After a protracted legal battle, Marilyn Manson has finally dropped his defamation lawsuit against Evan Rachel Wood and agreed to pay her roughly $327,000 in attorneys’ fees, according to legal documents obtained by Rolling Stone.
Three years ago, Wood made an Instagram post identifying Manson — whose real name is Brian Warner — as the alleged rapist whom she testified about in front of Congress in 2018 during her push to implement the Sexual Assault Survivors’ Bill of Rights Act. “It started slow but escalated over time, including threats against my life, severe gaslighting and brainwashing, waking up to the man that claimed to love me raping what he believed to be my unconscious body,” Wood told Congress at the time.
Wood and Manson began dating in 2005, when she was 18 and he was 36. They were together for five years, including a brief engagement. Wood has accused Manson of grooming her as a teenager, along with psychological abuse, coercion, antisemitic abuse, physical torture, threats to her son, and sexual assault. In one incident, she alleges Manson “essentially raped” her on camera while filming a music video in 2007. After Wood said Manson was her abuser, more than a dozen other women came forward with similar allegations.
Manson has vehemently denied all of Wood’s allegations, dismissing them as “horrible distortions of reality.” He sued her for defamation in March 2022, around the release of Phoenix Rising, an HBO documentary that detailed Wood’s account of domestic violence and her push for justice. (Speaking to the Cut about the documentary that year, Wood called her relationship with Manson “the darkest time” in her life: “I could have killed myself and my story never would have been told.”)
Last year, a California judge gutted much of Manson’s suit under the state’s anti-SLAPP lawsuit, which protects abuse victims from lawsuits as intimidation tactics. Manson appealed the judge’s decision, though Wood’s lawyers claim he was simultaneously seeking to settle, initially offering to pay a portion of Wood’s legal fees in exchange for keeping the settlement confidential apart from the release of a mutual statement. Wood rejected the offer, after which her lawyers say Manson agreed to drop the suit altogether and pay her legal fees in full.
In a statement to Rolling Stone, an attorney for Manson says the disgraced shock rocker is “pleased to dismiss his still-pending claims and appeal in order to close the door on this chapter of his life.” Meanwhile, a representative for Wood told the outlet that Manson’s lawsuit was a “publicity stunt to try and undermine the credibility of his many accusers and revive his faltering career … His attempt to silence and intimidate Ms. Wood failed.”
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