Marilyn Manson faces zero consequences and returns to the UK this week

Content warning - rape, abuse, assault

On Halloween, we imagine what is scary from a place of safety. Spirits wandering the earth and making the lights flicker. Chainsaw-wielding psychopaths. The final girl running breathlessly through the woods.

Still, these are horrors placed at a safe distance from our ordinary lives – after all, many of them are abstract, or even the stuff of fantasy. There are other horrors in our own reality we can’t run away from so easily. Abuse and misogyny, for instance, and the overwhelming lack of justice tied to both.

Marilyn Manson returns to the UK on Halloween for another headline run of shows, starting in Bournemouth. It’s the second time he has played on these shores this year after performing in Wolverhampton and London in February.

At one point, this might have seemed unimaginable after several women – among them ex-partner Evan Rachel Wood, actress Esme Bianco, his former personal assistant Ashley Walters and model Ashley Morgan Smithline - made allegations against him encompassing sexual assault, abuse, grooming, rape and battery. In total, there have been over a dozen accusers.

Although Manson denied the allegations, calling them “horrible distortions of reality”, he was dropped by his label Loma Vista, his manager and his booking agent.

Then the scales began tipping back in his direction. Smithline retracted her allegations. He and Bianco settled a lawsuit she filed (alleging sexual assault, physical abuse and human trafficking) out of court.

In January of this year, prosecutors in the Evan Rachel Wood case confirmed after years-long investigation that Manson wouldn’t be facing any charges for sexual assault or domestic abuse, citing insufficient evidence and the fact that the allegations were outside the statute of limitations. (Manson had sued her for defamation but later dropped the suit and paid roughly $327,000 in legal fees.)

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Prior to that, Manson signed a new record deal with Nuclear Blast and released a new album, One Assassination Under God – Chapter 1, last November. He’s gone from playing the 5,000-capacity Eventim Apollo in London to the 12,500-capacity Wembley Arena in less than a year. I’ve been to that venue twice in the last 6 weeks for journalistic purposes, walking past the tour poster beaming from screens above the bar, frowning back at the photo above me of Manson staring icily into the distance. If it's any consolation, his Brighton show was cancelled after pressure from campaigners and local MP Sian Berry.

This looks dangerously like a late-career resurgence. Lying low for a period, in the hope the raft of allegations might sink to the bottom of metal’s collective memory, didn’t prevent Manson from being any less revered by his fans.

He has 7.3 million monthly listeners on Spotify, which has risen from 6.6 million at the top of 2025. Of course, there’s outrage about the fact he still has any career at all, let alone a newly thriving one. However, some of that consternation will undoubtedly spiral outwards to the people standing next to us at gigs with Marilyn Manson tickets in their possession, or who have the audacity to wear his merchandise while stomping around festivals. The supply – and the ability to charge between £60-£80 for tickets - would not be there without the demand. When there's demand, there's people lining up to profit - promoters, agents, merch sellers, venues, the works - thereby lining their pockets with the profits of an alleged abuser.

I touched on some of the reasons for this, and the structures that enable potential abusers, in a recent podcast episode with the brilliant Sophie K and Yasmine Summan of On Wednesdays We Wear Black. In fact, one of their earliest episodes related to the allegations, and it saw them compiling and reacting to both the accusations made and the misogyny woven through Manson's 1998 memoir The Long Hard Road Out Of Hell. I wanted to expand on this discussion further, particularly relating to whether fans still support Manson for nefarious reasons or not.

Some of the continued reverence for Manson will come, of course, from ignorance. At this point, however, with how prolific the allegations were, it would take a lot of noise (or selective hearing) to drown them out. Generally, if you’re a fan of any particular musician, you know what is happening in their careers, so claiming not to know might well be a flimsy argument. Some, the ‘innocent-till-proven-guilty’ crowd, will shrug their shoulders and point to the fact that he hasn’t been convicted on any charges as a reason why it is fine to support him still.

Yes, allegations are allegations. As a journalist, not a solicitor, it is not my position to suggest whether Manson is guilty or not. It is, however, naïve to stand by this viewpoint when we know the justice system fails survivors constantly, so much so that in the UK, fewer than 3 per cent of rapes recorded by police resulted in someone being charged – not convicted, charged - that same year. Only a sixth of survivors go to the police in the first place.

Some will cry that they’re separating the art from the artist. This makes little sense to me when, surely, the artist would taint the art. Could you really stomach the idea of putting money into a potential abuser’s pocket? And can you actually listen to ‘Heart Shaped Glasses’ without feeling nauseous?

What I’m steadily more convinced of, however, is that some fans with certain views latch on to Manson harder because of the twisted values he represents. Being a fan of his might have been viewed as a way to piss off pearl-clutching parents and  reject a society that rejected you, but now, it may represent a supposedly anarchic rebellion against a perceived left-wing, pro-cancel culture “establishment” which has blunted the supposedly inherent controversy-baiting of good ol’ fashioned rock ‘n’ roll. They forget that genres shift and times change, and the standards of what is acceptable or not evolve. The values rock music has claimed to stand for have been co-opted to suit a regressive, right-wing narrative.

In fact, Yasmine summed it up brilliantly:

“Right-wing fascists feel ostracised because their views aren't the ‘norm’ anymore so they need safety, and they're latching onto metal, which is often seen as a genre for the ‘misunderstood’. It's creating a very uncomfortable dynamic in metal where half of us are very tolerant and accepting, and the other half are like ‘you should all die.’”

Manson’s fans will defend him voraciously. I know this because I have been their target. After I pointed out on Twitter the horrendous irony of his comeback US tour dates being announced on International Women’s Day last year, the fans came with their pitchforks. Here’s a few gems from my notifications:

“You know [what’s] not metal? This post.”

“Marilyn Manson is not a metal band and he's a legend. The allegations were never proven. You're just a crybaby.”

“We get it, you don't [like] metal because it's politically [inconvenient].  Now shut up and throw up the horns because you lost the culture battle.”

“In a completely unprecedented turn of events, a woman has made something completely about her.”

An equally frightening prospect this Halloween is the threat of society sleepwalking towards fascism, and given culture cannot exist in a vacuum, rock and metal risks becoming reflective of it if it’s becoming a haven for those clinging onto outdated views. These are a troubling breed of outcasts, who aren’t seeing through the shock rock smokescreen Manson has spent years projecting but identify with it. When that comes to women’s safety, that becomes an especially dangerous prospect.

I’ll leave you by letting Manson describe himself in his own words. “I have fantasies every day about smashing [Evan Rachel Wood’s] skull in with a sledgehammer,” Manson claimed to Spin in 2009 when discussing his song ‘I Want To Kill You Like They Do In the Movies’. (His team claimed – in 2020 - this was “obviously a theatrical rock star interview promoting a new record, and not a factual account”.) The recent documentary Marilyn Manson Unmasked contained a snippet of an interview with Rolling Stone in which he said: “I'm not into rape whatsoever… I prefer to break a woman down to the point where they have no choice but to submit to me.”

“I’m not sexist, but I tend to incite misogynist characteristics,” he told Dazed in 2015. “I do not hate women, I love women. I just don’t love what they do to me sometimes.”

For help and support regarding rape and sexual abuse, contact Rape Crisis on 0808 802 9999 in England and Wales, 0808 801 0302 in Scotland, and 0800 0246 991 in Northern Ireland, or visit their website at www.rapecrisis.org.uk. If you are in the US, contact RAINN on 800-656-HOPE (4673).

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