In the winter of 2016, the legal battle between Dr. Luke and his former protégée Kesha Sebert, once known professionally as Ke$ha, dominated music-industry news. Kesha has alleged that over the decade of their collaboration—which produced chart-topping hits such as “Tik Tok” and “Die Young”—the producer abused her both verbally and sexually. In a civil lawsuit filed in hopes of voiding her contractual obligations, Kesha made a string of nightmarish allegations, including that she was once given what Dr. Luke called “sober pills” and woke up the next day naked in his bed without memory of the night before.

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Dr. Luke has denied all charges, tweeting at one point that Kesha was “like my little sister”; he’s suggested the charges stem from a misguided attempt at a more favorable contract renegotiation. In February, a New York Supreme Court judge denied an injunction which would have allowed Kesha to release music out from under the jurisdiction of Dr. Luke’s Sony-backed Kemosabe Records.

This is a story that, if it didn’t feel so horrible, would sound clichéd. Kesha was 18 when Luke signed her, an aspiring starlet from Nashville with a country music background and a lovely natural singing voice. She dropped out of high school, moved to L.A. When she broke through a few years later, it was as an unbathed, whiskey-loving, quasi-rapping delinquent.

Dr. Luke was a protégé once, too. His mentor was Max Martin, the Swedish songsmith who has dominated the pop landscape for nearly two decades. From the outset, Martin was eager for total control: Robyn, the dance-music experimentalist, was in the Martin camp as a teenager, but bristled under his command and often shook off his directives (“I really wanted to stand on my own two feet,” she would later say). In the late ’90s, Jive Records introduced Martin to their new artist: the then-unknown, 15-year-old Britney Spears. And he found his blank canvas.

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All those years later, Luke would too. He’d crafted smash hits before, for Kelly Clarkson and Katy Perry. But Kesha was the first act that Luke had discovered and developed himself; to Luke, this seemed to mean he had a natural ownership over Kesha’s career. And that’s where the svengali archetype really kicks in. We may never know the details of Dr. Luke’s alleged sexual assault. But we can understand the dynamic at play in this contentious relationship: it’s that of a powerful, highly connected older man and a younger woman being denied her agency.

Kesha’s lawsuit describes a working relationship in which she had no true control over her creative choices or her public persona. Kesha says Dr. Luke made his control explicitly clear: during one spat, according to an affidavit, he icily told her that he could “manipulate my voice…in his computer…to say whatever he wanted.” And when taking aim at Kemosabe, the lawsuit paints the record label as less of an unwitting participant and more of a pimp. The label, the suit says, “provided Dr. Luke with unfettered and unsupervised access to vulnerable female artists beginning their careers…who would be totally dependent upon Dr. Luke for success.”

This is a formulation that is maddeningly easy to grasp. Because this is how our pop music naturally functions: the star at the front of the stage dancing and singing gets the mass adulation and the magazine covers; the operator behind the curtain maintains the control. This is how we—the engaged fans, informed as to the full machinations of the song machine—generally believe the best pop music is made.

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Svengalis are persuasive not just because they promise money and fame; they are persuasive as well because they promise grandness. That’s the currency of pop. An aspiring pop star doesn’t just want red-carpet glitz: they want the stature, the legacy, the iconicity that pop can grant.

An actor can dazzle millions with a vulnerable debut performance. A novelist can find awards and audience with direct, thinly-veiled memoir. But the pop star, we know, never just arrives fully formed. Even when the pop star’s rallying cry is individualism above all else, we know, there has been a process.

Which means the string-puller—the one who orchestrates the process—is elemental. In other artistic fields, the svengali occurs regularly. In pop, the svengali is baked into the system.