Evan Rachel Wood resurfaces after denouncing Marilyn Manson for assault

For more than four years, just after coming of age, the actress Evan Rachel Wood (United States, 34 years old), had a relationship with a man twice her age, the singer Marilyn Manson.

Some time later she confessed that during their coexistence together, between 2006 and 2010, she suffered abuse of all kinds from him, even reaching physical and mental torture, locked up in a Los Angeles mansion, tied up and without food for days.

, a documentary divided into two installments, exhaustively recounts her journey from the world of acting to that of activism against domestic violence.

When she was ready to report, she discovered that it was too late.

California law only allowed victims to do so within three years of the assault, which the actress, with statistics in hand, considered insufficient.

So she decided to change the law and she got it.

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Evan Rachel Wood, the actress and fierce activist who has denounced Marilyn Manson for abuse

Despite the fact that Wood has been making these struggles and his accusations against Manson public for years, the singer decided to sue for defamation at the beginning of this month of March, just a few days before HBO Max premiered this production in the almost 50 countries in which is present.

Its director, Amy Berg (United States, 51 years old), assures that neither she, nor the platform, nor the protagonist of the story considered "not for a single moment" to stop the broadcast because Wood's testimony "is loaded with evidence", says the veteran documentary filmmaker on the other side of the screen from her home in Los Angeles, during a conversation on Zoom.

Marilyn Manson and Evan Rachel Wood, at the time they were a couple. Cordon

Evan Rachel Wood, the star of the

(HBO Max) series, became a movie star as a teenager, with

(2003) and

(2013)

two independent films that weren't afraid to tackle sordid issues.

Those roles filled the actress with labels.

Many of them were related to early sexuality that did not correspond to reality.

Shortly after, she ran into Brian Warner, known as Marilyn Manson, at a party.

Berg was very curious about this path in favor of victims of abuse that the actress was starting and began to follow in her footsteps for a few years "without a concrete plan in mind", he recalls.

She decided that there was a documentary in her story when the actress managed to change the Californian law, extending the victims' right to file a complaint to five years.

That day, her personal testimony in the US Congress was massively heard and several women also dared to raise their voices against the singer.

Another key moment in Wood's long personal process was when Dan Cleary, one of the musicians who accompanied Manson on his tours, posted several messages on Twitter in September 2020 refuting the singer's version of events.

Thread: I worked directly with #MarilynManson in 2007-2008 for his touring band when #EvanRachelWood was with him.

She was on tour with us the entire time.

Over the course of 1 year he turned her into a different person.

He broke her.

I didn't totally realize until later in life.

— Dan Cleary (@DanCleary79) September 13, 2020

The path to change

While the first of the episodes seeks to give a context, reviewing the details of the childhood and adolescence of its protagonist and his arrival in activism, the second of them focuses on the consequences of making his personal experience public.

One of the aspects that converge in both installments is the enormous change experienced in the United States after the #MeToo movement of 2017. In Wood's exhaustive account, she recalls the Marilyn Manson music video in which she participated in 2007. It is titled

, in clear reference to the heart-shaped glasses of Stanley Kubrick's film Lolita.

The actress denounces that she was raped in front of an entire film crew without anyone doing anything about it.

The musician decided to change the terms agreed with her on the fly and began to have real sex instead of fake sex on camera without her partner, who at that time was a drunk and drugged teenager, being in a position to prevent it.

Despite the interpreter's statements, the recording is still posted on video platforms such as YouTube.

Evan Rachel Wood, in a moment of the documentary 'Risen from the ashes'.

"In many of the abuses that appear in my documentaries, most of the aggressors were themselves abused in the past," explains Berg, Oscar nominee for

(2006), about the sexual assaults of an American Catholic priest on dozens of children.

“It is very difficult to think that cases like the one reported by Evan Rachel Wood are just isolated events, that are not part of a culture.

It is systematic behavior that society has tolerated for centuries,” she argues.

But despite the progress of the #MeToo movement, there is still a way to go.

Berg explains that he could not include

songs by other musicians who share a record label with Manson, because the company, in an attempt to protect its artist despite the massive accusations it has received, refused to sell the relevant rights to this HBO Max production.

After the broadcast of the documentary, both she and Wood have been harassed on social networks by "a very small community of people who are very persistent and try again and again to discredit the victim," says the director.

“On the other hand, the amount of support that she has received since the first chapter was released has been enormous,” she concludes.

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