Yet Another Ex-Girlfriend Sues Marilyn Manson

Ashley Morgan Smithline has become the fourth woman to file a lawsuit against Marilyn Manson, “claiming sexual assault, sexual battery, intentional infliction of emotional distress, human trafficking, and unlawful imprisonment, among other allegations,” Rolling Stone reports.

Smithline, a 36-year-old model and actress, first leveled accusations against Manson (né Brian Warner) in a May interview with People. The lawsuit, Rolling Stone says, “echoes much of what she said previously” in that interview.

Like Game of Thrones actor Esmé Bianco, Smithline says Manson lured her in with promises of acting work before their relationship became romantic.

Accusations she makes against Manson include:

• Raping her multiple times, and one occasion telling her “You can’t rape someone that you’re in love with.”
• Multiple forms of physical assault, including biting, whipping, hitting, carving his initials into her thigh, cutting her stomach and drinking her blood (and then making her drink his), breaking her nose, and throwing a knife at her.
• Withholding food (she says she fell to under eighty pounds during their relationship).
• Sending Smithline to a glass box known as the “bad girls’ room” more than 100 times.
• Various forms of psychological abuse.

Many of Smithline’s stories and allegations have similar details shared by the singer’s other accusers: keeping it dark and freezing (i.e., disorienting) in house at all times, a fascination with Nazi memorabilia and predilection for anti-Semitic behavior (the lawsuit claims that on one occasion, “Mr. Warner threw a Nazi knife at Ms. Smithline, only barely missing her face,” and that he frequently called Smithline a “dirty Jew” and a “kike”), and, of course, the aforementioned “bad girls’ room.”

In a statement, a rep for Manson denies the allegations:

“We strongly deny Ms. Smithline’s claims. There are so many falsehoods within her claims that we wouldn’t know where to begin to answer them. This relationship, to the limited extent it was a relationship, lasted less than a week in 2010. Manson hasn’t seen Ms. Smithline since then.”

Manson is already being sued by already being sued two other ex-girlfriends — the aforementioned Esmé Bianco and a woman identified only as “Jane Doe” — as well as a former assistant, Ashley Walters, for similar accusations.

A flood of charges against Manson began in February, when Westworld star Evan Rachel Wood alleged that Manson “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 was the first time she explicitly named the singer. After that, there was a deluge of similar accusations from other women.

Earlier, a different 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, his agency, CAA, and his manager of 25 years, Tony Ciulla. He was also fired from television roles on the programs American Gods and Creepshow.

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, as did singer/songwriter Phoebe Bridgers. The actor Corey Feldman has also accused Manson of “decades [of] mental and emotional abuse.”

Last week, Manson agreed to turn himself over to authorities to face charges stemming from an incident in which he spit on a videographer during a New Hampshire show in 2019. If convicted, he faces up to a year in prison and fine of $2,000.