‘Marilyn Manson horrifically abused me for years. I lived in fear’

For the best part of a decade, Evan Rachel Wood could not imagine giving her account of her dark years of domestic abuse. “I thought I was going to go to my grave with everything that happened,” she says. “And then once you rip off the Band-Aid, all the things you were worried about happening do happen — the retaliation, the blackmail, the smear campaign — but you’re still standing. And nothing’s ever going to break you as much as you were broken before.”

Wood has alleged that over the course of their four-and-a-half year relationship, Brian Warner, also known as Marilyn Manson, subjected her to severe and gruesome acts of violence — many of which he videotaped — and chronic sleep deprivation. In claims she first made public in an Instagram post in 2021 and expanded on in a documentary, Phoenix Rising, the following year, Wood said that Warner raped her, drugged her and repeatedly threatened to kill her and members of her family. He broke her down, she alleged, using “military tactics”, subjecting her to freezing temperatures and keeping her awake for days to disorientate her.

“He controlled when I slept, what I wore and when I ate. He would have his assistants follow me around and send him photos of what I was doing so he knew where I was,” she said. He downloaded spyware onto her devices to monitor her, she has alleged, isolated her from family and friends, and systematically eroded her sense of reality. “So up is down, down is up. They scare you into thinking that the only safe place is with them.” He began, she suspected, to add meth to the cocaine she was already taking with him; her nose bled continuously, she developed scabs all over her body and could not get out of bed.

With Manson at an art gallery opening in 2006 getty images

Two years into their relationship, in 2009, she made an attempt to leave him; he called her 158 times until she returned. “On average, it takes a woman seven attempts to leave for good. That’s probably how many times it took,” she says. She eventually left Warner in 2011.

But only when she saw the 2020 documentary The Vow, about the NXIVM cult — a fraudulent New York self-help organisation that coerced women into abuse and sex trafficking — did Wood identify something else about her alleged abuser and his methods. “The dynamics can be very much the same [as a cult] and the tactics and the aftermath can be very much the same.”

Wood is now one of the voices in a new documentary, The Narcissist’s Playbook, directed by Mark Vicente, a whistleblower in NXIVM who became a crucial witness in the trial of key players.

The film is an investigation into a much cited but little understood pathology. Psychologists believe narcissists come in different forms, including grandiose (characterised by charm and arrogance), covert (generally more insecure, sensitive and passive-aggressive), as well as communal (who feign altruism) and malignant (who may be competitive or exploitative). Warner, Wood believes, “is more of a malignant narcissist, more of a cult leader. His circle, his sphere, it operated very much like a cult.” So it is not just the man, it is the fans, she alleges. “You’re up against an entire system — which makes it twice as hard to leave and twice as scary to speak out,” she tells me.

“There’s a lot of intimidation that comes with that — trying to keep you quiet or to blackmail you, to ruin your reputation, to hack into your electronics.”

Even 15 years after the end of their relationship, “I still get followed by cars,” she says. “I still have phishing attempts on my computer. I still have numbers calling me over and over again.”

Wood on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon in 2016 Getty Images

Most disturbingly, she claims she was subjected to a form of brainwashing more commonly used in cults. After one attempt to leave him, she returned to their house. In Phoenix Rising, Wood alleged that Warner tied her to a wooden prayer kneeler and beat her repeatedly with a Nazi whip, purportedly from the Holocaust and embellished with a swastika (Wood is Jewish). He delivered electric shocks to her genitals, cut his hand and forced her to drink his blood, then in turn cut open her hand and drank her blood. While she was subjected to this violence, according to Wood, “He was behind me the entire time. I barely even saw him. I just saw the screen in front of me — and on it was a video of a girl slitting her wrists in a bathtub.’ ”

In The Narcissist’s Playbook, she goes further, saying, “I didn’t understand why he had put me in front of a screen that was just projecting violence while the violence is being committed against me.”

Wood later discovered that this is a recognised tactic in cult practices, “a way to scramble your brain to make the memory of the abuse harder to recall.

“And it works,” she tells me. “When I was in trauma therapy, it was the only memory that the therapist couldn’t source.”

‘Even though I knew this was dangerous, I was paralysed’

Wood, 38, is speaking to me from her home in a US city she prefers not to name as she claims she is the ongoing target of harassment from loyal Marilyn Manson fans. She is articulate, thoughtful, poised and luminously beautiful. We have met in person several times. The first time, in Los Angeles in February 2011 — for an interview to discuss the miniseries Mildred Pierce, in which she starred alongside Kate Winslet — she had (unbeknown to me) left Warner only weeks before.

With her Mildred Pierce co-star Kate Winslet at the Venice Film Festival in 2011 AP

“Filming Mildred Pierce was one of the darkest periods of my life,” she tells me. “I was a waif. I was not really sleeping or eating. I was very isolated and very lonely.

“Even though I knew I was in over my head and that this was dangerous, I was paralysed and had no clue how to get out of it,” she says.

In just the previous months she’d fallen pregnant, had an abortion and made a suicide attempt. “After that, I checked myself into a psychiatric hospital, I started going to group therapy and I got sober — I was pretty heavily addicted to drugs and alcohol when I was with him.”

The second time we met was in 2016, when Wood was promoting the HBO series Westworld. That summer, Wood began, cautiously, to talk about her alleged abuse, telling a reporter from Rolling Stone that she’d suffered “physical, psychological [and] sexual” abuse in the past. A few months later, she elaborated in a letter to the reporter, which she also shared online, saying, “Yes, I’ve been raped. By a significant other while we were together. And on a separate occasion, by the owner of a bar… I don’t believe we live in a time where people can stay silent any longer. Not given the state our world is in with its blatant bigotry and sexism.”

Wood in the HBO series Westworld hbo

By the time we met again, to discuss the second series of Westworld in the spring of 2018, Wood had, the previous month, testified to the House judiciary subcommittee on crime, terrorism, homeland security and investigations in Washington DC. Wood was one of three women who spoke in the hope of extending a Sexual Assault Survivors’ Bill of Rights Act to all states, establishing nationwide statutory rights for survivors. She would go on to campaign successfully for the statute of limitations in California — the length of time in which victims of domestic violence can report abuse — to be extended first to five years and then seven.

Although she was yet to name Warner as her alleged abuser, she described “the toxic mental, physical and sexual abuse which started slow but escalated, including threats against my life, severe gaslighting and brainwashing, waking up to the man that claimed to love me raping what he believed to be my unconscious body”.

She told of “sick rituals of binding me up by my hands and feet to be mentally and physically tortured until my abuser felt I had proven my love for them.

“I thought I was the only human who experienced this, and I carried so much guilt and confusion about my response to the abuse,” she said. “I accepted my powerlessness and felt I deserved it somehow.”

‘He told me, ‘This is special. We’re supposed to be together’ ’

Wood spent her childhood in Raleigh, North Carolina, where her mother, Sara, was an actress and acting coach, and her father, Ira, also an actor, ran a local theatre group in which Evan and three of her four siblings were all involved. At nine years old, after her parents’ divorce, Wood and her mother moved to LA where she began acting professionally. Her breakthrough role came at 14 with the film Thirteen, in which she played a teenager spiralling into sex, drugs and crime. She earned a Golden Globe nomination and a Vanity Fair cover, proclaiming her one of Hollywood’s new “It girls”.

Wood, right, with Nikki Reed in her breakthrough film, Thirteen Universal Studios

When Wood met Warner, at a penthouse party at the Chateau Marmont hotel, he was not yet divorced from the burlesque performer Dita Von Teese and Wood was in a relationship with fellow actor Jamie Bell, star of Billy Elliot. She was 18; Warner was 37. Nonetheless, she says, he began love-bombing her. “He saw that I felt lonely and unseen and started to exploit that, saying, ‘This is special. This is different. We’re supposed to be together,’ ” she says. Soon, she had split from Bell and was living with Warner.

Following her testimony to Congress in 2018, “The response from people was so warm and healing and wonderful. I didn’t feel judged and I didn’t feel shame,” she says. “But then came all the other stories.”

Though she had not yet named him, former girlfriends, former employees, fans and acquaintances of Warner all contacted her, she says, with lurid claims that closely matched her own. She calls it “a sense of crushing validation. The sense that, ‘I feel validated but I hate that it’s in this way.’ ”

Manson with Dita Von Teese in New York, 2003 Getty images

While Wood could not press charges against Warner — the extended statute of limitations was still not long enough for Wood to report her alleged abuse — she submitted evidence to the FBI, which told her it was building a case from the evidence of multiple victims. Meanwhile, rumours circulated online and journalists began questioning Warner.

In February 2021, Wood confirmed the speculation. In her Instagram post she said, “The name of my abuser is Brian Warner, also known to the world as Marilyn Manson. He started grooming me when I was a teenager and horrifically abused me for years.

“I was brainwashed and manipulated into submission. I am done living in fear of retaliation, slander or blackmail.

“I am here to expose this dangerous man and call out the many industries that have enabled him, before he ruins any more lives. I stand with the many victims who will no longer be silent.”

Hours later, Warner’s record label dropped him. He posted a denial in response: “Obviously, my art and my life have long been magnets for controversy, but these recent claims about me are horrible distortions of reality,” he wrote. “My intimate relationships have always been entirely consensual with like-minded partners. Regardless of how — and why — others are now choosing to misrepresent the past, that is the truth.”

This echoed his response in 2018, when a police report was filed against Warner citing unspecified sex crimes alleged to have taken place in 2011. Warner’s lawyer, Howard E King, told The Hollywood Reporter that the “allegations made to the police were and are categorically denied by Mr Warner and are either completely delusional or part of a calculated attempt to generate publicity… Any claim of sexual impropriety or imprisonment at that, or any other, time is false.” (The police investigation was eventually dropped.)

He sued Wood for defamation in 2022, accusing her of fabricating accusations against him and convincing others to do the same. After a judge threw out significant sections of the suit, Warner dropped the case and was forced to pay Wood’s $327,000 legal fees.

Manson performing in Italy in 2012 Getty images

But in January 2025, the LA County district attorney’s office announced that a comprehensive investigation into allegations of rape, sexual assault and bodily harm against Warner brought by four women — including his former personal assistant Ashley Walters, actress Esmé Bianco and model Ashley Morgan Smithline — had not resulted in criminal charges. Prosecutors said that they too exceeded the statute of limitations, adding, “We cannot prove charges of sexual assault beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Wood mentions the “crushing validation” again. “What we’re seeing now with the Epstein files, everybody is so outraged, asking, ‘How can there be all this evidence and nothing be done?’ Every survivor I know was like, yeah, welcome to the party. Now you’re seeing what we have seen. We do have evidence — and it’s not enough. Something is wrong and broken to enable this kind of abuse to continue.”

In January, a judge reopened the case against Warner brought by Ashley Walters, after a two-year window opened for the consideration of sexual assault cases that had already expired under the statute.

Meanwhile, Warner is going on a world tour, including the UK. “There are still people giving him a platform and high-profile people touring with him, which is terrifying,” Wood tells me. “Because so many of the stories take place on tour, and the access that he still has to young fans is so troubling to me.” Last week, The Times approached Warner for comment.

With Jamie Bell in Los Angeles, 2012, the year they married Getty Images

But Wood, she says, is in a good place. After a break from acting, she has recently completed work on a new series for writer/director Ryan Murphy. She is mother to a 13-year-old son whom she co-parents with Bell. (They reconciled after her split with Manson and married in 2012, but later separated. He is now married to the actress Kate Mara.)

Wood is single but has, she says, been in some “beautiful and healthy relationships”.

She likens herself to “a shelter dog”. “It’s been in the shelter and it’s growling and lashing out. But the longer you sit with it, each day you get a bit closer, and then one day it’s in your lap and it never leaves your side.” She smiles wryly. “A lot of times people have more patience with dogs than they do humans.”

The Narcissist’s Playbook can be downloaded from June at narcissistsplaybook.com