Front Porch Step a.k.a. singer/songwriter Jake McElfresh recently spoke with Billboard for a tell-all interview regarding the controversy surrounding him. He covered everything from specific instances of sexual allegations to his multiple suicide attempts and more. Billboard was in contact with three underage girls for the story, whose names were kept concealed. Screenshots of explicit text messages were obtained and placed in the piece. “I was definitely a womanizer,” he confessed. “I’m horribly sorry if I hurt anyone, but I never intended to. I just want to say, on paper: I’m not a pedophile. I’m not a rapist. I’m not a monster.” At the time of the article's posting, no criminal charges have been filed against McElfresh.

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You can read excerpts from the interview below.

On a specific sexual allegation:

The first time Carina (not her real name) met McElfresh was at a Front Porch Step show on Feb. 23, 2014. (Billboard has given his underage accusers pseudonyms because they are minors.) In a December 2014 Tumblr post, the teenager assigns herself responsibility for how the flirtation began: During his set in Boston, the then-16-year-old tweeted about wanting to have sex with him. (“It was meant to be a joke, but in a way, not,” she writes.) The next day, Front Porch Step followed her on Twitter, then McElfresh (22 at the time) direct-messaged her. Within a week, he had given her his number. “You’re not going to post everywhere about it [sic] are you? Haha,” he texted after midnight on March 1. “Nono don’t worry,” she reassured him. By the next day, he had already become rueful about her age, typing at 3 a.m., “You are too young for me.”

That didn’t stop McElfresh from calling her his girlfriend or asking the high-schooler for naked photos. (Her compromise was underwear selfies.) “He was very controlling and would send dirty messages to me a lot,” says Carina now over the phone. Screenshots of texts she never posted online, but provided to Billboard, illustrate this explicitly. (One: “Baby shut the f— up and come ride me.” Another: “I just want to bend you over and destroy you. Ughhh send pics baby.”) “He sent me two photos of his penis. He would tell me he could [ejaculate] to pictures of me. He would also call me, masturbating.”

On a seperate occurance:

Another 16-year-old, Elizabeth posted one of his texts online: “If I’m single when you turn 18, I’m just going to marry you.” Another: “I’m gonna go find a girl to bring to [her home region] and get a hotel and me and her are going to tie you to a bed and have our way with you.”

“I did say that,” McElfresh admits to Billboard. “It does make me sound like some freak that’s going to go attack this girl. That was a mutual conversation, that’s something that she wanted to do, that she wanted to happen. Let’s put it this way: None of these girls were like, ‘Hey, Jake, I don’t want to text you like this, I don’t want to do this.’ It was always consensual. If anybody told me, ‘Hey, you are going too far,’ or ‘This is really inappropriate,’ I’d be like, ‘Oh, sorry, I’ll stop.’ ”

On his upbringing:

“I've probably seen more psychiatrists in my life than Gene Simmons f—ed girls,” confided McElfresh last fall in a podcast interview. Growing up, he was bullied, told he looked like he had Down syndrome. “People always picked at my appearance. I’ve always had messed-up teeth, and it made me feel really self-conscious around anybody, let alone women. I’m scared of women. I always think they hate me or they can do so much better than me.” So when young women fawned over his music, everything changed. “It wasn’t, ‘Oh, I have all these girls to talk to now’ — it was all these girls started talking to me. I was just like, awesome.”

On his suicide attempts:

When McElfresh was 10, his father left for a woman down the street. His parents divorced and he tried to jump out of a window, but his mother intervened. The second time he tried to kill himself, he was 18, driving fast, and contemplated smashing his car into a pole. A minivan approached, so he swerved out of the way and barreled into a cornfield. “If I had done it, I could have killed kids, or a whole family,” he says. “I was sitting in this cornfield, and I started bawling my eyes out. I went home and told my mom I needed help. I sought out therapy for suicide.”

On McElfresh’s current state:

McElfresh, who’s moved to Nashville, wants people to know he’s trying to become “a better person and a better man.” That he’s talking publicly now because, “I have to not sit with my head in the sand and let people say whatever they want about me.” That he’s not trying to make excuses. “I’m not victimizing myself against the girls that made the accusations, because I made my bed when it comes to things like that. If those girls truly believe that I hurt them, then that’s their truth. I can’t take that away from them.” He pauses, bites his lip and sighs. “I didn’t realize the gravity of what I was doing.”