Game of Thrones actress Esmé Bianco is the latest person to speak out with assault and abuse claims against musician Marilyn Manson.
In an interview with New York Magazine‘s the Cut published Wednesday, the 38-year-old actress revealed details on how her relationship with Manson allegedly went from “massive role model” to a “monster who almost destroyed me.”
The two, according to Bianco, met in 2005 and entered into a relationship in 2009, when she was 26 years old. The violence, she said, began during a shoot for a music video—for a song titled “I Want to Kill You Like They Do in the Movies”—in which she was whipped and tied up with cables.
Bianco spent the next couple of years in a long-distance affair with Manson, brushing off concerns from friends about her bruises and bite-marks, given without consent, she said. She said she left her husband in 2011 and moved in with Manson in Los Angeles, where she said she continued to suffer from abuse and stress—the source of which was Manson’s short-temper and controlling behavior.
“I basically felt like a prisoner,” Bianco told the Cut. “I came and went at his pleasure. Who I spoke to was completely controlled by him. I called my family hiding in the closet.”
In Games of Thrones, Bianco plays Ros, a character who works in a brothel and is often faced with abuse and humiliation similar to that in Bianco’s own personal life during the relationship. The pilot, containing her sex scene, aired while Bianco was living with Manson, and he would allegedly play it for guests. She said it would humiliate her.
An unnamed friend of Manson’s told the Cut he remembers one of these screenings. “That’s my girlfriend, she’s a whore. Look, her tits are out,” they recalled Manson saying.
Bianco is now among the more than a dozen women who’ve made claims against Manson, including Westworld star Evan Rachel Wood. Bianco and Wood both have spoken out about being survivors of abuse but did not name Manson until now.
Bianco, shared a post to Instagram in 2019 of her back covered in wounds she said were received in the name of what she thought was “art” at the time.
“I used to look at this photo with pride because I thought it was a sign of great devotion to my abuser,” she said in the caption. “Now I look at it with horror.”
Manson recently responded to the allegations against him with a statement posted to Instagram, saying the claims are “horrible distortions of reality.” “My intimate relationships have always been entirely consensual with like-minded partners,” he said.
Bianco told the Cut that after two months of living with Manson, the breaking point came in May 2011, when Manson chased her around the apartment with an ax.
In 2019, Bianco posted a thread about domestic violence using images of fake wounds from her time on the set of Game of Thrones. She said she received many questions regarding how she films scenes like this being a survivor of domestic violence.
“Honestly I had never thought about it. It never occurred to me that those scenes would be triggering/especially difficult given what I’ve been through,” she tweeted. “But that is what trauma does. It normalizes. It makes unbearable occurrences tolerable.”
Since Wood named Manson as her abuser, his record label, manager, and talent agency have all dropped him. Manson’s lawyer did not respond to the Cut’s request for comment regarding Bianco’s claims.
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