Never Shut Up.

The perseverance of Evan Rachel Wood

Domestic violence survivors fight to use their voices – on their own terms, without compromise. Yet that’s not without severe challenge. The #MeToo movement showed both the power and the betrayal of that principle; women were exploited and left twisting in the wind by non-profit organizations and feminist advocacy groups. They were tokenized for the cause and once the exploiter got what they wanted, those institutions fled at the first sign of trouble. That usually came in the form of a SLAPP lawsuit (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) targeting the individual – and not the organization or otherwise.

Fierce women who spoke up were left without any structural support, and many were overwhelmed, exiled and abandoned. Those who care about survivors’ stories would never want them jeopardized, yet that’s what happened. Organizations such as Time’s Up faced criticism for heavy spending on salaries and controversies like advising powerful figures (eg, Governor Andrew Cuomo) amid allegations made against them.

One woman who has defied defeat is Evan Rachel Wood. It’s not merely her own resilience that has brought her here. It’s also her strategy. Her abuser has been named by multiple victims (though that hasn’t spared her heavy online abuse). Wood’s path has focused on re-framing her story by talking of structural systemic patterns, and introducing new legislation. She faced – and largely defeated – a defamation suit from Manson under California’s anti-SLAPP laws, avoiding what could have been a brutal head-on confrontation in 2023 and poisonous adversarial tabloid noise.

Today the brilliant Andrew Gold - British journalist and podcast host of Heretics, where he interviews people as diverse as Richard Dawkins and Robbie Williams – published his hour-long interview with Wood. At the age of 38, she is now 20 years out from the beginnings of her horrifying story of abuse at the hands of her perpetrator - ‘90s superstar - Marilyn Manson (real name: Brian Warner). A child actor, Wood speaks not only to the Manson abuse and her teenage grooming, but to the overall system of industrial exploitation of Hollywood, which set her up for a lifetime of blurred boundaries, and unfair power dynamics from a young age, rendering her susceptible to control and cult-like behavior. When power is so asymmetrically held, speaking out can mean risking everything.

(Manson has denied the allegations as “horrible distortions”. Some claims faced legal pushback or were beyond the statute of limitations, hence Wood co-authoring the Phoenix Act, a California law signed in 2020 that extends the statute of limitations for domestic violence felony charges. The pattern from over 15 women who have made public allegations against Manson is well-documented in mainstream reporting, although some have recanted).

Andrew Gold is brave himself in his choice of subjects, and has never shied away from his Jewishness or his support for Israel. An investigative journalist who understands and stands up to the vicious extremism of modern antizionism especially in mainstream media, I imagine he sees the parallels with misogyny; the way in which truth is inverted, perpetrators and victims reversed, and smears weaponized. Gold is unafraid to state that there is no equivalence between the Jewish state’s need to defend itself from terror and the actions of Hamas, for instance. Gaslighting and DARVO are inherent to both hatreds. And just like Jews who fight back, women like Wood are not perfect victims – they are at once “all powerful” and “subhuman”.

As Wood’s testimony about the horrors she experienced at the hands of Manson unfolds, Gold does what survivors need: he listens with compassion. Wood’s voice has become her vehicle for change. That is how it’s done.

The full episode is linked here:

My perpetual question with the topic of domestic violence is how something so prominent is so little understood or spoken of? What is it about domestic violence that even feminists find so unpalatable? The intimidation to speak? The fact it’s so close to home? It is the silent killer, benefiting from its choke-hold on the voices of those who survived it. When you spend time with survivors, when you listen to the detailing of coercive control, the psychological harm, and yes the awful physical and sexual torture, it changes you. It changed me. It made me want to tear walls down, even while knowing that doing so may not free a victim who is wired to stay.

The world needs to care about domestic violence. In America it affects more than 1 in 3 women. Yet data shows only about half of these victims report to police. I was inspired to see two Jewish voices discussing it so bravely here and to share it. And trigger warning, the most pertinent incident discussed by Wood to me was a harrowing act of degradation by Manson in his home, when she returned to him after an attempt at leaving. To punish her, he stripped and bound her, forced her to watch violent videos, while he flogged her with a whip that had Nazi insignia on it. It was a relic from the Holocaust. To me it profoundly connects the two most pernicious forms of hatred - and the oldest - in the world: misogyny and Jew hate.

“I’m Jewish by the way,” says Wood, retelling this trauma. See the clip below.

Where you find a sexual predator, you can often find an antisemite, who will take particular pleasure in torturing a woman in the most demonic ways. Manson even acquired multiple Nazi tattoos during the relationship with Wood. Misogyny provides the architecture of control: grooming, isolation, gaslighting, sexual sadism, the pornographic thrill of breaking a woman into submission. Jew hate supplies the accelerant and the script. Medieval blood libels often go hand in hand with the modern edge-lord and the victim becomes a stand-in for every Jewish woman. For conspiracy fantasists, abusing a woman who is also a Jew is like killing two birds with one stone. That’s why the Nazi treatment of women in the concentration camps was so deeply sadistic.

Jewish women who have spoken out since October 7 have experienced a double dose of hate - documented in record spikes by the FBI and ADL, with antisemitic incidents surging over 100-140% in 2023 alone and remaining elevated. We see it online and in the streets every day: Zio bitch! Jew whore! Progressives who wept for #MeToo suddenly had selective blindness when the survivor was Jewish and the perpetrator’s depravity included Nazi cosplay, reinvigorated by the Gestapo’s incumbents – Hamas. They doubled down on supporting the “free speech” of those who screamed that rape was resistance or denied that it happened, and that Palestine should be free “from the River to the Sea” (a slogan shared by the rapists Hamas on October 7). The #MeToo cycle of compromising real, brave victims’ stories continues as feminist gatekeepers align themselves with perpetrators of sexual violence, blinded by Israel-phobia.

Jew hate has always been eroticized. Pornographic in its intensity. The domination, the inversion, the thrill of forcing the “chosen” into the dirt, of expelling the “powerful”. Add misogyny and you get an ideological piñata. Shatter her and you’re striking at something bigger. The intersection must be named without euphemism. Misogyny and Jew hate make perfect bedfellows and the intention is total erasure.

Evan Rachel Wood survived it and refused to stay quiet. Her fight goes beyond her ability to speak. She’s turning pain into policy, isolation into patterns named by many, and personal testimony into structural reform. To me it’s a miracle she survived the abuse at all. Do not take for granted the rarity of a public survivor arriving at a point where she doesn’t just live, but lives to tell it – and to do something about it.

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