[Warning: Potentially Triggering Content]
Evan Rachel Wood is getting more candid than ever before about her abuse allegations against ex Marilyn Manson.
The Westworld star has made shocking claims about the abuse she says she suffered at the hands of the musician (real name Brian Warner), and she’s been doing so since last year. Now, she’s gone into painful detail in Amy Berg‘s new two-part documentary, Phoenix Rising, which premiered on HBO this week, alleging that Manson tied her up, beat her with a Nazi whip, and electrically shocked her genitals when she tried to break up with him. And to top it all off: he allegedly made her drink his blood, too.
While trying not to get too choked up, the actress — who was just 18 when she started dating the then-37-year-old shock rocker — recalled how he repeatedly allegedly drugged and raped her while isolating her from her family and friends over the course of their relationship, adding that he took extreme measures when she tried to leave him.
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She recounted:
“We had broken up, and he was calling me and calling me and calling me and I was trying to defuse it.”
According to Wood, she eventually went back to Manson’s house to talk things over. But the singer allegedly had sinister plans up his sleeves to get her to stay: he brought the actress to his bedroom, which is where she saw a kneeler bench, like one used for praying in church, set up in the middle of the room.
She continued:
“And I just knew. I just knew what was gonna happen. After he tied me up, and hit me over and over and over again with a whip. Which was a Nazi whip from the Holocaust, with a swatstika on it. Because I’m Jewish. And he said he was gonna hit me in the same place over and over again so that it would really hurt.”
Unfortunately, it got worse from there, as Wood claimed her ex then “shocked me with the Violet Wand on the welts.” (A Violent Wand is used in BDSM; it produces low-current, high-voltage electricity to give the body painful shocks.)
She explained:
“He shocked my private parts and it hurt so bad that I broke the kneeler in half. I jerked so hard that I broke the kneeler. And collapsed in just like a pool of tears in his arms. And I remember thinking in that moment, just tell him whatever he wants to hear. Just tell him whatever he wants to hear, and I said, ‘I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry,’ and I was begging for forgiveness, and he was cradling me and saying, ‘You understand now.’”
If that wasn’t traumatic enough, Manson allegedly proceeded to cut open the skin on his hand and make ERW drink his blood, before cutting her and drinking her blood.
She noted:
“I’m still me and I’m still here, but there was a piece of me absolutely taken. I felt it leave my body, I felt my brain change. And the world is never the same. Because everything that happens to you after that point is through the veil of this memory.”
The violence had allegedly been happening for a while by that point, as well as the performer’s obsession with Nazis.
Wood claimed Manson’s antisemitism and racism started out as “ironic,” with the musician insisting it was merely a “commentary on the Nazis” or that he was “‘taking the p**s’ out of the Nazis.”
She explained:
“And then it turns into, ‘I’m just being shocking, using the n-word. You don’t get the joke.’ Then that evolved into, ‘I’m gonna get mad at you if you don’t laugh at this joke,’ [and then] ‘I don’t trust you if you don’t make the same joke.’ And then I felt like I had to participate to prove I was loyal. That’s what kept me from coming out for a really long time, just feeling Iike I was a horrible person, and I was disgusting, and there was something wrong with me, and I was crazy.”
The effects that this kind of manipulation can have on someone are unreal.
Evan went on to confirm that Manson filled their home with Nazi propaganda when they lived together, remembering:
“At one point, over the side of the bed where I slept, he wrote ‘kill all the Jews’ on our bedroom wall.”
If that wasn’t uncomfortable enough for the Jewish actress, she said Manson made fun of her for being Jewish, and taunted her when she got upset about his antisemitism.
His Nazi infatuation allegedly worsened during the course of their relationship: ERW claimed he got new tattoos, including a swastika on his chest and a skull and bones on his arm that looks like a Totenkopf, another Nazi symbol.
Elsewhere in the doc, the 34-year-old accused Manson of drugging and raping her on several occasions. The first alleged rape came when she agreed to be in his music video for Heart-Shaped Glasses. She shared:
“We had discussed a simulated sex scene, 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.”
Explaining how the “traumatizing experience” made her feel “disgusting,” she continued:
“It was a really traumatizing experience filming the video. I didn’t know how to advocate for myself or know how to say no because I had been conditioned and trained to never talk back — to just soldier through. I felt disgusting and like I had done something shameful, and I could tell that the crew was very uncomfortable and nobody knew what to do. I was coerced into a commercial sex act under false pretenses… That’s when the first crime was committed against me and I was essentially raped on camera, [and it was] just the beginning of the violence that would keep escalating over the course of the relationship.”
Absolutely sickening.
As for the alleged drugging, Wood claimed Manson was giving her meth without telling her that’s what she was taking, as well as sleeping pills — which she alleged he would use it as an opportunity to rape her while she was unconscious.
She explained she’d be covered in scars from picking her skin due to the drug use, and eventually grew sick, throwing up every day and having trouble getting out of bed. She shared:
“This is also when he started raping me in my sleep. He would give me a pill to go to sleep, and I never knew what the pill was for. So I was always pretty out of it. So I’d wake up, I just remember doing the mental math quickly and thinking, ‘Just stay, just stay asleep, don’t move, just don’t move.’ So I would just lie limp and still until it was over, and then I swear to God, he would just fling my leg and walk out of the room.”
Just… no words.
For his part, Manson has repeatedly denied the allegations made by Wood in the documentary, and has filed a lawsuit against the actress over, he says, the “malicious falsehood” of the claims she’s made against him.
We applaud the actress for bravely telling her story.