The actress Evan Rachel Wood has accused Marilyn Manson of raping her during the recording of the video clip ‘Heart-Shaped Glasses’, according to the documentary “Phoenix Rising”, which has just premiered at Sundance.
The film narrates the tortuous relationship between the protagonist of “Westworld” and the singer between 2006 and 2011, when, in his words, “he managed to undertake a final escape”.
In 2007, the actress starred in a video clip of the artist in which both appear having sex under a rain of blood.
The song “Heart-Shaped Glasses” -“Heart-shaped glasses”- is a nod to the glasses that the protagonist of Lolita in Kubrick’s version of the Navokob classic, “We talked about a simulated sex scene, but once the cameras started rolling, he really began to penetrate me. I had never agreed to that. It was complete chaos. I didn’t feel safe. Nobody cared for me. It was a really traumatizing experience”, explains Wood in the documentary directed by Amy Berg.
“I felt disgusting and that I had done something shameful and I realized that the team was uncomfortable and nobody knew what to do,” says Wood, who adds: “I was forced to perform a commercial sex act under false pretenses (…) That was when the first crime was committed against me. I was essentially raped on camera”.
Warner instructed Wood on how to talk about the video in interviews, saying that the sex had not been real and to talk about their love relationship.
“I was afraid of doing something that would upset me in any way. The video was just the beginning of the violence that would continue to escalate throughout the relationship.”
The Los Angeles police opened an investigation against Manson -Brian Warner is his real name-, after Wood’s complaints last year and other workers in the film industry. The content of the documentary has been collected by numerous American media such as Rolling Stone.
The musician’s lawyer Howard King, responded to this medium that “of all the false claims that Evan Rachel Wood has made about Brian Warner, his imaginative account of the making of the music video 15 years ago is the most brazen and easy to refute, because there were multiple witnesses.”
“Not only was Evan totally consistent and committed throughout the three days of shooting, but he was also very involved in the weeks of pre-production planning and the days of post-production editing of the final cut,” he notes.
Rolling Stone cites anonymous worker sources who participated in the recording and who state that Wood “seemed subdued” and with difficulty moving – apparently they could have given him some kind of substance – and who say that some were “uncomfortable” because of the situation in which the sex scenes took place, which in his opinion were real.
The same source claims that after one or two takes the shoot was canceled because of the sex scenes, as discussions between Manson and the producers and crew members escalated.
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