Wednesday 13 Says “Close Friend” Marilyn Manson Is “Innocent Until Proven Guilty”
Wednesday 13 (Murderdolls) has defended his “close friend” Marilyn Manson, asserting that “I don’t know of [Manson] to be any of the stuff that I’ve read” and calling the shock rocker “innocent untilproven guilty.”
Wednesday 13 (né Joseph Poole) made the comments as part of an interview with Rock N Roll Experience:
“Ya know, again, it’s just one of those kind of things, it’s the same thing where it was, alright, there’s these accusations and ok, everybody is, ok, well… he’s a monster so let’s step on the spider, let’s kill the monster. And I guess that’s probably the first reaction to that kind of thing, but they are all accusations and I say it’s innocent until proven guilty. Manson has been a close friend of mine for years and I don’t know of him to be any of the stuff that I’ve read so I don’t know man, it sucks.”
13 went on to argue that if “you start cancelling everyone for something bad they did there is going to be nobody left.”
You can read the entire interview here.
On February 1, the actress Evan Rachel Wood — a star of HBO’s Westworld and Manson’s former fiancée — said that Manson (born Brian Warner) “horrifically abused me for years.” She elaborated on those accusations a week later, at which point she also said that Manson’s wife, Lindsay Usich, and someone named Leslee Lane were “conspiring to release photos of me when I was UNDERAGE, after being given large amounts of drugs and alcohol, after Brian performed on Halloween in Las Vegas, to ‘ruin my career’ and ‘shut me up.’”
While Wood has implied in the past that Manson abused her, this has been the first time she explicitly named the shock rocker. Since then, there’s been a deluge of similar accusations from other women. Earlier, a former assistant claimed that he had seen Manson physically and emotionally abuse Usich.
Manson has called the previous accusations against him “horrible distortions of reality.” But the fallout has already been tremendous, with the singer being dropped by his label, Loma Vista, and his agency, CAA. He was also fired from television roles on the programs American Gods and Creepshow and by his longtime manager, Tony Ciulla, who dropped his client after 25 years of working together.
Two former Manson collaborators, Limp Bizkit guitarist Wes Borland and Nine Inch Nails mastermind Trent Reznor, have both spoken out against the shock rocker. Borland called Manson “a bad fucking guy” and asserted that his victims “are speaking the truth,” while Reznor said that he has “been vocal over the years about my dislike of Manson as a person and cut ties with him nearly 25 years ago.” He also denied, not for the first time, a story from Manson’s memoir, The Long Hard Road Out of Hell, in which the singer claims that he and Reznor plied two women with alcohol and then took advantage of them once they were heavily inebriated.
Otep frontwoman Otep Shamaya shared an unsettling story about Manson over the weekend, as did singer/songwriter Phoebe Bridgers. The actor Corey Feldman has also accused Manson of “decades [of] mental and emotional abuse.”
Sharon Osbourne, Ozzy’s wife and manager, addressed calls to comment on Manson by saying her relationship with him was strictly business and that she wasn’t privy to his personal life.
On Wednesday, February 3, police reportedly “swarmed” Manson’s home after a friend contacted authorities to say they couldn’t reach the singer and were concerned for his well-being. Although Manson never emerged from his house, a rep for the singer told police he was “fine.” Two weeks later, the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department confirmed it was investigating the singer.
California State Senator Susan Rubio has requested that the FBI investigate Manson, and one victim, Bianca Allaine, has said that she is, indeed, meeting with federal agents. There has been no word as to whether or not the LA Sheriff’s investigation or Allaine’s meeting with the FBI is in any way connected to Rubio’s request.
