Blood on the Dance Floor’s Dahvie Vanity Accused of Sexually Assaulting Multiple Women, Many While They Were Underage
In order to protect their privacy, all of the women in the following story will be identified only by a first name, some of which are aliases. No other details of their stories have been changed.
Tye was in the tenth grade the first time she met Dahvie Vanity, one half of the popular electro/ scenecore/ self-proclaimed “death pop” duo Blood on the Dance Floor. They’d started communicating, first via Facebook and eventually by text, in December of 2011, when she was already a massive fan. “At the time, him getting in contact with me felt like a dream come true,” she says today.
So when Dahvie — born Jesus David Torres — announced that he was coming to her hometown of Houston, Texas, she leapt at the opportunity to hang out with him. “It took a lot of convincing, but my mom let me meet up with him at the galleria mall,” Tye recalls. She was upfront with him about her age long before they ever met in person, but the disparity didn’t seem to bother him; Tye says Dahvie’s pet name for her was “My Little School Girl.” He was twenty-seven.
They ate at The Cheesecake Factory one Friday after school in January of 2012, and although Tye admits the meeting was initially “really awkward,” she thought Dahvie came off as being a nice guy.
That did not last long.
After they were done with their meal, Dahvie led Tye to his car, a black SUV, in the mall’s underground parking lot. She thought he was taking them to another location to continue their de facto date. “But instead he shoved my face on his dick,” Tye alleges. “He was feeling me up and I just didn’t know what to do. I’d never been in this situation. So I just let it happen.”
It was not the last time that Dahvie would treat Tye this way. In May of 2012, Dahvie invited Tye, her mother, and her brother to stay with him at his home in Arizona for a week. “It was over spring break,” Tye says. “I kind of feel bad about my mom, that she let me hang out with someone who was twelve years older than me who had obvious ‘interests’ in me. But she didn’t know the extent of what was happening.” Tye also says her mother “genuinely thought Dahvie was a good guy” because he’d paid to get her towed car out of the impound and promised to help with the cost of traveling to his house. “We’d driven 23 hours straight from Texas to Arizona to get to his house,” Tye remembers.
But Dahvie never actually paid Tye’s mom the money he’d promised, and the sexual assaults continued.
“He would never ask my permission,” Tye tells MetalSucks, “just take me somewhere where we were alone and grab my head and push me down like a dog.”
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Tye’s story about Dahvie Vanity exhibiting such abusive behavior is, unfortunately, not a standalone accusation. He was arrested in 2009 for sexual assault (although charges were never filed), and other prominent “scene” members, like the musician and cosmetic artist Jeffree Starr and New Year’s Day vocalist Ash Costello, claim to be eyewitnesses to his crimes.
Meanwhile, rumors about the multi-instrumentalist’s predilection for taking advantage of his predominantly female adolescent fanbase have been floating around the Internet for years, and there are now multiple online groups that seek to alert the world to Dahvie’s alleged crimes. And yet, somehow, Blood on the Dance Floor continued to record and perform successfully, and to receive positive (or at least neutral) press. Only recently has BOTDF is Garbagecore, a Facebook group devoted to outing Dahvie as a sexual predator, had success derailing the band’s tours.
Now a handful of Dahvie’s victims have bravely stepped forward to tell MetalSucks their stories in the hopes of preventing him from hurting anyone else.
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The same year Tye met Dahvie, Shae had an unfortunate run-in of her own. Shae was fourteen at the time, and, in her words, was “in love with the band.” She went to a show which included, amongst other acts, Blood on the Dance Floor, and brought with her a t-shirt she wanted to have signed by as many musicians as possible. Shae remembers thinking, “I got Davey Suicide and his band to sign it, so why not ask Dahvie?” So she waited for him outside the venue with a crowd of other girls.
When she finally got to meet Dahvie, he was happy to sign her shirt… just not the one she’d brought for signing. “He decided to sign the shirt I was wearing,” says Shae, “and he grabbed my boobs in the process.” Shae’s passion for Blood on the Dance Floor’s music prevented her from speaking out about Vanity groping her. “I didn’t think much of it other than ‘OMG my idol is touching me,’” she admits.
Hindsight began to take hold a couple of years later, when Dahvie publicly assaulted Shae’s mother during a show in support of the band’s album Bitchcraft. “She was minding her own business at the bar because, in all honesty, she didn’t want to be there,” recalls Shae. “She only came because no one else could bring me.” And then they played the song “Call Me Master.”
“Dahvie walked through the crowd with a girl on a leash,” says Shae. “He walked over to my mother, who was sitting at the bar, and proceed to pour a drink all over her shirt.” Then he grabbed her and tried to make out with her. “She was appalled,” Shae tells us. “She tried to push him off.”
Today, Shae calls the experience “mind-opening,” and cites it as the reason she’s come forward. “Obviously my mom and I didn’t have that bad of an experience compared to some of the people I’ve talked to in confidence. But I’m willing to help put that guy away, even if my story isn’t as bad, because I have heard other victims’ stories about him and it breaks my heart to know that he is still able to do this.”
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Belle, from Colorado, was fourteen when she met Dahvie in 2013, at which point she’d been a Blood on the Dance Floor fan for about a year. “I went to every show in my state, and Dahvie always remembered me, he even remembered my dad, and would call him ‘Dad’ as well.” One night, when she was sixteen, her father drank too much to drive them back home, which was an hour-and-a-half away. Dahvie and his then-girlfriend offered them a ride. “That kind of made me look up to him more. He was always seeing if I was doing alright, and genuinely seemed to care.”
That facade began to crack when Belle was seventeen. There was an incident when Dahvie stopped talking to her for months after she declined to meet him in a questionable neighborhood very late at night, which she says “was pretty upsetting to me, I thought I did something wrong.” Then he started posting flattering comments on social media photos in which Belle was dressed as the popular DC Comics character Harley Quinn.
When Belle turned eighteen, Dahvie called her to wish her a happy birthday. “We talked for about thirty or forty minutes, which was mostly him telling me how awesome my boobs were, and that it was finally ok for him to say stuff like that to me. It was a bit uncomfortable for me hearing him talk about me like that, but I brushed it off.” A few days later, Dahvie called again to tell her he’d be coming through town. He offered to pick her up at her house, since he’d be arriving early in the morning. “He said that it should make me feel safer with him picking me up, instead of me trying to find my way to him that early.” He asked her to keep the meeting a secret. He picked her up at 5 a.m., when it was still dark out, and parked at a location she didn’t recognize.
Dahvie started to intimate that he was interested in Belle sexually. “I just explained to him that I see him as a friend,” she says, but he wouldn’t let it go. “Then he leaned in and started kissing me. I wasn’t expecting it, so I froze up a bit when it happened.” Dahvie asked Belle if she was a virgin. She told him she wasn’t… but not by choice: she was assaulted by her ex-boyfriend. “He genuinely seemed upset that that happened to me. He told me that he hates people like that, and feels horrible for everyone who experienced stuff like that.”
Dahvie decided to express this sympathy by telling Belle she was beautiful, complimenting her figure, and asking to feel her breasts. Belle still wasn’t interested, “but I didn’t want to say ‘no’ to him after all he had done for me,” so she agreed. Things escalated quickly after that, she says.
“He squeezed [my breasts] a lot, didn’t remove his eyes from them, and just said how amazing they were. Then he pulled my top down and started sucking on them. I tried to back up, but I was in a car, so I couldn’t go anywhere. I started to get scared, and I didn’t know what to do. I pushed my arms against him a bit to sort of show him I didn’t want him to continue, but he kept at it. Once he was done, I pulled my shirt back up, and he was pulling down his pants. He grabbed my head, and started to force it down. I kept telling him that I was not comfortable with this, and asked him to stop, all while trying to pull my head up. He was much stronger than me, and was able to get my head down all the way.” Belle froze. “So he grabbed my hair and started bobbing my head up and down on him.
“I didn’t know what to do,” Belle continues. “I didn’t want to fight him out of fear that he would do something much worse, and I didn’t want to participate and give him the idea that I wanted more. I just clenched my fists, and cried.” Then Dahvie used his free hand to cover her nose. “I wasn’t even able to breathe. I thought I was going to pass out, but I couldn’t do anything about it.
“Once he was finished, he let go of my head, and I cleaned myself up. Then he grabbed me, and pulled me close to him, hugging me. He started to tell me that, that’s just how BDSM is, that it’s about love and trust, and things like that.”
Belle went into denial about what Dahvie had done. “I truly cared about him, and, even after what happened, I refused to believe that he did anything wrong… I didn’t want to believe it, so I didn’t. But the thoughts telling me what he did was wrong were always there. I tried my best to ignore them.”
Eventually BOTDF is Garbagecore began to report on the relationship between Vanity and Belle. Some of their exchanged messages showed up on the page after Belle showed them to a friend she thought she could trust. Dahvie was furious. “I tried to say someone must have gone on my phone and took those screenshots,” she says. “He knew my phone number, and where I lived. I was so scared of him coming after me.”
Just as bad, Belle was racked with guilt. “I felt like I deserved what he did to me [because] I wasn’t careful enough, I trusted him, I did this or that wrong. I always blamed myself for it,” she says. With the help of other members of the Garbagecore group, Belle was finally able to admit to herself that “what he did was not okay at all, and it haunted me.” She unfriended Dahvie on social media and ignored texts and phone calls with him. “I still do get the occasional thought that it was my fault,” she admits. “I’m working on that as best as I can.”
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Alice also met Dahvie for the first time in 2013, when she was fifteen years old. “As a middle schooler I idolized Dahvie,” she says, “and I loved Blood on the Dance Floor. I was completely obsessed.” She saw the band live for the first time when they played at the Martini Ranch in Scottsdale, Arizona, and got to encounter her idol at a meet-and-greet after the show. “When Dahvie stopped near me I gushed about how much of a fan I was and how his music ‘saved me’,” she says. “The usual cringey fangirl things. He gave me a hug and asked to see my phone, which he proceeded to put his number into. That alone shocked the absolute hell out of me.”
Alice and a friend were waiting for their ride home later when Dahvie approached them. “He asked what we were still doing there, and if he could help. He was honestly quite a gentleman.” The band was leaving for their first European tour the next morning, and Dahvie invited the girls back to his place for a celebratory launch party. Alice called her mother and begged for her permission to go. Eventually, she agreed.
“The party was quaint,” Alice remembers. “Dahvie’s then-girlfriend was there and was a complete sweetheart. Video games were played, one of the guys made burgers, and Dahvie gave us full access to their merchandise room so any fans at the party could help themselves to whatever they wanted.” Alice wanted merchandise but felt uncomfortable at the thought of just taking it, so declined the offer. Dahvie, she alleges, insisted, and took her to the merchandise room.
“Once I had some merch, he grabbed the door knob and got super close to me and asked me if I was a ‘good student.’ I, being super oblivious and awkward, said ‘not really’ and that I didn’t apply myself in school.” The two returned to the party, but later, Dahvie tried again, asking her to help him with something in the garage. “Naively, I agreed.” Alice alleges that once they were in the garage, Vanity blocked the door and again asked if she was a “good student.” Alice didn’t respond. “I had finally realized where this was going.”
“He asked me how old I was,” she says. “I told him: fifteen. He made me pinky-swear that I would never tell another soul what he was about to do, because he could ‘get in big trouble.’ Then he forcefully kissed me.
“I was devastated,” she continues. “I had just found out that the rumors about Dahvie, that I had tried so hard to defend his name against, were true.”
Alice alleges that the singer then made her perform oral sex on him. “He was in total control. He wouldn’t let me stand up or even leave the garage until he had come in my mouth. I had tears in my eyes most of the time we were in there. He made me clean the makeup that had run on my face with a scarf that was on the floor of the garage. I couldn’t tell you how long it had been when we got back to the party, but it felt like forever.”
Alice’s friend, also at the party, was starting to become concerned that Alice kept disappearing with Dahvie. “I assured her we were just talking,” Alice says, “because at the time I was still confused and trying to process everything myself. It felt like the whole night was unreal.” Later into the party, Dahvie asked her to help him pack for his trip. “You’d think at this point I wouldn’t be so naïve,” Alice says of her fifteen-year-old self, “but I went with him to his room.”
For twenty minutes, she and Dahvie chatted pleasantly — about their home lives, their upbringings, and art. Hearing about her love of art, Dahvie offered her a job designing merchandise (an offer, Alice says, that he never followed through on). Then Dahvie assaulted Alice a second time.
“Dahvie went into the walk-in closet, and came out with a rainbow penis-shaped lollipop. He asked if I wanted one. I said no thank you, but he insisted and went back in to get me one.” The singer then called her into the walk-in closet. “It was basically a repeat of the garage, only this time he wouldn’t let me leave until we had sex, too.” Alice had told Dahvie her family’s water had been turned off; he promised to give her the money to have it turned back on if she had sex with him. “I complied, if you can call it that,” she says. “I stood there in shock while he did his thing, thinking I was helping my family. We were so bad off at home that our showers were basically sponge baths using water bottles that had been warmed over the stove. I wanted to do whatever it took to stop my family of five from living that way.
“He pulled my dress down super forcefully,” she continues says. “He actually broke the zipper on my dress. A lot of my clothes were tattered hand-me-downs, including my bra. It was held together by safety pins, which he actually made fun of me for. He covered my mouth the entire time and was very forceful.” She also alleges that he filmed her performing oral sex on him. “I’m not sure whether or not the footage still exists. I sincerely hope it doesn’t.”
When Dahvie was done, Alice went back to the party to find most people were asleep, including her friend. She texted her mother asking her to tell school she wouldn’t be in the next day, knowing she would be unable to cope, emotionally. When asked about the party, Alice was initially reluctant to discuss what had happened to her. “I lied to my mom,” she says, “and even my friend. I said I’d had an incredible time, that everything had been fantastic, that Dahvie was awesome, the works. But once I was in my room I just broke down. I didn’t leave my bed all day.”
Two days later, Alice noticed injuries stemming from Dahvie’s attack: her mouth was cut open in several places and there were bruises on her arms. “For a while after that night,” she says, “I just tried to pretend nothing had ever happened. It took a while to sink in. I am ashamed of that. He would message me from time to time wanting to meet up, but we never did. For that I’m glad. I never ended up with the money or job I was promised, but I see now that that was for the best.”
By her own admission, Alice was “a lot more scarred than I realized at the time.” She still blames herself for the attack (“I honestly should have known better”) and asserts that “What [Dahvie] did to me still impacts my life and how I handle relationships, even now, five years later.”
And what does she think of Vanity? “The man I looked up to is a monster in my eyes.”
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Evelyn met Dahvie in San Diego, CA through a dating app. She was eighteen, and already a fan. “When I was in middle school, I subscribed heavily to the ‘scene’ culture because of my identity as an outcast,” she says. After confirming that she was, in fact, speaking to the real Dahvie Vanity, they made plans to meet.
“Dahvie picked me up where I was staying in a black SUV. I was shocked it was him. He was wearing a turquoise, pink, and green graphic tee, and was heavily made up, just like I had imagined.” They went to dinner at a Japanese restaurant and talked. Dahvie ordered wine; he knew that Evelyn was under the legal drinking age, but “he encouraged me to drink” all the same, according to Evelyn. “I drank two glasses by the time we had left, and I asked Dahvie to take me home.
“As we drove home in the SUV, Dahvie began talking about sexual desires,” she continues. “He parked the car in front of where I was staying and out of nowhere, groped my breasts. I suppose you could say I was starstruck, but I couldn’t seem to assert myself in any way.” Dahvie invited Evelyn to a party at his home. She accepted, arriving later that night via an Uber.
“A few of his friends were there, as well as a pink-haired roommate,” Evelyn recalls. “They were all drinking, and, hesitantly, I joined. Dahvie’s friends and I all chatted and got acquainted as I drank more than I should have. At around 1 a.m., Dahvie brought me back into his room, where he provided me with marijuana.” They hung out. They cuddled. They kissed.
And then Vanity took things too far. “All of a sudden, Dahvie took his penis out of his pants and grabbed my head with the back of his hand. I was at a loss for speech. He pushed me down with all the force in his arm and I fought back. I screeched in pain but I couldn’t fight him, he was stronger than me.
“When he was done with me I got my things and took an Uber home, drunk and sobbing.” She says she was afraid to tell anyone about what had happened. “I was so young, I didn’t understand the severity of the situation. At the time, I didn’t even realize what had happened to me and how wrong it had made me feel. ”
The psychological scars soon began to make themselves known. “It has hurt me in ways I can not even begin to fully explain. I fear the worst from those that I trust, I hide things that have happened, I relive the event from time to time; I live with anxiety and anguish… it has affected my relationships and my anxiety surrounding men and sex. I do not live in a world where I feel safe. Dahvie proved to me that evil hides behind those most unassuming.
“I was orally raped by a man that I looked up to as a teen. It still eats away at my heart strings to this day.”
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Katie, from Ohio, is the most recent of Dahvie’s alleged victims to come forward. She was twenty when she met Dahvie in the summer of 2016. “I was not a fan of Blood on the Dance Floor,” she reveals, “but my friend dragged me to their show.” She immediately noticed something about her fellow concertgoers: “It was all thirteen-year-olds.” She says that even though being older than most of her peers made her feel “weirded out,” she also enjoyed that the younger girls gave her attention and praised her looks.
She met Dahvie after the show, surprised to learn that he already knew who she was; a friend was “deeply involved” romantically with Dahvie, and, without Katie’s consent, “talked to him about me and sent him pictures of me wearing lingerie.”
“The whole night, Dahvie was all over me, and it was both creepy and flattering,” Katie continues. He “insisted” she come out to his van with him and Jayy Von Monroe, a member of BOTDF at the time. “It was weird because he talked to Jayy the whole time while ignoring me… except for rubbing my thighs, which was creepy.”
They went their separate ways, but eventually, Katie says, Dahvie grew on her. “I always had bad vibes from him, but there was something I found intriguing about him, and the more I saw of him, the more I decided I enjoyed being around him. He gave me attention and made me feel wanted.” When he moved to Cleveland that fall, “I started going over [to his place] regularly because we had a lot of mutual friends.”
One night Dahvie invited those friends to crash at his place. “I slept in Dahvie’s bed with him because there was no room anywhere else.” She claims that around 4 a.m., she woke up to find Dahvie holding her head and moving it towards his crotch.
“I was pretty deeply asleep and didn’t get what was going on until he just stuck his dick in my mouth. I didn’t know what to do, I was still tipsy from the night before, he had a firm grip on my hair and my head and was trying to force me to [perform oral sex] and I didn’t want to make him mad at me so I just gave him a blowjob and then we went back to sleep. I felt super weird and gross about it but at the same time I wasn’t shocked. I was like ‘That’s what you get for sharing a bed with someone you KNOW is creepy.’”
Still, when Dahvie asked her later to appear in a music video for his other project, Sinners are Winners, she agreed, because… well… she wanted to be in a music video. For the shoot, she was instructed to feign giving Vanity a blowjob under a desk. Unsurprisingly, she says he spent the scene pushing her face into his penis, despite her asking him to stop and the on-set presence of Dahvie’s current Blood on the Dance Floor bandmate and fiancée, Fallon Vendetta.
https://youtu.be/BhhTyREbE54?t=1m29s
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For his part, Vanity continues to stay mum on the allegations. MetalSucks contacted him yesterday to give him the opportunity to read and respond to the accusations in this article, and while he didn’t reply, he did take to social media to post this seemingly-related message:
https://www.instagram.com/p/Bl51pREFiX7/?taken-by=officialbotdf
Meanwhile, it seems worth noting that when similar accusations were recently leveled against former Aiden frontman Wil Francis, a.k.a. “William Control,” Dahvie was one of the first people to leap to his defense:
MetalSucks will continue to remain abreast of the accusations and update this story as needed. In the meantime, we encourage anyone else with a story to share to engage with support groups such as the aforementioned BOTDF is Garbagecore. Those wishing to speak to MetalSucks can contact us by e-mailing news AT metalsucks DOT net.
Correction: An earlier iteration of this article identified Davey Suicide as the lead singer of AFI, when the lead singer of AFI is, in fact, Davey Havok. We apologize for confusing the two Daveys.
