Shock rocker Marilyn Manson has denied the claims by his ex-fiancé, Evan Rachel Wood, that he raped her while on the set of a shoot for one of his videos.
In the new HBO documentary ‘Phoenix Rising’, the first part of which premiered at the Sundance film festival on January 23, Wood claims that she was given absinthe on the shoot to the point that she was almost unconscious, at which point the actress claims she was “essentially raped on camera” by Manson.
“We had discussed a simulated sex scene,” Wood says in ‘Phoenix Rising’, “but once the cameras were rolling, he started penetrating me for real. I had never agreed to that. I’m a professional actress, I have been doing this my whole life, I’d never been on a set that unprofessional in my life up until this day. It was complete chaos, and I did not feel safe. No one was looking after me.”
Marilyn Manson’s lawyer Howard King has denied Wood’s claims in a statement issued to The Guardian.
“Of all the false claims that Evan Rachel Wood has made about Brian Warner,” King says, “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.
“Evan was not only fully coherent and engaged during the three-day shoot but also heavily involved in weeks of pre-production planning and days of post-production editing of the final cut. The simulated sex scene took several hours to shoot with multiple takes using different angles and several long breaks in between camera setups.
“Brian did not have sex with Evan on that set, and she knows that is the truth.”
Since going public with her abuse allegations toward the shock rocker, more than a dozen women have come forward with similar stories about Manson, with four going on to file lawsuits.
In Phoenix Rising, Evan Rachel Wood says that learning about the testimonies from other survivors,“ was like finding out you dated a serial killer.”
“This isn’t about revenge, or, ‘He’s a monster and he needs to be punished and destroyed‘,” she insists at one point. “He’s already destroyed.”
Phoenix Rising will appear on HBO later this year.