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The Spoof That Became a Reality: How Evan Rachel Wood and Darren Criss Became Friends in 2014

Evan Rachel Wood and Darren Criss hit the stage together in the Off-Broadway revival of Little Shop of Horrors on January 30th, and this Sunday, March 31st, their performances are coming to an end. On February 20th, the pair appeared together on TODAY with Hoda & Jenna to promote their show and talk about how their friendship began a decade ago in 2014 and has continued strong till today. But what was it that brought Evan and Darren together in 2014? It was a spoof on the show Funny or Die of the Tom Hank's movie Big , but in this version of the film the male lead role is played by a female, Evan Rachel Wood. Darren Criss is the adult who plays her love interest and eventually finds out he’s had sexual relations with a 13-year-old girl aged by magic. What is interesting on top of this, in the 2003 movie Thirteen , Evan played a 13-year-old who wanted to be older and in one scene she had sex with an older man.   When Big came out in 1988, it was a huge success and few were

Fact Check: Was Marilyn Manson Really Planning To Kill Evan Rachel Wood?


"Someone says, ‘You tried to kill me,’ I’m like, ‘No, wrong. If I’d tried I would’ve done it.’" 
(Marilyn Manson - Dazed, February 2015)
 
On March 2, 2018 Jill Gutowitz of Glamour asked: "Why Is Nobody Talking About Marilyn Manson's 'Fantasy' of Killing Evan Rachel Wood?"

This was the week Evan Rachel Wood testified in front of Congress and detailed a harrowing account of sexual and physical abuse with an intimate partner, whom she did not name at this time. According to Evan’s testimony, the abusive experiences she described happened “a decade ago” and seemed parallel to her relationship with Manson. She recounted “sick rituals” of “binding me up by my hands and feet to be mentally and physically tortured until my abuser felt I had proven my love for them.” The actress added, “In this moment, while I was tied up and being beaten and told unspeakable things, I truly felt like I could die. Not just because my abuser said to me, ‘I could kill you right now,’ but because in that moment I felt like I left my body and I was too afraid to run. He would find me.”

In this article, Gutowitz sought to remind her readers that in an interview with Spin in 2009, Manson admitted the following: "The song ‘I Want to Kill You Like They Do in The Movies’ is about my fantasies." Responding to a question about his relationship with his ex at the time, Evan Rachel Wood, Manson continued, “I have fantasies every day about smashing her skull in with a sledgehammer.”

Evan Rachel Wood would go on to repeat several times over the years that she felt like she was going to die at the hands of her abuser, and when she named Marilyn Manson as her abuser on February 1, 2021 she straightforward said that Marilyn Manson threatened her life through physical and mental abuse.

On October 3, 2021 Elif Ozden of Metal Head Zone wrote an article with the headline: "Accuser Admits Marilyn Manson Was Planning To Kill Evan Rachel Wood".

This was written in light of Marilyn Manson‘s accuser "Jane Doe" refiling her sexual assault lawsuit which was dismissed a few months ago because her testimony was based on a groundless claim of having a repressed memory, and among the repressed memories was her claim that Manson told her that he considered killing his ex-girlfriend Evan Rachel Wood. She then revealed the musician told her about how he tied Evan to a chair and pointed a gun towards her. Moreover, Doe alleged that Manson considered killing Evan but then decided to "be merciful."

Another Manson accuser, Ashley Morgan Smithline, said in an interview with People magazine that the common belief of all the alleged victims of Manson's abuse was that Manson was trying to get them all to commit suicide. This was his goal, according to all the accusers.

After Metal Head Zone published this article, Metal Injection followed two days later with the headline: "Accuser Claims MARILYN MANSON Planned To Kill Evan Rachel Wood; Wood Encourages Contacting LAPD".

This refers to the fact that Evan Rachel Wood reposted snapshots of the article by Metal Head Zone on her Instagram page, and included the following three posts encouraging her followers to make some phone calls and push the investigation against Marilyn Manson forward:
 
What is really happening here? Did Marilyn Manson truly plan to kill Evan Rachel Wood? Let's briefly examine this issue, though I will get into this in more detail in future posts, and much of this I have already addressed in previous posts in some detail.

1. There is no investigation out on Marilyn Manson. This should be clarified from the beginning. Evan Rachel Wood knows this, but she still wants you to harass law enforcement in California and waste their time. Currently there are four lawsuits against Manson, and none of them are by Evan Rachel Wood due to the statute of limitations in California. These lawsuits have established dates for hearings, so calling anyone in law enforcement will not change anything.
 
2. Why is it that Evan Rachel Wood is now so quick to want to call law enforcement, but never attempted to do so when she felt her life being threatened? To say you felt it would destroy your career is a very poor excuse, especially when the relationship was over and Manson again started dating many women who also could have suffered being with him and even been killed, if what she claims was true. Why hasn't Evan issued an apology to all the women that supposedly suffered and almost died under Manson? Evan could have stopped the abuse dead in its tracks. Instead, the only thing we got for years after their break up was Evan gushing about her relationship with Manson and saying nothing but positive things, even going out of her way and sending out a public tweet of sympathy on the day Manson's mother died in 2014. Was she really so scared of Manson that she allowed so many to be in danger just to preserve her career in Hollywood? Such selfishness is unforgivable, if what she and others claim about Manson is true.
 
3. What triggered Evan Rachel Wood all of a sudden to resurface this issue? Yes, it was partly Jane Doe backing up her claim that Manson planned to kill her, and Metal Head Injection publishing its headline which she first reposted. But there is something else. On the same day that Evan posted these things on Instagram, she was in New York on the set of Westworld where it was announced the same day, October 5th, that the show is reviving her character Dolores. If you read the Rolling Stone interview from November 2016 with Evan, she goes into great detail how this character serves as a primary inspiration for her self-empowerment, and it was at the height of her fame playing this character at the time that she found the courage to finally admit that not only was she abused by a previous partner, but she was raped as well. So what we have here is Evan Rachel Wood not only stirring up added publicity, since from her perspective fame, victimhood and activism all go together, but she feels inspired by a character who is out for revenge against those who abused her in the past.
 
 
4. As I have explained in previous posts, the song "I Want to Kill You Like They Do in The Movies" comes from the 2009 album The High End of Low, and has no basis in a real event, but rather one that is fictional, imaginary. This album, according to Manson, was made like a movie that draws from his own biography but fictionalizes it to reflect a story similar to movies like American Psycho and Cape Fear, which served as inspirations. It is based on his relationship with Evan Rachel Wood, because before they broke up he was planning on making a movie of a similar nature with her. Since they were no longer together, he went forward with the project in which she is a character, and this was reflected in the interviews he gave at the time. This is therefore a case of people not understanding how to separate the art from the artist, by people who naively think that something so extreme must hide a secret reality, especially someone who looks like Marilyn Manson who has been accused of every evil under the sun.

Even before Manson met Evan, he talked about the role of the imagination in the stories he tells in his albums as a way to exorcise your demons without giving into them. By expressing fantasies through art, you are making sure to not act out on them, but rather you are allowing your art to see them through until it is out of your system. For example, in an interview with MTV News in 2001, Manson said of the Marquis de Sade: 
 
"I relate to how he was a person who had a very vivid imagination that scared a lot of people and he was punished for the things that were going on in his head. He was using his mind and his art to exorcise his demons, and he was punished for it. And I feel a lot of times I get myself into similar circumstances."
 
Furthermore, one of Manson's biggest influences on several albums is the band Ministry. Ministry did what Manson has come to do also, by putting out extreme fantasies into their songs to exorcise them instead of acting them out, in the spirit of the Marquis de Sade. Just read the lyrics and listen to the song "Flashback" to see how violent and gross Ministry could get in expressing their fantasies. I once played this song for a girl and she made me shut it off because it was grossing her out.

5. Ashley Morgan Smithline's claim, which is a claim, according to her, of all the alleged victims of Manson, is ridiculous. First of all, she is trying to make Manson out to be a serial killer. Secondly, by stating his goal was to get these women to commit suicide, she is already admitting to him failing to achieve his goal, since there is no woman who was in a relationship with Manson that ever committed suicide. This would make him the most unsuccessful serial killer in history. Furthermore, several women he has been in relationships with have also said that Manson was very pleasant and fun to be with, showing no signs of such extreme behavior, not even close in fact, and they usually cite as the cause of their break up as being lifestyle differences, either due to his busy schedule, different career paths or because they couldn't change his drug habit. Some of these testimonies I will share in future posts.

6. The scenario painted by Jane Doe in which she claims Manson told her he planned to kill Evan is based on what she admits to being a recovered memory from a memory that she had repressed for about a decade. The only way she recovered this memory was after hearing the stories of the accusers after February 1, 2021. Seeing that Evan had told this story then and even previously, how do we know that her repressed memory is not just a projection of Evan's testimony? There is absolutely no way to tell the difference, which is why courts usually regard repressed memories with great suspicion.

Furthermore, let's say that Jane Doe really did hear this from Manson. If you read her testimony, he apparently did this while showing her violent films that he made. These violent films in her testimony she considered to be real violence by Manson. One video was a short film called Groupie, which Jane Doe thought was real and even says in her testimony that Manson implied to her that he killed the groupie in the video. Since this testimony came out, the woman Jane Doe thought was killed in real life has come out in a public interview saying this was an acting gig she did with her then boyfriend Marilyn Manson, and nothing in the film was real, adding further that her relationship with Manson was a pleasant one that she looks back on fondly.

What we understand from this is that Jane Doe has been proven to be unreliable. First she thought Manson implied that he killed the woman in the Groupie film, her real name being Pola Weiss, and assumed many other false things about it, and now she claims Manson planned to kill Evan. But was this also based on a video she saw? Keep reading.

7. It should be noted further that we possibly have the origin story on which both Evan and Jane Doe based their claim that Manson planned to kill Evan. Evan has admitted that she and Manson filmed violent footage together for a movie he was making. In fact, it seems that this footage was for the music video to "I Want to Kill You Like They Do in The Movies". Esme Bianco, another Manson accuser, was cast in this video after Manson and Evan broke up, but she claimed it was too difficult to endure, among other things. To be clear, this footage is fake and done with Evan's consent. Many people assume this footage was never released, but it partly was. In 2009 the Intro page to Manson's official website had the video playing as a flash, which shows Manson beating a naked and bloody Evan Rachel Wood while she is tied to a chair. We know this is the real Evan and not an actress because at the 34 second mark we can see her back tattoo of a quote from Edgar Allan Poe that Evan is known for. When abuse allegations against Manson came out on February 1, 2021, this video resurfaced on forums by Evan supporters, and they for the most believe this is real footage of Evan being beaten. Even Evan said that footage of her being beaten was leaked. However, if you examine the video, it is clearly fake. For example, when Evan's head snaps back after seemingly being punched by Manson, you will never see Manson or anything touch Evan, instead Manson uses a camera trick with editing to make you think that Evan is being punched. Watch the video below:
 

Here are a few others (here, here and here).
 
Concluding Remarks:

Did Manson plan to kill Evan? There is no evidence to suggest this is true, and the proposed evidence we do have is not only very weak but the testimonies are very unreliable. In fact, what we do have is evidence that the accusers are using Manson's artistic expressions as fuel to light a fire of false accusations, artistic expressions that Manson himself made public, but if you don't understand Manson as an artist and are naive, this art can easily be used as evidence against Manson, even though it will never hold up in a reasonable court of law. We will examine this in greater detail in future posts.
 
 

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