SURVIVING MARILYN MANSON
ASHLEY MORGAN SMITHLINE SAYS HER RELATIONSHIP WITH THE ROCK STAR TURNED INTO TWO YEARS OF LIVING HELL. THE MODEL OPENS UP ABOUT WHAT SHE ENDURED — AND WHY SHE AND OTHER WOMEN ARE SPEAKING OUT TO CALL MANSON A PREDATOR
When Ashley Morgan Smithline first began conversing with Marilyn Manson in July 2010, she thought he was the perfect man. “All we talked about was our favourite movies and our favourite books. We knew the same lines from the same movies,” says the Californiaborn model, who was introduced to the singer (real name: Brian Hugh Warner) by a mutual contact, photographer Tyler Shields.
Then working in Bangkok, Smithline says her relationship with the LA-based Manson, known for heavy metal with shocking lyrics, grew from emails into hours-long phone conversations. Over several months, “he lured me in with this endless intelligence”, says Smithline, 36, who thought she had found a sensitive soul underneath his ghoulish persona. “It felt very safe and secure.”
But soon a monster emerged, according to Smithline, who says their relationship over the next two years turned into a terrifying ordeal of sexual, physical and psychological abuse. He began to bombard her with dozens of messages at a time across email, Facebook and text, around the clock. Then “it was slowly more and more invasive”, she says. “He asked me to spend a week where I took a photo every five minutes and sent them to him. If I didn’t, he would freak out.”
He told Smithline, who is of Jewish descent, to hunt down Nazi memorabilia for him in Asia, she says. “He asked specifically for whips, knives, throwing stars, masks, any uniforms I could find,” she recalls. “I was like, ‘You know I’m Jewish, right?’” Still, she had grown attached to Manson and complied.
“Looking back, it’s so obvious he was seeking to groom someone really vulnerable,” says Smithline, one of 15 women, including actresses Evan Rachel Wood and Esmé Bianco, who have come forward this year accusing him of harrowing abuse – allegations he has denied.
In a statement released on February 1, the singer said his “intimate relationships have always been entirely consensual with like-minded partners.” In response to Smithline’s allegations, a spokesperson for Manson says, “We strongly deny her claims. There are so many falsehoods within her claims that we wouldn’t know where to begin to answer them. This relationship, to the limited extent it was a relationship, didn’t last one week.”
Smithline says otherwise and showed WHO’s sister magazine People texts, messages and emails she says were from Manson that span more than two years. Earlier this year, Manson was dropped by his record label, long-time manager and talent agency, and he is currently being
investigated by the LA Sheriff’s Department for domestic violence.
“He was the most terrifying monster in the world,” says Smithline.
After months of longdistance conversations, Smithline says, she flew to LA in November 2010 for the first time to meet Manson, who offered her a film role. “The reason I came out in the first place wasn’t ‘We were in love’,” says Smithline, who had shared her dreams of being an actress with the musician.
While Manson initially put her up at the Roosevelt Hotel, he soon invited her to move in to his home, which became her home whenever she was back in LA from her modeling jobs. The West Hollywood loft above a liquor store had black walls and blacked-out windows and felt like a dark, freezing “refrigerator”, she says.
In their first few days together, Manson and Smithline “hung out and had some drinks. He asked, ‘Can I kiss you?’” she recalls. “He was being so romantic, kind and normal.”
Days later the abuse began, she says. As an associate filmed them for what she says she was told would be a movie, Manson whipped her bare back as she lay facedown and naked on his bed. Soon after, she says, in the middle of the night, he tied her arms behind her back and penetrated her while she slept.
“He kept telling me, ‘You can’t rape someone who you’re in love with’,” says Smithline. She insists that BDSM – sexual practices that involve bondage, dominance and submission between two consenting partners – “wasn’t what he presented at all. He found me as a vulnerable shell of a person and hollowed me out more and more and more.”
The violence intensified, she says. Manson, who she claims frequently abused drugs and
“I was afraid for my life every moment I was with him”
– SMITHLINE
alcohol – and would urge her to also partake – bit her, shoved his fist in her mouth and cut her with a swastika-emblazoned knife she had purchased for him in Asia.
She could leave the apartment, but felt trapped. “What I’ve read about getting someone into a cult is you deprive them of food, you deprive them of sleep and you deprive them of talking to anyone. All those things were true,” says Smithline. “The more I did for him and the more I let him hurt me, the more I loved him.”
Smithline, who has struggled with anorexia throughout her life, dwindled to less than 36kg during her time with Manson. He would cut her protruding ribs with knives and once drank her blood, she says, and she still has scars from when he carved his initials onto her upper thigh.
When she “misbehaved” in front of guests, he locked her inside a soundproof glass box in his bedroom, she says. Over the course of two years, she was sent to what he called the “bad girls’ room” more than 100 times, sometimes for up to six hours at a time. (Some of the other women have said they were forced into this room too.)
“If I had to pee while he was replaying one of his songs I’d heard 30,000 times, I’d have to go in the box,” she says. “I was malnourished and cold.”
Smithline now calls Manson a “dry serial killer” – someone who enjoys coming close to killing victims. He once broke her nose before she had a 17-hour flight to Japan for a modeling job, she says. Another night he threw a knife at her from across the room. “At one point, I asked him, ‘Do you want me to kill myself ? Do you want me to just f---ing kill myself ?’” she recalls. Manson, she says, scoffed and forced her to watch suicide scenes from movies.
She rarely saw her friends or family, she says. “They were really getting worried. I was closing off, and my eating disorder was getting worse and worse,” she says.
Then in April 2011, her appendix ruptured while she was abroad on a modeling gig. She was in “horrendous pain” while recovering in the hospital for 10 weeks, but the experience was a wake-up call. “He never called to ask, ‘Are you OK?’ like a friend or boyfriend or lover would ask,” she says. “On that plane ride back [I thought], ‘I can’t do this. If this s--t happens again, I’m leaving. He’s gonna kill me.’”
Still, like many victims of domestic violence, Smithline felt unable to end the relationship. That fall, after Manson furiously berated her for becoming drowsy at 3am during a video shoot, she tried to leave him for the first time. “I called a
friend who lived pretty close to that area at 5 o’clock in the morning. I was in lingerie, put on a sweatshirt and left,” she says.
A decade later, it’s still difficult for Smithline to admit that it wasn’t the last time Manson was able to hurt her. “I want to think that I never went back again,” says Smithline, who continued meeting up with the musician during his tour breaks in 2012. “I wanted to go back on my terms and be in control, but it doesn’t ever work like that.” She finally saw him for the last time in January 2013. “I tried to take back my power,” she says.
For years, Smithline says, she kept Manson’s abuse to herself. “I survived a monster,” she says. “I never said his name out loud.” While she was out of his reach physically, the model says her emotional wounds were deep. Months after leaving Manson, Smithline checked in to the Eating Disorder Center of California to treat her anorexia. There, she reconnected with her therapist Dawn Theodore, who had treated her in 2005.
Though Smithline didn’t tell Theodore about her relationship with Manson, the therapist could tell something had changed. She was no longer the “bubbly, effervescent girl” she’d met previously, says Theodore. “There was much more than the eating disorder. She’d be curled up in a ball, rocking.”
It was not until four years ago that Smithline began sharing her trauma with loved ones. “I wish I could paint a picture of how free and joyous she was before this,” says Jennifer Gural, Smithline’s close friend of 12 years, who confirms the model confided in her in 2018. “I haven’t seen that person again.” (Four other friends tell People that Smithline spoke to them about Manson’s alleged abuse over the past several years.)
Smithline says her healing process began last September, when she met with Wood, Bianco and other women who say they too survived Manson’s abuse. “It was like looking at a room full of myself,” she says. “We all related on guilt and shame.”
In February, they all shared statements on Instagram. Smithline continues to see a therapist as she battles OCD, night terrors and PTSD. She remains “terrified” of Manson – “I’ve been trying to shower him off of me. I never want to see him for the rest of my life,” she says – but is finding strength by focusing on protecting other vulnerable women.
Over the past few months, Smithline has received threats from Manson’s fans, but “I’m not a victim”, she says. “I’m a f---ing survivor. I want people to know who he is, and it’s worth it if not one more woman gets hurt again.”
“I want everyone to know who he is and what he does. And I want it to stop”
– SMITHLINE