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Pondering the Triumphant Return of Marilyn Manson

  A week has gone by since tickets to Marilyn Manson's summer tour went on sale, and fans are generally very excited to see him perform live again. And even though various accusers, their supporters, and media outlets have tried canceling him from any comeback due to the coordinated hoax against him, having done all they can to prevent him from ever having a music career again, branding him as a rapist, a pedophile, a murderer, a Nazi, a racist, a cult leader, and pretty much anything else to falsely twist his art and smear his image and destroy him, what we have just experienced this past week, right before the spring equinox tomorrow and the resurrectional atmosphere of the Easter season upon us, is Manson's own resurrection from what could simply be described as a dead career, after being crucified with false accusations. Remarkably, despite the absolutely relentless campaign to destroy him over the past three years, where they left him dead in the tomb of obscurity, he has

An Analysis and Investigation of the Photo of Evan Rachel Wood's "Self-Inflicted" Scars

 

Evan Rachel Wood Coming Into 2019

As we entered 2019, Evan Rachel Wood continued her activist role as a self-proclaimed warrior fighting on behalf of all women, and she made sure all women knew this when she gave a stirring speech at the third annual Women's March on January 18th, where she said among other things:

"When you are knocked down, you get back up. Keep getting back up. Now, women are really good at that. We’ve had a lot of practice. But we are tired. I’m tired. As a mother, as a rape survivor, as a domestic violence survivor, I am tired."

Almost a few weeks later, Evan revealed in a Nylon essay she wrote that she had once committed herself to a mental hospital, specifically when she was 22 years old after a suicide attempt. A few days after publication, on February 2nd, the Daily Mail published an awkward article of Evan emerging from LAX in her first public appearance since writing that essay.

Chronologically, her stay in the mental hospital coincides with the time after she and Marilyn Manson broke off their engagement and went their separate ways in August 2010 and before her birthday a month later on September 7th when she turned 23. This also falls within the time period she was wrapping up filming Mildred Pierce for HBO (April to August 2010), when she played the darkest character of her career, a role which seeped into her mental stability, as she says in an interview with Nylon Magazine published in November of 2010:

"I was in a dark cloud the whole time we were filming, I was kind of depressed and it affected me. I mean Thirteen was hard, but this one, like, hurt my soul."

When filming wrapped and she split with Manson, Evan soon after, according to her timeline, entered a mental hospital after a suicide attempt. In the November 2010 interview with Nylon, she said she wanted to take a year off after filming Mildred Pierce and after her relationship with Manson ended:

"I think that's why I'm taking the rest of the year off. I'm like, I need to go back to me, and be happy, and not think about that."

In 2019 Evan's narrative was fully established that she was in a "very dark place" while filming Mildred Pierce because of the alleged abuse she suffered under Manson, and she took time off and supposedly entered a mental hospital because of this abuse under Manson, though she still had not named her abuser. Evan's primary goal still was her political activism, to get as many like-minded representatives in government positions, and her primary platform was making it known she was a rape and domestic violence survivor, an ideal of female victimhood.


Evan's Self-Inflicted Scars: Problems With the Timeline

On March 11, 2019, Evan Rachel Wood posted two tweets that were supposed to be seen as evidence that she suffered domestic abuse; here we will only concentrate on the second tweet. In the second tweet, the actress shared an image (which can be seen above) that she says depicts the “self-harm” she engaged in to try and prevent her abusive partner from abusing her.

“2 years into my abusive relationship I resorted to self-harm. When my abuser would threaten or attack me, I cut my wrist as a way to disarm him. It only made the abuse stop temporarily. At that point, I was desperate to stop the abuse, and I was too terrified to leave. #IAmNotOk.”

The media ate up this news and disseminated this story everywhere, and it was generally received without question, however if you read some of the comments under these stories from that time, many people were also skeptical, especially those who leaned conservative. The reason for this is because in January 2019 Jussie Smollett staged a fake hate crime against himself in Chicago, and people began to wonder if she also was staging a hoax for the same motive Smollett had: to become an icon of victimhood and raise their activist platform in the current left-wing political climate fueled by hatred for Donald Trump. Most people understood this is what Smollett was doing, but at this point they still didn't understand the political agenda of Evan Rachel Wood, so her story was not nearly as well-known. Perhaps Evan felt threatened to be exposed at this time like Smollett, which is why she felt the need to present some "evidence" on social media.

When the media reported on the second tweet, they would talk about how a year earlier, in February of 2018, Evan also opened up about her self-harm when she spoke in front of a House Judiciary Subcommitee in Washington, D.C. to advocate for Sexual Assault Survivors’ Bill of Rights Acts in all 50 states:

“I struggled with self-harm to the point of two suicide attempts, which landed me in a psychiatric hospital for a short period of time. This was, however, a turning point in my life when I started seeking professional help to deal with my trauma and mental stress. But others are not so fortunate, and because of this, rape is often more than a few minutes of trauma, but slow death.”

Hence, the photo of the self-inflicted wounds became associated with the suicide attempt and subsequent stay in a psychiatric hospital, both of which according to Evan's timeline took place in August of 2010. But Evan in her tweet is very specific when she wrote it was "2 years into my abusive relationship". The problem is, Evan had not named her abuser, and therefore had never told us at this point when she tried to commit suicide and when she entered a mental hospital, and by saying the photo was "2 years into my abusive relationship" we still didn't know in 2019 where this fit into the timeline. In other words, a timeline did not exist on March 11, 2019 when this photo was released, and the media was too lazy to do an investigation. They just accepted everything she said at her word. But the truth is that her words were contradictory, because in her statement before Congress in 2018 she linked her self-harm to her suicide attempt in 2010, while in 2019 with her Twitter post she linked her self-harm to about two years prior. It would not be until February 1, 2021, when Evan named her abuser, that we could actually form a timeline. Till then however, she had plenty of time to control the narrative and not allow journalists to investigate her claims. The damage had been done.

Still, however, the media refused to do an investigation even after Evan named her alleged abuser. Despite this, we can now say that the timeline this photo falls under is most accurately around January 2009, which is two years after she began her relationship with Marilyn Manson, in January 2007. However, January 2009 is nearly two years before Evan tried to commit suicide and entered a mental hospital. This means that the photo is completely unrelated to her suicide attempt and subsequent stay in a mental hospital. Furthermore, in January 2009, Manson and Evan were not dating. Their first breakup took place on October 23, 2008. They would not officially get back together until November or early December 2009, though reportedly they did briefly get back together in late February 2009.

All this tells us that not only is Evan Rachel Wood off in her timeline of events, but she also allowed for the media to spread the lie that her photo of self-harm was associated with her suicide attempt right before she entered a mental hospital. This should make us question anything Evan says is true, and question if what she says took place at the time she says. But still, the media refuses to investigate and follows an outdated timeline devised by Evan at a time when she held us all in ignorance so as to not be able to evaluate and investigate all these things.


Evan's Self-Inflicted Scars: An Initial Analysis of the Photo

There are three things in this photo that I want to concentrate on in order to establish what we are in fact seeing.

1. Her position on the bed.

2. Which arm has the scars and the nature of the scars.

3. Her makeup, hair color and style.
 
Evan's position on the bed shows she is posing for the camera. Her head is more leaning on her scarred arm, neither of which are leaning against the pillow, but her neck is slightly elevating her head to hang in the air, giving her face photo-friendly structure. It is difficult to establish if someone is taking this photo or if it is a selfie. The arm under the pillow emerges at the elbow area, which could allow for her arm to be slightly elevated enough to take the photo. When recreated (I recreated this pose with my niece), this photo depicts the scars on the right forearm, the arm under the pillow is her left, and the side of her face facing the camera is her right side. The eyes are shut and the mouth is slightly open for dramatic purposes to add emotion to the featured scars. The eye makeup is dark purple and the lipstick is dark red. The hair color also seems to be dark and the hair is gathered up instead of allowed to flow freely. The scars themselves seem to be in different stages of affliction, perhaps because they were from different times or perhaps some were more severe than others and are in different stages of healing, nonetheless they are in stages of healing and not very recent from when the photo was taken.


Evan's "Self-Inflicted" Scars: The True Story

If we were to follow the evidence, without taking into account Evan's later narrative that these scars were "self-inflicted", this is what an investigation will show us.

1. The only time we are told Evan became wounded to the point that it resulted in bleeding and scars was when she was shooting the movie The Wrestler, which began production in January of 2008 and ended in March that same year. These photos show Evan Rachel Wood filming on location for The Wrestler on March 4, 2008 on the boardwalk in Asbury Park, New Jersey.



We are not told when exactly the injury took place, but from the timeline it could have taken place as late as March 2008. This is how the injury is described by Evan in an interview with Interview Magazine on November 26, 2008:

"I bled for Darren Aronofsky. There’s a scene where I get very angry at Mickey. I picked up an aluminum soda can and squeezed it, I guess, and threw it at him. We were in the middle of this emotional scene, and all of a sudden I think, Why does my hand feel wet? And I look down and my hand is covered in blood. I’d split my thumb open. And, of course, Darren loved it. He’s like, 'Use it! Use it! Look at your hand!' And he asked the makeup artist to take note of the color of my blood. Darren glued my finger back together and we kept going. I was proud of myself, and I think I proved myself to Mickey. [laughs]"

From this we observe that the injury took place with her thumb splitting open. Nothing is said of the forearm. Very important is that the makeup artist took a note of the color of the blood, which seems to mean that Aronofsky wanted the bleeding to be recreated for the scene, but obviously didn't want her to keep bleeding till she died so they glued the wound together. We are not told which thumb was injured. Noteworthy also is Evan's excitement to have gone through the experience, which is the same each time she talked about it.

In an interview for Soma Magazine at that time, the reporter opens the interview by describing the bloody incident:

“The fight scene, we did it all night,” recounts an animated Evan Rachel Wood in a cubicle-sized wardrobe room in the Rossyln Hotel in Downtown LA. “[I was] just screaming and crying and exhausted. I cut my finger open. I was bleeding.” As she recalls the experience, she waves her finger in the air for effect, and I suspect she would recreate the entire episode were she not bound to the makeup chair. No, she’s not describing some late night brawl, but her physically demanding role in Darren Aronofsky’s new critically acclaimed film, The Wrestler, where she stars opposite Mickey Rourke. The film is about an amateur wrestler finding his way back to the top and reconnecting with his estranged daughter after suffering a life-changing heart attack. Wood’s scenes with Rourke were often brutal, requiring a level of dedication that verged on the hazardous. “[They said] ‘We can call an ambulance. We’ve got crazy glue.’ [But] Mickey’s right there, and I want to look tough. He’s like, ‘shove your finger under hot water.’ And I’m like, ok!” Wood’s perseverance, and just plain spunk, demonstrate her gutsy commitment to character—and she has the scars to show for it."

Though again we are not told which thumb the injury took place, we are told more details about the physically demanding and sometimes dangerous role, and the report concludes talking about the scene by saying she "has the scars to show for it." No scars ever appear in photos on her right hand, since in the movie she threw the can with her right and she is right-handed.

Much more detail about this scene was given in an interview with Collider from December 23, 2008. There Evan is asked: "Was the final exit scene between the two of you a tricky thing to do? Your character was so angry and wanted to get that message across. Did you have to shoot that in multiple takes?" To this she replied:

"Yeah. That was all night. That was a really hard night to have to keep doing that over and over and over. And the waves she goes through, you know. First, she’s trying to keep the anger under control, then she just completely explodes, then she’s got to bring it back and then make the decision to just tell him she never wants to see him again, and that was kind of in one take. First, I was too emotional and Darren kept telling me to fight it and bring it back and not let him see how upset you are, because I was just bawling. Halfway through the night we got all of my coverage done and it was time to turn it on Mickey. And right before I cut my thumb open on one of the things I was throwing at him. It was like a soda can and I squeezed it and it just went [makes crushing noise]. So I’m in the middle of my scene and I’m wondering why is my hand wet? It must be soda. And I look down and it was covered in blood and Darren’s going 'Use it! Look at your hand! It’s bleeding!' And I was like, 'Huh?!' So I got really light headed because I was already exhausted and then seeing that. I was like 'Oh, I’m going to have to get stitches.' So he laid me down in a room and an ambulance came and the guys were like, 'Yeah, we could take you in and give you a couple stitches or you could superglue it.' (laughs) And we didn’t have a lot of time or money and couldn’t really come back to shoot the scene, and Mickey Rourke is looking at me with his cigarette dangling out of his mouth like 'What are you going to do?' (laughs) 'I want to superglue it!' Grrrrrr! I’m putting it under hot water and bandaged it to keep going. (laughs) Poor Darren. He’s making the make-up people take pictures of the blood to make sure the blood in the movie is authentic and they’re laughing at it. (laughs) It was worth it."

Without going into all the details, it seems that after the wound was glued back together, the scene was done with more takes to get things right, and it required for the makeup team to recreate the blood. However, her wound was also bandaged, so they couldn't show the bandage in the movie. If you watch the scene in the movie, Evan's arms are covered with a long shirt, she throws the soda can with her right arm, but bleeding is never depicted.

The only media source to actually feature Evan's injury was Female First, which on January 20, 2009 had the following headline: "Evan Rachel Wood Hurt On Wrestler Set". This report just seems to have received its information from the previous source.

Could this injury or another from the filming of The Wrestler have been the source of the scars on Evan's forearm? Nothing explicitly tells us this is so, but what we do know is that those scars have their origin from the time of the filming of The Wrestler or right after, as late as March 2008 to early April 2008. We know this from when Evan Rachel Wood was photographed for the Los Angeles Times on April 8, 2008 in New York City. In one of these photos she is seen wearing a bandage over the exact place of the scars in the 2019 photo. She doesn't even try to hide it. It is like she has some sort of pride in it, or sees it as a fashion accessory.

 
 
The first time we see the scars without the bandage is at the New York after-party to the screening of The Life Before Her Eyes a week later on April 15th. Again, she is wearing a short sleeve, allowing for the scars to be seen without anything to cover it up. Also, if you look at her makeup in close-up facial shots, it is exactly like the makeup from the photo Evan posted in 2019.

 
 
We see the scars again on September 5, 2008 at the Venice Film Festival.


 
 
On the same day, they can be seen in another dress worn by Evan. By this time, the scars are more faint and healing.

 

 

On September 7th at the 2008 Toronto International Film Festival, the scars and other hand injuries are prominent.


 
 
In October and November of 2008 she was photographed in sleeveless outfits, but no scar can be detected.

Then at the 18th Annual Gotham Independent Film Awards at the Museum of Finance in New York on December 2nd, the scars faintly make their appearance again.

 

 

 

At the premier of The Wrestler on December 17, the scars again show prominently.

 


 


We see the scars again at the 66th Golden Globes Awards on January 11, 2009 in Beverly Hills.

 

We will conclude with an appearance of the scars at the 15th annual Screen Actors Guild Awards in Los Angeles, California on January 25, 2009. You can't really see the scars after this time.

 

What can we conclude from this evidence?

1. The scars are real and they belong to Evan Rachel Wood.

2. The scars are on the left arm, not the right arm. This is particularly confusing in light of the scars, which are all the same shape and placement, depicted in the photo Evan posted on Twitter in 2019. An easy explanation can be that the image is flipped due to mirroring, but mirroring is a feature of the front facing camera which was not a part of phone technology until the iPhone 4 in 2010. A regular photo doesn't mirror. Seeing that the scars originated probably in March of 2008 and began the process of healing and completely disappearing by the beginning of 2009, this does not allow for a mirroring image to happen. One possible explanation is that Evan had the 2008 image mirrored on a computer before she posted it on Twitter in 2019.

3. Marilyn Manson is in none of these photos from the time the scars appear. Not to say it's due to the scars, of course, but it is interesting Evan attended all these events alone and still did not hesitate to allow her scars to be seen by anyone if they looked closely enough.

4. The makeup and hair in the photo from Twitter in 2019 matches with Evan's makeup and hair in the photos from April 15, 2008 the most, which is near the beginning of when this happened and would align with the stage at which the scars were healing. Evan wore similar hair and makeup other times as well, even up to 2015, but April 2008 seems the most likely to me.

5. Evan took no liberties to hide her scars, but prominently displayed them, which is odd if done under the dark circumstances she claims in 2019. The photos above show a more positive outlook on having the scars. If she had put the effort of hiding them with gloves, jewelry or a long sleeve shirt, her case that they were associated with abuse would be much stronger, but she never does this.

6. Somebody must have asked her about these scars, yet no one today mentions them. Manson at the very least is probably the only person that knows the true story of these scars, besides Evan herself.

7. The scars always look the same, and no additional scars are ever again detected as long as Evan was with Manson. This indicates that it was a one time event, and not an event that occurred on multiple occasions as Evan suggests in her Twitter post from 2019. They all appeared together and disappeared together.


Evan's "Self-Inflicted" Scars: A Concluding Analysis of the Photo

In light of all the above information, I see no evidence that leads to Marilyn Manson's alleged "abusive" behavior being behind these so-called "self-inflicted" scars. The conclusion that there is a correlation between abuse and these scars can only be drawn based on Evan's words from her Twitter post over a decade later in 2019, even though Evan has been proved to be a liar on many occasions and cannot be trusted.

1. Perhaps the wounds are due to self-harm. Evan has talked about being a depressed person numerous times even before she met Manson, and admits she suffers from many mental illnesses. Her biggest struggle, she says, in her youth was how to understand her bisexuality. She has said that she tried to commit suicide when she was twelve years old after she kissed another girl, which was the first of her suicide attempts, the second being in August of 2010. These scars show no indication of being a suicide attempt, but if they are truly the result of self-harm, there is no reason to conclude this was done to thwart Manson from abusing her. She could be blaming Manson for the scars over a decade later to fit her radicalized narrative and boost her claim of abuse with some photographic evidence to win sympathy from the Me Too "believe all women" types.

2. All the scars seem to have appeared at once, even though they are of different shades and stages of healing. None seem to have caused significant bleeding, as they aren't deep enough. The scars did not exist before the filming of The Wrestler, then they suddenly appeared right after the filming and an injury on set.

3. In late 2007 Evan did talk about going through depression, which she ascribed to being in a transition from being a child actress to an adult actress and all the stress that brings, especially since child actors usually don't make it as adults in Hollywood, Evan having become a rare exception. Such a depression could have led her to self-harm.

4. During this time Manson was doing some filming for the film Phantasmagoria, and he also shot Evan at this time in 2008 for what would later become the "WOW" video in which she takes the appearance of the Black Dahlia. Perhaps for one of these projects, Evan imitated Manson, who is known to scar himself for his art, and she scarred herself for a particular scene that was filmed. This may have felt cool to her at the time, which is why she prominently displayed the scars, sort of like a tattoo, and may be why the scars do not really seem to be made in a harmful way. One thing is for sure, she made no attempt to hide her scars or even seemed ashamed of them.

5. I can't help but see the similarities between the photo Evan posted in 2019 of her self-harm and her memorable cutting scene from her film Thirteen, which was filmed when she was fourteen. In the film Evan's character cuts herself in the bathroom, then goes to lie down on her bed in a similar way to the photo posted in 2019. The photo from 2019 thus seems to be part of a performance. Perhaps it was taken by Manson himself for a film, video or art piece. It even comes off as something Manson would put in an album booklet or even on the cover.
 



6. Almost six months after Evan posted the self-harm photo in 2019 on Twitter, a photo appeared on Instagram of Evan Rachel Wood showing her scars on her arms from the filming of Westworld, on her right arm especially. This shows she liked to pose with her wounds and scars.
 

7. If I were to pick a date for when the photo was taken that Evan posted in 2019 on Twitter, I would say it was done on April 15, 2008. Her look matches exactly. However, phones didn't mirror image at the time. Two of the scars seem to be a little darker too in the 2019 photo. Could it be possible that Evan took this photo in August 2010, when the technology for mirroring on phones existed? Perhaps with some makeup she made her scars look more prominent and fresh, or perhaps she scratched into them to make it look like a suicide attempt before she went to the mental hospital? There is the option too that she mirrored the image on her computer in 2019 that she took in 2008, but if this was done then I would argue this is a strong argument that the photo was made for artistic purposes more than anything else.

I must conclude that all of these possibilities can be true. We just don't have enough evidence to draw any conclusive conclusion. Evan's 2019 narrative seems like it is the least likely scenario. None of the facts make sense if her narrative is true. There is some other reason behind these scars, and my hope is that if someone reads this that knows more information or who can dig up better evidence will help me solve this mystery. It is definitely a solvable mystery. The right people need to come forward. This case remains open.



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