In a recent podcast interview about narcissistic abuse, Evan Rachel Wood said that Marilyn Manson described in his autobiography how the Brian Warner part of him was dead and whatever he had become was now his true self. Her purpose was to show that Manson completely abandoned his humanity and truly came to embody a disassociated narcissistic monster. But is this what his autobiography actually said or even implied? No, of course not. He says something along those lines, but she completely twists it to make a point that fits her narrative rather than the actual facts. What Manson actually describes in his autobiography is that he went through a personal apocalypse. He writes: "When I first conceived of Antichrist Superstar , I set out to create an apocalypse. But I didn’t realize it was going to be a personal one. As a child, I had been a weakling, a worm, a follower, a small shadow trying to find a place in an infinite world of light. In the end, in order to find that place...
When on February 1st 2021 Marilyn Manson was called out by name on social media by Evan Rachel Wood and a number of other women for alleged abusive behavior, and in the lawsuits that followed months later, one of the most common terms used to describe this abusive behavior was "gaslighting", which is an umbrella term that includes grooming, controlling, brainwashing, love bombing and manipulating with a goal to get someone to question their own reality, memory or perceptions. The association of Marilyn Manson with gaslighting began with Evan Rachel Wood's 2018 congressional testimony , in which she described that the abuse she suffered by her then anonymous abuser was centered around gaslighting. She said: My experience with domestic violence was this. Toxic mental, physical, and sexual abuse, which started slow, but escalated over time, including threats against my life, severe gaslighting and brainwashing, waking up to the man that claimed to love me raping what he beli...