Marilyn Manson has dropped his defamation lawsuit against Evan Rachel Wood and agreed to pay her $327,000 in legal fees, according to legal documents obtained by Billboard, officially ending a case that the shock rocker first lodged against his former girlfriend more than two and a half years ago.
Filed in March 2022, the lawsuit accused Wood of conspiring with another woman, Ashley Gore, to falsely portray Manson (real name Brian Warner) as a “rapist and abuser” in the public eye. Both women appeared in the 2022 documentary Phoenix Rising, in which Wood detailed her accusations of sexual abuse against the singer. The lawsuit claimed that both women “secretly recruited, coordinated, and pressured prospective accusers to emerge simultaneously with allegations of rape and abuse against Manson, and brazenly claim that it took 10 or more years to ‘realize’ their consensual relationships with Warner were supposedly abusive.”
But Manson’s lawsuit suffered a major blow in May 2023 after a judge largely sided with Wood in her move to have it thrown out by invoking California’s anti-SLAPP statute, which makes it easier for judges to dismiss cases that threaten free speech. In that ruling, the judge struck down much of Manson’s case after finding that the rocker had not shown he would ultimately be able to prove many of his accusations against Wood. Manson had appealed that decision this past August.
“Marilyn Manson — whose real name is Brian Warner — filed a lawsuit against Ms. Wood as a publicity stunt to try to undermine the credibility of his many accusers and revive his faltering career,” Wood’s lawyer Michael J. Kump said in a statement sent to Billboard. “But his attempt to silence and intimidate Ms. Wood failed. As the trial court correctly found, Warner’s claims were meritless. Warner’s decision to finally abandon his lawsuit and pay Ms. Wood her full fee award of almost $327,000 only confirms as much.”
In his own statement, Manson’s attorney Howard King said, “After 4 years of fighting a battle where he was able to tell the truth, Brian is pleased to dismiss his still-pending claims and appeal in order to close the door on this chapter of his life.”
The public battle between Manson and Wood kicked off in February 2021, when Wood claimed in an Instagram post that Manson “started grooming me when I was a teenager and horrifically abused me for years.” In addition to Wood’s accusations, Manson has been hit with multiple sexual misconduct lawsuits over the last several years from women including former assistant Ashley Walters, model Ashley Morgan Smithline, Game of Thrones actress Esme Bianco and two Jane Doe accusers.
The majority of these cases are no longer active. In May 2022, a judge dismissed Walters’ lawsuit, citing the statute of limitations. Manson subsequently settled with both Bianco and one of the Jane Doe accusers, while Smithline recanted her allegations and claimed that Wood and others had “manipulated” her into bringing them.
Manson has denied all of the allegations against him.
