Marilyn Manson has reportedly filed a lawsuit against his ex-fiancée and actress Evan Rachel Wood over her allegations of sexual abuse.
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 while filming the 2007 music video for “Heart-Shaped Glasses” to the point where 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 denied Wood’s claims in a statement issued to The Guardian, stating: “Of all the false claims that Evan Rachel Wood has made about Brian Warner, 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.”
According to The Blast, in his lawsuit against Wood, Manson accuses his ex-fiancée of intentional infliction of emotional distress, defamation, computer fraud, and impersonation over the Internet.
The documents, which were filed on Wednesday morning (March 2) in the Los Angeles Superior Court, state: “This action arises from the wrongful and illegal acts done in furtherance of a conspiracy by Defendant Evan Rachel Wood and her on-again, off-again romantic partner, Defendant Ashley Gore, a/k/a Illma Gore, to publicly cast Plaintiff Brian Warner, p/k/a Marilyn Manson, as a rapist and abuser—a malicious falsehood that has derailed Warner’s successful music, TV, and film career.”
In the documents, Manson accused Wood of impersonating “an actual agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation by forging and distributing a fictitious letter from the agent, to create the false appearance that Warner’s alleged ‘victims’ and their families were in danger, and that there was a federal criminal investigation of Warner ongoing. They provided checklists and scripts to prospective accusers, listing the specific alleged acts of abuse that they should claim against Warner.”
The documents further allege that Wood “made knowingly false statements to prospective accusers (which have since been repeated by those accusers in court filings), including the defamatory claim that Warner filmed the sexual assault of a minor.”
Wood, who was in a relationship with Manson from mid-2006 until early 2011, claims in the “Phoenix Rising” documentary that the music video shoot was “the first crime [he] committed against me.”
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.”