rolling #metoo thread for sexual harassment in the music industry so no one misses out when artists we don't give a fuck about like Tim Westwood and Bassnectar get caught

xpost is there any documentation of that, as I've tried to find details on that for years and all it's lead to me is ancient message boards and circular references

this is all I find

https://www.reddit.com/r/badreligion/comments/mpfupp/the_webcam_incident_nsfw_i_guess/

I remember it breaking on punknews and largely being received with a bunch of sesquipedelian dick jokes - who knows if those articles still exist now - people calling it out at as creepy the time were drowned out by the hilarious "process of relief" gags

wouldn’t call Anti-Flag part of the “punk scene,” they’ve always been a very commercial band with a commercial sound, but ymmv— not that the actual “punk scene” is that much better, of course

I think time has proven that you can literally say that about any male dominated genre of the last fifty years

pretty much yeah

(3 month xpost) why the fuck do sweet trip even have new fans? that band always sucked. reading through reddit, what a bunch of weirdos.

Sounds like Lizzo is in the crosshairs right now.

Anti Flag is the corniest dork band of all time

American version of Idles?

oh god Anti Flag is a thousand times cornier than Idles

Anti Flag is basically the band version of the annoying freshman guy that read half a chapter of Zinn and Chomsky each and now cannot shut the fuck up about it

Um whats the news about Lizzo?

see her thread

thanks

freshman in college or high school?

lol, not sure it matters. and i even say that as someone who was trying to get into Anti Flag around 1998/99 since the girl i was dating at the time loved them.

i loved them, i saw them live in 1998, i was 13 and I remember feeling weird about the show. it felt more “bro-ey” than other shows i had been to, punching the air about being against “the government “ and of course i had a lot of fun, but left feeling weird about A-F as a band and never really listened to them again! it’s strange how seeing a band live can sometimes do that.

they did a split with The Dread that year on which they covered Mission of Burma, so in some way they changed my life because MoB did a lot for young table

Um whats the news about Lizzo?

Charges against Till Lindemann of Rammstein dropped

Berlin’s public prosecutor’s office on Tuesday said it had dropped its sexual assault investigation into Till Lindemann, the frontman for the rock band Rammstein, citing a lack of evidence.

The investigation began in June after several women said that Mr. Lindemann had plied young people with alcohol and drugs before, during and after concerts in order to have sex with them. Lawyers for Mr. Lindemann denied those claims in a statement and threatened legal action against those making the claims and news outlets reporting on them.

“I thank all those who have waited impartially for the end of the investigation,” Mr. Lindemann, 60, posted to Instagram on Tuesday.

When the German news media reported on the allegations of impropriety against the leader of one of the country’s most successful modern music groups, commercial partners ended their ties with Mr. Lindemann. Universal, which distributes Rammstein’s music, said it would stop any promotional activities. And politicians condemned the described behavior.

“We need more awareness about abuse of power and sexualized violence, and not only in the music industry, but in the whole cultural industry,” Claudia Roth, Germany’s culture minister, told Der Spiegel, a newsweekly, adding, “The times of foul machismo combined with abuse of power up to sexualized violence should really and definitely be over.”

According to the prosecutor’s office, however, it was impossible to substantiate the reports against Mr. Lindemann because so many accusations were made anonymously. Kaya Loska, a prominent influencer who had described her experience backstage during a concert in 2022, was interviewed by prosecutors. But they said she was of little help because she did not witness any crimes being committed.

“It was therefore not possible to sufficiently substantiate any allegations of the crimes, nor was it possible to gain an impression of the credibility of the alleged injured parties and the believability of their statements during questioning,” Sebastian Büchner, who speaks for the public prosecutor’s office, wrote in a statement.

Shelby Lynn, a former fan of the band, helped make the allegations public when she posted on social media about her experience at a concert in Vilnius in May, during which she believed she was drugged. Ms. Lynn took her complaint to the Lithuanian police, but they declined to investigate.

Long RS piece with many detailed (and horrible) stories about the Anti-Flag guy: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/anti-flag-justin-sane-1234817170/

jfc

that was a hard but an important read

also a good reminder to keep a healthy skepticism for musicians/artists who appear to 'tick all the right boxes'. which is hard when you're so desperate to have positive allies in the music industry

i have listened to 16 (out of 17) seasons of Something Was Wrong podcast and this guy seems like a carbon copy of the guy from S14, who was outed by name on the podcast and was an enormous piece of shit who hid behind his work with a socially conscious media company.

beware the charismatic man who says all the right things

jesus that article was sickening

what a fucking scumbag

the band broke up immediately after the first allegation a few months ago but considering the timespan in this story and their statements after - it really makes you question whether they and other people around the band truly didn’t know what was going on. not a single person looked out for these women, it’s devastating.

it really makes you question whether they and other people around the band truly didn’t know what was going on

it's impossible they didn't know stuff was going on imo

maybe I'm naïve but I don't think that's a given. I'm guessing they suspected something uncouth was happening but they didn't know for sure and wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt

I don't know, it's not like Anti-Flag was likely ever "every member riding solo in their own tour bus" successful, particularly during those 90's years where he was also doing awful stuff. It's pretty hard to imagine a group touring that closely together, while he was pulling this shit on tour, not having at least some inkling that he was up to sketchy shit.

the fact that many of these incidents were occurring at their shows, i kinda find that hard to believe.

The women, alongside some of the band’s fans, also chastised the other band members for failing to take an immediate hard stance against Geever publicly or even acknowledge the blind eye they may have turned, as three women claim some of the members were present when Geever brought them on tour, backstage, or on the tour bus as teenagers and young women. “They knew how young everybody was,” Rebecca, who dated a then-25-year-old Geever as a 17-year-old in the late 1990s, claims. “There was a clear boundary that he kept crossing over and over that should have raised flags for everybody.”

Guys in rock bands and teenage girls, the rest of the band probably just shook their heads and got on with playing the gigs.

it's very easy to brush aside improprieties that you become aware of, directly or indirectly, when you like the person enough. it shouldn't be, but for many, it is.

There was a cast party for a production I was doing back in 2009, and a bunch of us left. a friend of mine was very intoxicated and stayed behind, as did a handful of others, and only a little while after I'd left, one of our other cast members, who was new in town at the time, raped her while in that state.

She was not someone who held onto her story for years only to come forward later - she started speaking up about it almost immediately. The couple in charge of the theatre company chose to believe him over her (he claimed she seduced him, consensual - the usual). The story didn't circulate widely because once my friend realized nobody was going to believe her, she just swallowed the story for years.

More stories of abuse/etc followed this guy for YEARS - but it wasn't until around maybe 2015-2016 that they got any traction and probably 2017 when people finally began distancing themselves from him.

The same director couple who failed to believe my friend 14 years ago are now touted as allies and forward-thinking members of the community, and are still holding to the story that they were naive and blind to his misdeeds and were finally called out on them, when in reality they knew all along and only cut ties with him when people threatened to start boycotting their theatre company/projects.

suffice it to say....the things discussed in this article, there is usually smoke, and often people turn a blind eye because they don't awnt to believe it, not because they don't actually believe it.

"Dated"

Geever lied about his age at the time too

yea I'm sure there were plenty of red flags raised for the other band members but when it's a friend (not to mention your meal ticket) it's def very natural to give them the benefit of the doubt if you don't see it directly. being aware they were just teenagers though...yikes

you forget musicians are the biggest gossips in the world

In (unfortunately) my experience it's absolutely possible that no one in his circle knew what was going on with any certainty. I'm sure he was very secretive about his private life, and passed everything potentially suspicious off has either innocent "just friends/fans" interactions or consensual relationships.

you forget musicians are the biggest gossips in the world

I'm sure there was some gossip and conjecture but it's very possible there was no evidence that you could confront him with or take public action on. Reading this was wearily, terribly familiar based on people I've known.

(well, person)

the speed with which the band shutdown everything feels there was a (sickening) sense of relief that the gig was up and it was finally time of move on, like they already had their plan-b. Probably an awareness that plan-b was not going to be in politically aware rock, or even music.

In (unfortunately) my experience it's absolutely possible that no one in his circle knew what was going on with any certainty. I'm sure he was very secretive about his private life, and passed everything potentially suspicious off has either innocent "just friends/fans" interactions or consensual relationships.

yeah -- if some of this happened on the bus, then they probably saw him bring people onto the bus, but if elsewhere? I get along real good with my band but I'm very much in my own bubble now, because I need rest, I turn in long before they do -- I ~think~ I know what they're doing after the show (because most nights I can hear them howling as they watch the third consecutive episode of impractical jokers, and because I clean up the empty bags of chips ahoy et al from the front lounge when I wake up before everybody else) but if somebody was going off somewhere else to do evil, I would have absolutely no idea. OTOH: I've known these guys as long as or longer than the AF guys have known each other, and we've been on the road a long time. I feel like there'd be a vibe shift. but literally my entire band could right now be engaged in some massive criminal conspiracy that took place after shows and all I'd be able to say would be "idk I go to bed before they do"

Not trying to make a parallel comparison exactly, but there have been enough serial killers doing the most vicious terrible shit imaginable while maintaining the facade of a typical quiet conservative seeming suburban dude with a wife and kids. If someone is doing something wrong, either on the most hideous level imaginable or the more unfortunately banal and everyday, they will try to do it out of sight from others.

Meant to end the first sentence: ", that we should recognize people can have a whole other shadow life that no one knows about"

Sometimes people are of course gleefully and publicly sleazy, but you know there are those who want to be the good guy in public and maybe even use that to cover for what they're doing.

And in those serial killer cases, I don't think people are going after the family and acquaintances of the perpetrator on some "they must have known" shit (or maybe that does happen? idk).

I definitely have read stories where people accuse spouses of having some knowledge, sometimes tempered with a bit of sympathy suggesting that maybe they had some Stockholm syndrome or whatever.

But you're right I think it happens more with bands. I think people just group them together visually so much as band members that it's hard to imagine them going off and having their own lives and not doing things are a crew.

I think it's mostly because there have been so many accounts over the years from victims saying that they were assaulted backstage/on the bus/in the hotel room while other band members were present. It's practically a rock star cliche at this point. Serial killing isn't nearly that kind of a systemic issue with so many complicit witnesses.

Yeah obviously true there, I guess it just illustrates the point though that people are able to hide their dark side if they want to, and put up a public facing front that is completely at odds with that side, and zero people know about it except for those unfortunate enough to be in their crosshairs.

All of the incidents reported on in the RS Anti-Flag piece are thoroughly described as happening in very private areas (inside hotel rooms, private residences, secluded backstage areas at venues and festival grounds). A great, albeit hard to read, piece of reporting.