The arrest last month of hip hop mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs on sex trafficking charges has the potential to become the music industry’s #MeToo moment.
When the New York Times reported on Harvey Weinstein’s predatory behaviour in October 2017, the story encouraged victims of sexual abuse in Hollywood to come forward with their equally traumatic experiences. Weinstein went to jail; others saw their careers rightfully go up in flames.
In the music business, the floodgates have remained tightly shut. But with more than 100 women making allegations against Combs – who denies all accusations of criminal wrongdoing, and has said he looks forward to vindicating himself in court – there is a feeling the industry’s dirty secrets may finally be dragged into the spotlight.
The rumblings grow ever louder. There have already been a series of civil cases by women alleging abuse at the hands of music figures – many prompted by the temporary suspension in Los Angeles of the statute of limitations for lawsuits alleging sexual misconduct. They include legal action by two women against the estate of Atlantic Records founder Ahmet Ertegun (a lawyer for his widow said the claims were “meritless”).
“The surge isn’t over, far from it,” Jeff Anderson, who represented a number of women in sexual harassment civil cases told Rolling Stone. “When it comes to the music and entertainment industry, it’s largely been insiders working with insiders to keep secrets and protect celebrities and executives.”
The allegations against Combs read like something from a horror movie. He is accused of forcing sex-trafficking victims to engage in group sex acts with associates in events he referred to as “freak offs”. These would sometimes go on for days, with victims put on IV drips to recover, according to prosecutors. The indictment claims Combs enticed women by giving them ketamine and ecstasy, financial support, or lured them with the promise of career support or a romantic relationship. He is alleged to have then used covert recordings of the sex acts as “collateral” to ensure that the women would remain silent, prosecutors said. The civil suits are piling up too. At the most recent count, over 100 alleged victims have come forward, with the youngest just nine.
The Combs allegations are uniquely disturbing. Still, the music industry has long had a reputation for seediness.
It’s a measure of the standards that applied in the industry that barely an eyebrow was raised when Elvis Presley first met his future bride, Priscilla Presley, when she was 14 and he was 24. In her memoir about David Bowie, Me and Mr Jones, Suzi Ronson – wife of Bowie’s guitarist Mick Ronson – described how he would, in the words of one reviewer of the book, “move quite aggressively on young women he would pick out of his concert’s audiences”. One anecdote has Bowie in his dressingroom with a 16-year-old fan, only for the girl’s mother to arrive at the backstage door demanding to see her child.
Historically, a blind eye was turned to such behaviour. People also shrugged off songs such as the Rolling Stones’ Stray Cat Blues, which features the line, “I can see that you’re 15 years old / No I don’t want your ID / You look so restless and you’re so far from home”. In recent years, the Stones have dropped it from their set list.
Stray Cat Blues was released in 1968. How much has changed in the years since? Less than you might imagine. Many female artists will talk about the misogyny they have experienced in an industry that is in many ways far rougher around the edges than other parts of the entertainment business (just ask anyone who tries to work as a music journalist in Ireland). They describe men in positions of power – whether producers or executives – treating female musicians as objects.
“It’s not that uncommon,” singer Zara Larsson said in 2021. “The encounters I’ve been in have been with people I’ve worked with for a long time or looked up to even. All of a sudden going from 16 ... nobody moves on a 16-year-old, unless you’re R Kelly [who is behind bars for child sex crimes], which is a rarity. Then you turn 18 and people are talking to me very differently. Like, ‘Oh okay ... that’s how it is. I thought we were friends’. Or, ‘I thought you were someone I looked up to’.”
The routine mistreatment of female artists has been highlighted by singer and former X Factor contestant Rebecca Ferguson. “[Misogyny] is the tip of the iceberg of the things that are happening behind the scenes,” she told a British parliamentary inquiry into misogyny in music.
That message was echoed by Dublin DJ Annie Macmanus at the same hearings. “It’s infuriating the amount of women who just have stories of sexual assault, they just had to bury them and carry them, it’s just unbelievable ... do think if something were to happen, if one person were to speak that had enough profile where it got media attention, there could be a kind of tidal wave of it.”
It isn’t just female artists. Fans are often regarded as sexual playthings. “There was definitely a power division where the band wanted to feel special. They saw the fans as being ... they would refer to them as “groupies” and s**t like that, which I thought was grotesque,” said Ryan Jarman of indie groups The Cribs – a long-time critic of “groupie” culture – said in 2020. “The younger journalists and the younger bands were trying to live vicariously through rock biographies they’d read – about how it used to be in the 1960s and 1970s. They were trying to recreate and live it for themselves.”
Combs is currently in a detention centre in Brooklyn awaiting trial. The full details of his notorious “freak off” parties are yet to emerge.
He issued a statement through his lawyer, Erica Wolff, in which he said: “As Mr Combs’ legal team has emphasised, he cannot address every meritless allegation in what has become a reckless media circus. That said, Mr Combs emphatically and categorically denies as false and defamatory any claim that he sexually abused anyone, including minors.” She continued: “He looks forward to proving his innocence and vindicating himself in court, where the truth will be established based on evidence, not speculation.”
But as more and more women speak out, there is at last the possibility that the sort of behaviour that has gone on for years will no longer be tolerated. It has been a long time coming – but perhaps #MeToo is about to make a much overdue encore in the world of rock ‘n’ roll.
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