Marilyn Manson Told Us What He Was
One of the visual conceits of Phoenix Rising—a new two-part HBO documentary about the actor Evan Rachel Wood’s allegations of abuse at the hands of the rock musician Marilyn Manson—is a series of animated sequences that portray Wood as a cherubic, Alice-like doll and Manson as a macabre monster whose darkness infects and imprisons her. It’s a curiously heavy-handed choice, as though Wood’s raw testimony weren’t enough. In reality, her recounting of the things she says Manson did to her is profoundly, indelibly disturbing.
Over the course of an on-and-off, almost-five-year relationship that started in 2006, Wood says, Manson whipped her with a Nazi whip; shocked her wounds using an electric sex toy; had sex with her while she was passed out; and forced her to drink his blood while he drank hers. She suspects he drugged her repeatedly. Wood describes alleged abuse so traumatic that, at one point, “I felt my brain change. I felt it almost calcify. And the world is never the same.”
Manson denies all of Wood’s allegations, and has responded by for defamation. has been his crisis response since the late 1990s, when he was widely and for inspiring the school shooting in he “vehemently denies any and all claims of sexual assault or abuse of anyone,” and in his lawsuit he accuses Wood of recruiting other accusers and working to coordinate their stories. But if we believe Wood—and
