Trent Reznor has issued a new statement regarding his former friend and collaborator Marilyn Manson. The statement, shared with Pitchfork, comes days after Manson’s former partner Evan Rachel Wood alleged that the musician groomed and abused her during their relationship.
Reznor’s statement addresses an anecdote involving Reznor that Manson included in his 1998 autobiography The Long Hard Road Out of Hell. In the story, which has recently resurfaced, Manson recounts a horrific scene in which he and Reznor allegedly physically and sexually assaulted an inebriated woman in the 1990s.
Trent Reznor’s statement reads:
Screenshots of passages from The Long Hard Road Out of Hell began to circulate on Twitter after Wood and multiple other women came forward with allegations that Manson abused them. The book—co-authored with Neil Strauss—includes stories about Reznor, who signed Manson to his Nothing Records imprint and produced his band’s 1994 debut album Portrait of an American Family.
The passage in question was allegedly part of an unpublished interview with the now-defunct Empyrean Magazine, originally intended to run in the magazine in 1995, but never printed due to “content objections on the part of Empyrean’s publisher, Centaur Enterprises, which believed that the magazine had followed unethical interview procedures in order to extract information from Mr. Manson,” according to Manson and Strauss’ book.
When Manson was asked by the Empyrean interviewer how he ended up working with Reznor, he told the aforementioned story. According to the book, this took place the night before Reznor told Manson that he wanted to sign him to Nothing Records.
Reznor, who also worked on 1996’s Antichrist Superstar, said of Manson to Mojo in 2009: “He is a malicious guy and will step on anybody’s face to succeed and cross any line of decency. Seeing him now, drugs and alcohol now rule his life and he’s become a dopey clown.”
Manson claimed in 2017 that he and Reznor had reconciled. “He’s the one who’s actually sent me an email, we had sort of mended ways after a long time through [Manson collaborator and producer] Tyler Bates strangely enough,” Manson told Zane Lowe. “He goes and he said in the email something along the lines of, ‘It really pisses me off that music’s not dangerous anymore and it reminds me of how great you were and I was and the time, the era.’”
Evan Rachel Wood previously testified before Congress in support of the Sexual Assault Survivors Bill of Rights about her experiences, though she didn’t publicly name Manson until this past week. In the wake of her allegations, Manson’s record label, touring agency, and television programs cut ties with the musician. He has since denied the allegations in a statement, which in part read, “My intimate relationships have always been entirely consensual with like-minded partners.”