Marilyn Manson Suing Evan Rachel Wood for Defamation

Marilyn Manson is suing Evan Rachel Wood for defamation, emotional distress, and “impersonation over the internet.”

Manson, whose real name is Brian Warner, argues that her allegations of rape and sexual abuse, which he calls “a malicious falsehood,” though they have now been echoed by many other women, have “derailed” his “successful music, TV, and film career.”

The complaint accuses Wood of collaborating with her friend Illma Gore to shoot down Manson’s reputation in a campaign that allegedly involved hacking, posing as an FBI agent, and interference that amounts to tampering with would-be witnesses.

Marilyn Manson and Evan Rachel Wood

Manson’s attorney, Howard King, said his team had assembled “an overwhelming trove of evidence, including both documents and witness statements, which proves that the stories that Evan Rachel Wood and her co-conspirator Illma Gore have been falsifying and spreading are both vindictive and demonstrably untrue.”

King also said there was a difference between Warner, his client, and Manson, Warner’s stage persona.

Evan Rachel Wood

“Wood’s claims may resonate because of the intentionally ‘shocking’ character of ‘Marilyn Manson’ but they simply do not reflect the truth. The manufactured facts these conspirators scripted a decade after the event never happened.”

Wood said the singer tied her up and physically tortured her. She has also said that he subjected her to anti-Semitic abuse and regularly used racial slurs.

In a new documentary, Phoenix Rising, which will air on HBO later this month, Wood recalled an incident in which Manson “essentially raped her on-camera” while filming a music video in 2007.

Marilyn Manson

Wood says they agreed to simulate sex for one scene, but she explained that when the time came, Manson “started penetrating me for real.”

She added that she had been given absinthe before the shoot, which left her barely conscious. She now believes she was “coerced into a commercial sex act under false pretenses.”

Manson, for his part, has consistently denied Wood’s allegations, first framing them as “horrible distortions of reality.”

In a statement responding to Phoenix Rising, King described Wood’s memory as an “imaginative retelling,” insisting that Manson “did not have sex with Evan on that set, and she knows that is the truth.”

But Wood’s initial account prompted more than a dozen other women to come forward with similar experiences, and Manson now faces multiple sexual-assault lawsuits, while a criminal investigation is underway in Los Angeles.