Evan Rachel Wood accuses Marilyn Manson of driving her into a paranoic state by allegedly monitoring her and reading her emails in a clip from the second part of the upcoming doc, Phoenix Rising. The two-part HBO documentary debuts on HBO on Tuesday, with both parts available to stream on HBO Max the same day.
“Manson had hacked into my emails,” the Westworld actress says. “He was watching me, and he had people watching me, again under the guise of ‘This is for your own good.’”
Dan Cleary, one of the musicians’ former assistants, then corroborates her claim. “When I was his assistant, anyone who hopped on his Wi-Fi, he had your information and was able to clone phones or laptops or something,” he alleges.
“I’ve seen him hack into people’s laptops and gather information on them as blackmail,” Wood responds. “He’s hacked into my computer and social media accounts. He was monitoring my every move. I couldn’t reach out to anybody to say, ‘I need help,’ because if he caught me doing that … it would be up for two days getting yelled at, pleading my case, trying to talk him off the ledge. He just knew how to break you down.”
Phoenix Rising chronicles Wood’s decision to name Manson, whose real name is Brian Warner, as the man who allegedly sexually and physically abused her. The film, directed by Amy Berg (West of Memphis, Prophet’s Prey), explains how she met Warner at a party when she was a teenager and he was twice her age. Wood claims he forced a relationship on her that quickly grew dark.
A trailer for the film showed Wood’s mother and brother claiming that Warner had groomed Wood, alongside a meeting Wood had with other women who have made similar allegations against Warner. Wood named Warner as her abuser on Feb. 1, 2021. Late last year, several women alleged that Warner also sexually, physically, and mentally abused them in a Rolling Stone investigation. Four women have filed civil lawsuits against the musician.
A rep for Warner did not return a request for comment on Wood’s allegation in the clip, but Warner has denied all allegations of abuse. Earlier this month, he sued Wood and her friend, Illma Gore, for defamation and distress, as well as for allegedly impersonating an FBI agent to convince women to come forward with claims against him. In his lawsuit, he claimed Gore hacked into his computer, phone, and email. (Neither Gore nor representatives for Wood or HBO replied to requests for comment.)
When Phoenix Rising premiered earlier this year at Sundance, the film made headlines for a scene in which Wood claimed Warner “essentially raped” her on camera during the filming of his “Heart-Shaped Glasses” video. “I was coerced into a commercial sex act under false pretenses,” she alleged in the film. “That’s when the first crime was committed against me.”