Note: This article includes details of alleged assault that readers may find disturbing.
The conclusion of the two-episode, Amy Berg–directed documentary Phoenix Rising, which focuses on Evan Rachel Wood’s abuse allegations against Marilyn Manson, airs tonight on HBO and is currently streaming on HBO Max. In part one, Wood shared previously unreported details about an alleged assault that took place during the filming of one of Manson’s videos (a claim Manson’s attorney later called “false”). In part two, she detailed the ways that Manson allegedly tortured her.
Wood alleged the torture began after she finished filming The Wrestler in 2008. She claimed that she was isolated inside Manson’s home in Glencoe, California for months. There, she said she experienced sustained emotional abuse and sleep deprivation. She accused Manson of drugging her with meth and raping her:
This is also when I suspect he started putting meth into the drugs. I remember thinking that the drugs were a lot stronger than they had been. My nose was bleeding all the time. I started getting scabs all over my body, all over my face. I was digging into my skin. I didn’t know what meth was. I didn’t know I was doing meth. I started getting really sick and was throwing up every day. I couldn’t get out of bed. And he wasn’t doing anything, he just didn’t care. He just wanted me to be there.
This is also when he started raping me in my sleep. He would give me a pill to go to sleep, but I never knew what the pills were, so I was always pretty out of it. So I’d wake up, and I just remember doing the mental math quickly and thinking, “Just stay asleep, just don’t move, just don’t move.” So I would just lie limp and still until it was over, and then I swear to God, he would just fling my leg and walk out of the room.
After this period, Wood said she fled Manson’s home and spent time at her father’s house. Wood’s mother claimed that Manson told her something he later repeated in a 2009 interview—that he cut himself 158 times for every time Wood didn’t answer his calls. Wood said she returned to Manson to “diffuse the situation” and applied Neosporin to his cuts. She said she went back to him for fear that a restraining order would “make him more mad,” explaining that her decision was rooted in the kind of fear survivors of abuse often experience.
“That was around the time that he tied me up and tortured me,” Wood said. Speaking to a room of other women with their own allegations of abuse against Manson, Wood described walking into Manson’s bedroom after returning to him to find a piece of furniture called “the kneeler.” She said that was when he tortured her:
After he tied me up and hit me over and over and over again with a whip—which was a Nazi whip from the Holocaust with a swastika on it because I’m Jewish—I was tied to the kneeler and he hit me over and over again and said that he was going to hit me in the same place over and over again so that it would really hurt. And then he shocked me with a violet wand on the welts. He shocked my private parts and it hurt so bad that I broke the kneeler. I jerked so hard that I broke the kneeler and collapsed in a pool of tears in his arms. And I remember in that moment thinking, “Tell him whatever he wants to hear.”
Wood said that after she apologized to him repeatedly, Manson cut his hand and made her drink his blood, and then cut her and drank her blood. She described how a feeling of disassociation and subsequent trauma changed her life. “The world is just never the same,” she said. “It’s never the same because everything that happens to you after that point is through the veil of this memory. You know it’s out there. You know that’s in the world. You know that people are capable of doing something like this.”
