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Evan Rachel Wood, an American actress, has spoken out about her claimed abuse at the hands of her ex-fiancé, artist Marilyn Manson.
The 36-year-old actress appeared on Dr. Ramani Durvasula’s podcast Navigating Narcissism on Thursday, discussing about specific claimed incidents during her relationship with the 54-year-old musician.
The Dope Show singer, whose actual name is Brian Warner, has denied all sexual misconduct and abuse allegations leveled against him by Wood and others.
Wood claimed on the podcast that Manson, driven by a mound of cocaine, subjected her to a ‘continuous stream of negativity’ and a ‘non-stop barrage of words and monologues’ in his alleged efforts to break her down mentally.
‘He would keep you up and stay awake just berating you telling you everything that was wrong with the world and the people around you, everything you were doing wrong, all the ways you were failing him and failing yourself, the suspicions he had towards you, he would start wrecking the house,’ Wood said.
She said that while she was dealing with Manson’s abusive behavior, she felt like she ‘couldn’t escape and couldn’t stop’ it.
‘It’s where the brainwashing and abuse started taking place,’ she said on the podcast. ‘He wouldn’t stop until you gave in or started agreeing with everything he was saying or making the phone calls he wanted you to make.’
Wood on the podcast explained the anxiety and despair she experienced amid the relationship, saying that her only strategy in dealing with Manson was to ‘play dead’ in an effort to make herself ‘undesirable’ to him.
‘There was a moment where I was like, “I’m so afraid of this person, I’ve been threatened so many times, either with blackmail or with force and if I stay here because I’m too scared to leave, I feel like I’m dead anyway,”‘ she said.
She continued, ‘Staying felt like a death sentence, leaving also felt terrifying because something could happen to me or he could come after me. I felt like either way I feel dead, so I may as well try to escape.’
Wood said on the podcast that Manson had kept her isolated from other people for days, threatened her, punished her for minor mistakes and gaslighted her endlessly.
Wood said media coverage of her relationship with Manson, who she was linked with from 2006 until 2010, was ‘very shaming and very blaming’ toward her.
Wood said that the narrative at the time was, ‘Here’s this like sort of young harlot Lolita-type home wrecking party girl that’s come in and ruined everything,’ without any focus on the ‘somewhat inappropriate’ aspects of their early relationship.
Wood mentioned the roughly two-decade age difference between them, as well as the fact that Manson was married to burlesque dancer and model Dita Von Teese when he first began chasing her.
Manson, according to Wood, also focused his efforts on getting her to disconnect from her mother, Sara Lynn Moore, and would take notes during their conversations.
She said that Manson’s behavior was reflective of the methods cults use to control their members.
‘Cults do the same thing when they’re like, “Don’t read anything about the cult online” … it’s the same kind of psychology of up is down and down is up,’ Wood said on the podcast.
The Westworld star said on the podcast that the onslaught of stories about sexual misconduct and abuse that emerged during the #MeToo movement in late 2017 – triggered by revelations about Oscar-winning producer-turned-convicted rapist Harvey Weinstein.
Wood said ‘the weight of it all’ of the led her to began having seizures due to the stress from past trauma she claims Manson inflicted on her.
‘When I realized what a physical impact this was having on me and it was making it nearly impossible to just move about my life normally and comfortably and safely … that was such a breaking point for me,’ Wood said on the podcast.
Wood and Manson initially began seeing one another when he was 37 and she was 18.
In her HBO documentary on the topic release last year, Phoenix Rising, Wood said that Manson had physically tied her up and subjected her to torture; at one point, she said he used a whip used by Nazi forces in the Holocaust to brutalize her.
