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What Was Dan Cleary Talking About? Is He a Witness of Evan Rachel Wood's Abuse?

Before Dan Cleary was Marilyn Manson's personal assistant in 2014, he worked as a keyboard tech for the 2007-08 Rape of the World Tour. Before Evan Rachel Wood named Marilyn Manson as her abuser in February 2021, Dan Cleary named him as her abuser in September 2020, which is why he is featured so prominently in Evan Rachel Wood's documentary Phoenix Rising , where Evan describes him as the one who changed everything. Here I would like to only address one claim made by Dan Cleary, which he has repeatedly made. Dan likes to make big claims that upon examination prove to be exaggerated, presenting himself as more insightful and important than he really is. I wanted to see if this was the case also with the claim that he supposedly witnessed Evan being abused over time. Let's see what he said about it in September 2020 on Twitter: On his February 18, 2021 podcast, where he further explained what he witnessed with Evan, Dan says that he wrote his September 2020 tweet after an ab

How Evan Rachel Wood Tried to Make Marilyn Manson a Dangerous Cult Leader and Herself a Heroic Survivor

 
 
Evan Rachel Wood first spoke out as a survivor of domestic abuse and sexual assault in 2016, without naming who her two rapists were. In 2017 she became more and more of a voice for women who had suffered domestic abuse and sexual assault. It was in 2018 that she gained widespread attention when she spoke about her abuse before congress, though she still refused to name who her rapists were, but this would be the last time we would hear about her second rapist that was allegedly the owner of a bar. It was after this that Evan and her girlfriend Illma Gore along with actress Esme Bianco began work on the Phoenix Act, to increase the statute of limitations in California for victims of domestic violence. It was on April 23rd of 2019 that Evan Rachel Wood testified before the California senate on behalf of the Phoenix Act, and for the first time she would describe her abuser as one who showed all the signs of a cult leader. The Phoenix Act was passed by the Senate on May 28, 2019, passed by the Assembly on September 10, and signed into law by Governor Newsom on October 7, 2019. On February 1, 2021, Evan Rachel Wood named Marilyn Manson as her abuser and rapist for the first time.
 
How and why did Evan Rachel Wood change the narrative of her abuse and assault story in 2019 to focus on her abuser being a dangerous cult leader and she a victim/survivor of his cult?

In the spring of 2019, Evan Rachel Wood contacted documentary filmmaker Amy Berg to document on film what would eventually become the HBO documentary series Phoenix Rising, which was initially meant to document the rise of the legislation known as the Phoenix Act. This is how Amy Berg describes how she came to sign on to do this project:

"In the spring of 2019, Evan approached me about some work she was doing and was told because of the statute of limitations she was unable to pursue any justice in this case unless she were to change the law herself. So Evan started working with a group of people on the Phoenix Act and she was telling me that she thought they were going to be heard and she thought there was going to be new legislation in the state [of California]. I was really interested in that story… I saw a lot of changes in the landscape after #MeToo and I was interested in the empowerment of women through sharing their stories and trying to educate others who were maybe suffering in silence...  I had been sending a camera around with her for that year and we didn’t really sit down until the summer of 2020. I wasn’t 100% sure to be honest from the beginning if I was going to direct it or just produce it until somebody else stepped in, but the timing fortunately worked out."

Both Evan and Amy had done a lot of work with HBO over the course of many years, so they had previously known each other. In 2014, Amy's documentary An Open Secret was released, exposing child sexual abuse in the film industry in California. No Hollywood distributor would pick up the film. On October 12, 2017, the film was released for nine days on Vimeo "to commemorate serial predator Harvey Weinstein finally being exposed," and it went viral. In 2015, Amy berg released Janis: Little Girl Blue, which is a documentary about the singer-songwriter Janis Joplin. Ever since Evan was a teenager she would say in interviews that her dream role was to play Janis Joplin in a film. Then Showtime premiered on October 10, 2015, another documentary of Amy Berg called Prophet's Prey, which follows cult leader Warren Jeffs, the president of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, who was running the group from the confines of the Texas state prison, serving out a life sentence for the rape of young girls. Years prior to these films, in 2006 Amy Berg wrote and directed Deliver Us from Evil, a documentary about Father Oliver O'Grady, a Catholic priest who was relocated to various parishes around the United States during the 1970s in an attempt by the Catholic Church to cover up his rape of dozens of children.

Meanwhile, in January 2019, Lifetime began airing a six-part documentary series titled Surviving R. Kelly detailing sexual abuse and misconduct allegations against R. Kelly. In 2017, Kelly was accused by three sets of parents of holding their daughters in an "abusive cult". In a January 2019 BBC News article, a woman named Asante McGee whom Kelly had met in 2014 and taken to live with him some months later, said that she lived with not only Kelly alone, but with other women. She said: "He controlled every aspect of my life, while I lived with him." Kelly's record label, RCA Records, dropped him shortly after the docuseries aired. On February 22, 2019, R. Kelly was formally charged with 10 counts of aggravated criminal sexual abuse. On March 6, 2019, in a CBS This Morning interview with Gayle King, R. Kelly broke down crying while strongly denying all allegations and charges made against him. The CBS This Morning segment also included two women whose parents claimed were brainwashed captives of Kelly. They described themselves as "girlfriends" of Kelly, defending and declaring their love for him, while also denouncing their parents. Afterward, King would debrief with colleagues on the recording on the segment. She recalled that a condition for recording the segment with the "girlfriends" was that Kelly would not be in the room with them. Kelly had nevertheless stayed nearby during the recording and, according to King, Kelly would "cough really loudly" to remind the women of his presence. Evan Rachel Wood has expressed in interviews how she watched Surviving R. Kelly with great interest. In March of 2019, she was asked by Dax Shepherd in an interview if she watched it, and said, "I did watch it, and I related a lot to it... He sounds like he might be an actual psychopath," she said. "Definitely has a God complex and is definitely narcissistic."

It was also around this time that another alleged sex cult was being talked about in the media. It began with a New York Times article titled "Inside a Secretive Group Where Women Are Branded" published on October 17, 2017. This was published as former members of this marketing group called NXIVM were in the process of defecting from and exposing the group as a dangerous sex cult (which involved the victims having to be branded and provide collateral to keep their mouths shut), and capturing everything on film that they experienced. In April 2019, HBO announced that it had green-lit The Vow, which would include the footage that the former members recorded. At that point, the leader of the group Keith Raniere and his "co-conspirators" had been arrested. By the middle of the same year, the women deeply involved in the organization had taken plea deals, and Raniere himself was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison. The NXIVM documentary series The Vow premiered on August 23, 2020 on HBO.

On October 3rd and 6th 2022, Evan Rachel Wood appeared in a two-part series on the podcast A Little Bit Culty, though the interview itself took place months earlier in June when she was promoting Season 4 of Westworld. You can hear both parts at these links:

Big Phoenix Energy: Actor, Activist and Badass Evan Rachel Wood (Part 1)

Big Phoenix Energy: Actor, Activist and Badass Evan Rachel Wood (Part 2)

The podcast hosts of A Little Bit Culty are Sarah Edmondson and Anthony 'Nippy' Ames, former NXIVM members featured in the HBO docuseries The Vow which began airing in 2020. The hosts consider themselves to be "ex-cult members and whistleblowers" and are now hosting a show on what they perceive to be cults as well, often featuring guests who are viewed also as ex-cult members and whistleblowers. A Little Bit Culty is advertised as a "not your typical cult show", with the aim of the hosts being to expose cults in a "frank" and "fresh" fashion with a "surprising number of laughs". The reason they interviewed Evan Rachel Wood is because since 2019 she has equated Marilyn Manson with being a cult leader and has viewed herself as an ex-cult member and whistleblower of Marilyn Manson. During this very long interview, Evan could be heard saying things like this:



Throughout the interview, Evan expressed her admiration for the hosts of the show, and spoke of how she was inspired by them to move forward with her own HBO documentary series Phoenix Rising. This was more clearly expressed by Evan on Instagram on October 26th and 27th of 2022 when she captured her reaction to watching the premier of season two of The Vow and encouraged everyone to watch it to understand the dynamics of being in a cult, and how The Vow inspired Evan to create Phoenix Rising.



 
 

Like Evan's testimony before the senate of California in 2019, Evan presented Marilyn Manson as an evil and monstrous cult leader in Phoenix Rising and herself as a victim and survivor of his manipulative cult, but in the documentary she went beyond what she had spoken of before in this regard. It seems pretty clear that when Evan developed her narrative about her abuser in 2019 to depict him as an evil cult leader, she was inspired primarily by two things mentioned above:

1. Amy Berg's documentaries

2. Surviving R. Kelly

Of course, we can add other things, such as her show Westworld, which she claims as being one of the prime inspirations for coming out as a abuse survivor in 2016, and she also has praised the depiction of domestic violence in the HBO show Big Little Lies: "[It's a] really great portrayal of what it is like and the complexities behind it," she said. "It's very accurate."
 
When the first season of The Vow premiered on August 23, 2020 and ended on October 18, 2020, it was exactly within the time period either during or just before Evan and Amy decided to change the focus of Phoenix Rising from being a documentary about the rise of the Phoenix Act legislation to a documentary about chronicling the full exposure of an evil and dangerous cult leader named Marilyn Manson, whose persona was a cover-up for the real person behind closed doors, and to depict Evan herself as the phoenix who rose as if from the dead. The Vow played a significant role in this transition of emphasis in Phoenix Rising, and it gave Evan the inspiration to create the narrative she started in 2019.

Evan has revealed on many occasions that she is a big fan of scouring through books and the internet to create this narrative of Marilyn Manson being a cult leader by making him fit into the tell-tale categories and signs of being a cult leader. Even in Phoenix Rising we see her doing this towards the end of part one, when she is going through a list of signs of human trafficking and comes to a realization that she was also a victim of human trafficking by Manson. And if you read through Evan's 2019 testimony and watch Phoenix Rising, it is actually structured according to these lists of signs you can read on dozens of internet websites, almost word for word. For example, when I Google "Signs of Being in a Cult", the first article I read gives these ten signs:

1. You are in a small group trying to keep out of the radar

2. Members are pressured either personally or sexually

3. Leaders claim special powers or abilities

4. You cannot leave willingly

5. You received a brand or tattoo against your will

6. You are sworn to secrecy about the group and leader

7. Food and water intake is restricted

8. There is evidence of brainwashing

9. How you speak and dress is controlled

10. Skepticism and critical thinking are discouraged

Now this is just one list of many you can find on the internet. What Evan appears to have done is take all the things mentioned in these lists and made them a part of her story. Keep in mind, that those who spoke out against R. Kelly and Keith Reniere only checked a few things off these lists to help them come to a conclusion that they were part of a cult, but Evan literally checks off every single one of them and tries to squeeze her alleged experiences with Manson into every category that exists to show the signs of her being in a cult. As absurd as it sounds, this is in fact what is done, and if you read her 2019 testimony and watch Phoenix Rising with any of these lists in hand, you will see how Evan goes through each section of the list to form her narrative of Marilyn Manson being a dangerous and monstrous cult leader. In fact, she goes beyond the basic lists and even goes into lists that break down the signs of being in the most dangerous and deadly cults. Let's not forget, both Evan and Illma accused Manson of killing an underage girl on camera (though now this has already proven to be false).

But why does Evan want to depict Marilyn Manson as an evil and monstrous cult leader, who makes R. Kelly and Keith Reniere look like amateurs? The answer is pretty simple: the greater the monster, the greater the survivor of that monster. Evan has said that she wants to be the voice for all women who have suffered abuse. You can't be the voice for all women if you aren't looked upon with admiration by all women for what you have gone through and survived to be this voice. Furthermore, there is no greater environment of victimhood than a cult environment, where you lose all agency and freewill and control. To pass legislation like the Phoenix Act, where Evan argues that it takes years to realize and deal with your trauma, requires the survivor being in a cult-like environment and escaping from it. The great champion of this legislation must be someone who understands this better than most. It is this story that got the Phoenix Act passed.

Before Marilyn Manson was Marilyn Manson, he was a journalism student in Florida who wrote stories in class. In a 2015 interview he described his first story as a journalism student that he got published as follows:

“The first article I ever did was about Marilyn Manson, which I wrote as myself as Brian Warner, and that was in part why I had to have a pseudonym, a stage name. I was put in a situation where I was suddenly stuck with… where I had created a Frankenstein’s monster. There was Marilyn Manson, but there was no music yet. I created a fake world maybe because I didn’t like the one I was living in. But that’s what made me make music. I had to fill in the gaps I’d created.”

Just like Brian Warner created the concept of Marilyn Manson and filled in the gaps to bring him into being, Evan Rachel Wood likewise created a concept where Marilyn Manson and Brian Warner are one and the same being, so that Brian Warner is Marilyn Manson, but not the Marilyn Manson that Brian Warner conceived, rather the Marilyn Manson she herself conceived that is so monstrous that he goes beyond the public rumors and misconceptions so that she emerges as his greatest heroic survivor. This is the story Evan began developing when she was radicalized in 2016, but came to full actualization while she was dating Illma Gore and was championing the Phoenix Act and becoming the leader of a movement. The problem lies in the fact that too often the general public has been so naive that they believe these concepts to be true which are created by individuals for their own gain and infamy, and they result in actual witch hunts.
 
 

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