Deryck Whibley is opening up about the abusive experiences he allegedly faced at the hands of Sum 41‘s first manager. In his memoir Walking Disaster, out Tuesday, the Sum 41 frontman claims he was groomed and sexually and verbally abused by the band’s first manager, Greig Nori, during the early stages of the band’s career.
“I always thought that I would take this to my grave and I wouldn’t say anything,” Whibley tells Rolling Stone. “As I started getting into the book, I felt like, ‘How could I not be honest?’”
In the memoir, per Los Angeles Times, Whibley discusses how Sum 41 started working with Nori — who fronts Canadian punk band Treble Charger — when Whibley was 16 and Nori was 34. Whibley alleges that the manager was the first person to serve him and his bandmates alcohol and that Nori slowly went from music mentor to controlling and abusive boss.
Whibley claims that while at a rave, Nori asked Whibley, who was 18 at the time, to come to a restroom stall to do ecstasy with him. Inside the restroom, Nori grabbed his face and “passionately” kissed him, Whibley writes in the book. Whibley says he was stunned and that Nori claimed he had never had same-sex attraction and that what the two of them had “was so special.”
As time went on, Whibley writes that he tried to push away the physical relationship with the former manager and that Nori called him homophobic in response, saying Whibley “owed” him for helping start their career.
Per the Times, the sexual encounters concluded after a mutual friend of his and Nori’s found out what he had been through. Although the sexual aspect of the abuse ended, Nori continued to allegedly be abusive to the group, forcing the band to mark him as co-writer on songs and failing to respond to requests. The band fired him in 2005, and Whibley says he hadn’t spoken to him since.
“Once I get to that Greig Nori stuff, I was like ‘Do I talk about this?’ But how could I not? It’s so intertwined with everything for seven years,” Whibley tells Rolling Stone. “I would be lying if I didn’t.”
Nori did not immediately respond to Rolling Stone‘s request for comment.
Whibley kept the allegations away from everyone, and it wasn’t until he dated Avril Lavigne that he heard what he went through described as abuse. In the book, he writes that Lavigne exclaimed, “That’s abuse!,” when he confided in her, and said, “He sexually abused you.”
“I went through a long period of my time where I didn’t think about it anymore. I came to realize it was self-defense,” he tells Rolling Stone. “I came to realize later on that I didn’t want to think about it or have any feelings of being a victim. I didn’t want to have victim issues.”
Whibley says he doesn’t call what he went through “abuse” in the book. When asked if, today, he sees what he went through as “abuse,” Whibley says he’s still in the “early stages” of processing what he went through.
“I’m dealing with it for the first time and I don’t know what I think about it. I can’t deny that it was very manipulative, but I didn’t really realize what a lot of this was,” Whibley says. “It didn’t dawn on me until I hit the age he was, in his mid-30s, when I was a teenager. He was a hero so to see that power dynamic, you see how you can manipulate a 16-year-old kid.”
Whibley says that in the book he just wrote his truth and allowed “the reader to decide” what it was he went through. “If that’s what people think that is, then that’s fine,” he says of calling what he went through “abuse.” He adds, “I always called it ‘some shitty thing I went through.’”
In the book, Whibley also claims Nori insisted on being credited for songs he didn’t write, telling the band it would give them more credibility. He also told the Times Nori “tried to keep” his and his bandmates’ parents away from the band.
“Now it makes more sense. Because he was the same age as our parents, and we didn’t know that at the time. He knew they would get suspicious of the way things were running,” he told the Times. “He would always be like, ‘You can’t have a relationship with your parents and be in a rock band. It’s not cool. It’s going to hurt your career.’”
Whibley was inspired to come forward with the allegations after doing a joint interview with his wife Ariana for People, in which she came forward about a suicide attempt. “I saw her bravery in that and that inspired me,” Whibley says. “I became a different person where I felt the importance to just be open.”
While he didn’t speak to his bandmates about the allegations at the time, Whibley says he sent them the memoir. “He became kind of a bad guy to all of us,” Whibley adds. “We all collectively never spoke about him.”
Overall, Whibley says his book, Walking Disaster: My Life Through Heaven and Hell, details the personal inspiration behind the lyrics that end up backing Sum 41’s music, both the good and the ugly.
“Everything that is on the records is coming from my personal experience, even if it’s just vague in the lyrics,” Whibley says. “When I started writing, I told myself, ‘Don’t try to make yourself sound cool. Just fucking write the true story.’ And I never stopped. It all just came out.”