling of discomfort with my love of Marilyn Manson. I saw so much of him in my abuser, and so much of my abuser in him, that sometimes I would look at the posters of him on my walls and feel a confusing mix of adoration, love, and fear. The same things I felt for my abuser. I wasn’t able to listen to the those two albums for about 2 years after I ended my abusive relationship. I recultivated my love of Marilyn Manson, appreciating him for everything that he has done for me, telling myself that MM is the one thing that no one can take from me, and promising that nothing he could ever do would change the positive things he has already done for me.

As time passed, I began to speak out about my views regarding Marilyn Manson’s abusive characteristics. But much like the ways in which victims and survivors of violence are often treated, I was met with disbelief, anger, and attempts to discredit me. “You’re not a real fan,” “there’s no evidence,” “he was never found guilty of anything.” None of these people knew that Marilyn Manson is my everything, regardless of these thoughts I had of him. I learned FROM HIM that I should always be critical. That no one is perfect. That I am my own God, so I refuse to put anyone up on a pedestal be worshipped as hero while knowing that they are also human. I was only doing what he had taught me to do. I repeatedly stated that if these fans knew anything about abusive dynamics, if they had a deep understanding of his music, if they PAY ATTENTION TO WHAT HE HAS SAID, they too would see these abusive characteristics. I’ve never quite broken down all of the pieces that led me to believe that MM was an abuser. But ERW’s story was the last link in what I felt I needed to know that what I believe about MM is true. Here it is.



“My experience with domestic violence was this: toxic mental, physical and sexual abuse that started out slow, but escalated over time including threats against my life, severe gas lighting and brainwashing, waking up to the man who who claimed to love me raping what he believed to be my unconscious body. And the worst part, sick rituals of binding me up by my hands and feet to be mentally and physically tortured until my abuser felt I had proven my love for them. In this moment when I was tied up, being beaten, and being told unspeakable things, I truly felt like I could die, not just because my abuser said to me “I could kill you right now,” but because in that moment, I felt like I left my body and I was too afraid to run, he would find me.” -ERW

What most sticks out to me here is the threats against her life, the necessity of him needing her to prove her love for him, saying the words, “I could kill you right now.”

Devour, the opening track on EMDM defines MM’s view of love and death and sacrifice that she shared with ERW.

“Manson touched on the song’s inspiration and subject matter briefly in a June 2009 interview with Revolver: “It’s kind of a murder-suicide story based on the reality of my life that day. The record maybe saved me, and the person I would have killed also. If somebody says they want to be with you until they die, I take that kind of seriously. It became a song…luckily.”

The song was written 3 days before what was planned to be a dark Romeo and Juliet murder suicide. He had planned to kill himself and his lover. In a 2009 interview with Shockhound,he revealed the “would be” tragedy, explaining the situation with mild detail, quoting that he had said “I’m going to kill you first, because I don’t trust you.’

I believe that this dynamic of “until death do us part” began with this this experience between Marilyn Manson and ERW:

‘Manson says he was finally uplifted by a close friend’s morbid gesture of devotion. “She picked up a butcher’s knife and said, ‘Here, you can stab me,’” he says. “When someone was willing to drown with me, I really didn’t want to drown anymore.’”



To represent this event, in the video for Heart-Shaped Glasses off the EMDM album, after it shows a short sex scene between him and ERW, the video pans to a scene in which ERW and MM are in a car where Marilyn Manson is taking photos of ERW posing with a butcher knife. The EMDM album is widely recognized as an album similar to a diary, with the songs appearing on the album in the order they were written. The beginning of the album marks the ending of MM’s marriage with Dita Von Teese, and right after “Just a car crash away,” “Heart-Shaped Glasses” begins which introduces MM’s passionate, inflammatory relationship with ERW.



What I speculate happened here is that within the cycle of abuse, ERW finally decided to try to leave, and in response MM threatened her with murder and his own suicide because of what he perceived as loyalty and devotion within a promise to die if he died. Marilyn Manson was in such a dark place within his own mental health, that he wanted to die without her. She saved him from his suicidal ideations and deep depression with her gesture to go down with him, and now that she was leaving, he wanted to hold her to her promise.

He comments more on this dynamic in the song “15”:

“this time I won’t hesitate

to kill to protect what I believe in

this time I won’t hesitate

to kill to protect what I believe in



i can get by now

I’m not really dead

but I really needed someone to save me

leaving me alone to die

is worse than having the guts to kill me”

At this point, ERW is gone, and throughout THe High End of Low, Marilyn Manson’s bitterness over ERW is apparent. These lyrics within 15 represent another veiled threat on her life, as well an attempt to cause her to feel guilt over "abandoning” him in his pain. This bitterness, and expression of abusive characteristics, is also seen in the song “WOW” and in the video for “Running to the Edge of the World.”

“i was happy for ‘awhile’ and i stopped being scared and ashamed to say what’s on my mind.

but you thought that I’d change after 'awhile’ and said,

"you better treat me different, or else!”

"or else" seems like a stupid,

fucking thing to say to someone like me

someone like me? i am worse

than what you think you’d catch from me

'complicated’ is understated.

did you stop and take a look at who you fell in love with?

at who you fell in love with?”

-”WOW” by MM

WOW was probably the most difficult song on the album for to hear because it so perfectly illustrates MM’s complete lack of accountability for the ways in which he treated ERW. It smacks of victim blaming - ERW “should have known better” - how could she ever expect MM to change his behavior? She knew who she was falling in love with, and chose to fall in love with him.Because an 18 year old girl has it all figured out, right? And the 47 year old man she is dating is the one being taken advantage of. The video for WOW is a loop of ERW dropping a strap on a dress she is wearing.



The story continues with the video for “Running to the Edge of the World.” The lyric “Together as one, against all others” is a throwback to the Heart-Shaped Glasses video where at the end, MM says “Together as one” and ERW responds with “Against all others.”

There is one specific verse in Running that I looked back on after exiting my abusive relationship that helped me find some clarity:

“And everyone

turned their backs

because they knew

when we held on tight

to each other,

that we were something

fatal

that fell into the wrong hands.”

These words represented to me how my abuser and I’s relationship was so intense, so tightly knit, and so clearly toxic, that everyone tried to turn their backs (or they tried to help me in very wrong ways). My abuser and I were in it too deep. I couldn’t get out, our love was passionate and all-encompassing, but it was so very, very fatal. I could actually listen to this song and mourn the ending of a relationship in which I had loved more passionately than I ever had, even though it had destroyed me.

But then there was the video.

“It opens with Manson, dressed in a white shirt singing the song to a camera while partially concealing himself with a curtain. As the bridge and outro of the song play, he beats a woman to death, speculated to represent Evan Rachel Wood, played by Kelly Polk.”

The Manson fandom was quick to absolve Marilyn Manson of any wrongdoing. People denied that the woman in the video was ERW. People said that the video was fine because he didn’t actually hurt ERW in it. People said that it was probably a good thing that MM made this video instead of actually hurting ERW in real life. As if ERW deserved to be hurt for “breaking his heart” and “abandoning him” when actually she was just a young woman who had been scrambling in and out of the relationship for 4 years. You know, it takes approximately 7 times leaving for someone to stay left when they are trying to leave an abusive relationship.

So here we have the story, the evidence I have seen, that caused me to believe that Marilyn Manson is an abuser. ERW’s description of being afraid for her life is literally representative of what MM openly shared in his music, videos, and interviews about their relationship. It doesn’t get much more clear than that for me. I very well may be wrong about some of this. All of this. But it really doesn’t feel like it.

The question is, what do I do with this? I am a Mansonite. A Feminist. A survivor. How do I manage to live while being all of these things? How do I live with the fact that my greatest teacher committed acts of violence against a young woman similar to what were committed against me? The fear in ERW’s voice during the proceeding was palpable. It danced with my own fear that I still carry. It brought up a memory I have of my abusive partner joking around about tying me to the bed and lighting the house on fire. They said that it was a joke. But it didn’t feel like one. Marilyn Manson taught me about duality, about light and dark. At the age of 19, I realized that I was a walking antithesis. I still feel this way, and it’s because I accept that there is no overcoming the light or the dark, that they must always exist together. If you try to extinguish one, you’re ultimately being disingenuous to yourself. Which is funny to me, since people believe that I’m being disingenuous because they don’t get how I can be a comfortable combination of things that are seemingly opposite of each other.

In the song, “I Have to Look up Just to See Hell”, MM says “The light shines in the darkness/but the darkness will never understand it.” In this way, I feel like the pupil has outshone the teacher because I have come to know that the darkness and the light can understand each other, but only if you learn that you’re made of both, simultaneously and continuously. Your darkness and light will only understand each other if you accept that idea.

As a result of this concept, I have realized that although my heart aches because of what I know my greatest teacher has done, I also know that Marilyn Manson grapples with his light and his dark. I am disgusted knowing that he could hurt someone the way my abuser hurt me. Perhaps his actions are unforgivable, and I’m not sure if I’ll ever look at him the same way again. But unlike the many fans who refuse to see him as something less than a hero or a God, I will see him as the person he is. A damaged, sad, lonely man who is a victim of his own traumas. A man who sometimes does terrible things and makes mistakes. What I won’t do is forgive him, what I will do is hold him accountable through expressing my ideas through the rest of his fan base. I can only hope that he will come to some sort of realization in which he accepts that what he did was abusive and wrong - my abusive partner did.

But in the meantime, I will try to ignore the spiral heart on my abdomen that I wear as a reminder that “Love is the only thing strong enough to destroy me” (as MM said in an interview during the EMDM/THEOL era). Perhaps I’ll turn it into a flesh removal one day instead to represent the strength I have rebuilt over the years that will not allow me to ever be destroyed by “love” ever again. And I will continue to see my triptych tattoo and my Golden Age of Grotesque era M’s as representative of the times in my life in which I learned the most about myself, through the art of this man who has meant everything to me. I will coexist within my dark and light feelings surrounding Marilyn Manson because that is what I have done for the majority of my life. That is what he taught me.



