Marilyn Manson Accuser Ashley Morgan Smithline Details Alleged Brutal Sex Abuse
Model Ashley Morgan Smithline has detailed the alleged sexual abuse and sex assaults that her ex-boyfriend, Marilyn Manson, inflicted upon her.
The singer, whom she describes as the “most terrifying monster in the world,” reportedly raped her, bit her, whipped her, cut her, choked her with his fist, confined her in a soundproof room, and enticed her into a blood pact, she told People. “I didn’t know you could rape someone that you were in a relationship with,” she said in a video that accompanied the article. “There’s a difference between waking up to someone having sex with you nicely in the morning and waking up tied up with someone having sex with your unconscious body, being tied up and screaming and not enjoying it, and him laughing, like, sadistically, or gagging my mouth or something.”
Through a spokesperson, Manson denied Smithline’s accusations. “There are so many falsehoods within her claims that we wouldn’t know where to begin to answer them,” Manson’s spokesperson tells Rolling Stone. “This relationship, to the limited extent it was a relationship, didn’t last one week.” Smithline said the relationship took place between 2010 and 2012.
Smithline is one of more than a dozen women, including actresses Evan Rachel Wood and Esmé Bianco, who have accused Manson of sexual abuse. Last week, Bianco filed a lawsuit against Manson alleging rape and sexual battery, and claiming that Manson and his former manager, Tony Ciulla, violated sex trafficking laws by allegedly flying her from England to appear in a music video that was never released.
Smithline said photographer Tyler Shields had shown Manson photos of her and connected the two in the summer of 2010. The shock rocker allegedly invited her to appear in a film he was making and put her up in Los Angeles’ Roosevelt Hotel before moving her into his West Hollywood apartment. She says he charmed her with his intelligence, discussing Tolstoy, Nabokov, and foreign films with her; she was aware of his music but was not a fan. Moreover, she said she was unfamiliar with his sexual interests like BDSM.
After she moved in with him, his demeanor changed. One day, she says, he whipped her bare back as she lied nude on a bed. Previously, he had asked Smithline, who is of Jewish descent, to bring him Nazi-emblazoned throwing stars, knives, and whips as a joke. “If I’d known the weapons would be used on me, I think it would have felt a lot stranger,” she says. He also allegedly cut her with a swastika-adorned knife. He cut her ribs, she said, and scarred her outer thigh with his initials; People published a photo showing the latter scars. He also reportedly used a knife on her for a blood pact. “He cut me on my stomach and then drank my blood. Then, he had me drink his,” she said. “The more I let him hurt me, the more I loved him and the more I was proving myself to him.”
In the article, she described the first time he purportedly assaulted her. She had been asleep and when she woke up, her arms were tied, and he had penetrated her. “He kept telling me, ‘You can’t rape someone that you’re in love with,’” she said.
“Even when he was being abusive, sometimes he would be joking and funny, and then sometimes he would be the most terrifying monster in the world,” she added in the video. He would say things like, ‘Do you know I could kill you right now?’”
The violence and abuse increased in severity as the relationship progressed, she claimed. He allegedly cut her frequently and broke her nose during a rape. Another time, she said he threw a knife at her and narrowly missed her face. If she defied him, she said, he punished her by putting her in the “bad girls’ room,” a soundproof glass enclosure in his bedroom. She said he placed her there more than 100 times. One infraction she recalled was asking to urinate while he played her one of his songs. One time, she said, he locked her in the enclosure for more than six hours. And generally, she said, he didn’t look after her well-being. At one point she weighed around 80 pounds, and she claims he plied her with cocaine to keep her alert. “I was malnourished and cold,” she said.
“I asked the other girls that I’ve spoken to who were victims of him, ‘What do you think his objective was,’” she added in the video. “And we all agree that we think he honestly wanted us all to kill ourselves.”
This past September she met with Wood, Bianco, and several other women who have accused Manson of alleged abuse and started to process what she had gone through. She says she suffers from OCD, night terrors, and PTSD.
Since Wood and the other women came forward in February, Manson’s record label, booking agent, and manager all severed ties with him. His appearances on upcoming TV shows, American Gods and Creepshow, were also canceled. At the time, Manson responded with a statement on Instagram calling the women’s accusations “horrible distortions of reality.”
“[Manson and I] didn’t really speak of it,” Smithline said of the abuse she said she suffered. “I wasn’t allowed to speak of it. I never stood up to him ever, because I knew that would be more abuse, more torture. And I just, I didn’t want it.”