Marilyn Manson: Unmasked review – should a tour bus really need the age of consent pinned to the wall? | Television & radio

Roll up, roll up – enjoyable instances are right here once more, particularly for us women! Final week we had 2025’s first addition to the bulging information of true-crime tales, with the documentary sequence about rapist and serial killer Todd Kohlhepp (The Amazon Evaluate Killer). Now we’ve the primary documentary a couple of high-profile star claimed by a number of girls to be a violent sexual predator lengthy enabled by his fame, cash and energy to do precisely as he preferred, to as many younger girls as he preferred, with out concern of consequence.

Marilyn Manson: Unmasked is a meticulously assembled three-part account of the shock-rock musician’s profession and what was allegedly occurring behind the scenes. All of which, I ought to say, is denied by Manson (actual title Brian Warner) and on display screen by his quietly terrifying lawyer Howard King, whose favorite expression appears to be “full fabrication”.

It follows what has change into, depressingly, the standard trajectory of interviewing the accused’s buddies and associates, interwoven with testimony from his alleged victims, and permitting the viewer’s viewpoint to evolve. Former bandmate Stephen Bier is emblematic of the wrestle we see play out in so a lot of what we would name witnesses for the defence in such programmes: eager to not appear unsympathetic, however discovering it exhausting to not let an underlying incredulity present by way of. Being on a rock tour, he admits, “is a check of your advantage … And minors have totally different brains, they haven’t developed, et cetera, et cetera. However that’s a authorized downside!” Bier has an unlucky tendency to punctuate his ideas with laughter. He additionally notes that the tour supervisor would write the age of consent up within the bus “as a result of they’re totally different in each state”. He appears to assume that is proof of one thing good. However, gosh – I’d enterprise that it’s indicative of one thing fairly different.

Manson’s most well-known accuser is his former girlfriend and now movie and tv star Evan Rachel Wooden. She testified at a 2018 congressional listening to concerning a domestic-violence prevention invoice to years of horrific abuse at a accomplice’s arms, and later named him as Manson. It inspired different girls to come back ahead with comparable tales, and lawsuits in opposition to the musician started to build up. Some he has settled, others are ongoing. In response to his followers, Wooden is orchestrating a marketing campaign of lies in opposition to him and persuading different girls to hitch in. Wooden asks if that’s extra possible than the notion that “a nasty particular person has been doing dangerous issues for a very very long time”.

Past setting out the timelines and testimonies that should kind the backbone of this type of documentary, Marilyn Manson: Unmasked teases out the query of how ready folks ought to have been to tell apart between performative transgressions designed to shock (and construct the notoriety upon which his profession depended) and a person hiding horrible proclivities in plain sight. There may be plentiful footage of Manson on stage saying to his screaming followers issues like “Which one in every of you sixth graders desires me to make you’re feeling like a goddamn eighth grader?” and “Ship a few of these little eighth-grader women up right here so I can put my entire arm inside them”, and referring to their “sticky pussies”. I feel most of us would have been on excessive alert by then. However maybe it will rely upon how a lot cash he was making for us. And the way a lot we thought we may blame anybody for getting concerned with a self-proclaimed Devil lover. “When you’re a vegetarian, don’t go to a hamburger store,” advises one in every of his former colleagues.

What are we to make of the crew who apparently didn’t realise a barely acutely aware Wooden was, she says now, being raped by Manson as they filmed the Coronary heart-Formed Glasses – a Lolita reference – music video? Their silence and professed ignorance is proof, in keeping with King, of one other of these “full fabrications” by a girl decided “to destroy Brian professionally and emotionally”. Once more, it’s doable to really feel fairly in any other case.

What will we make of the media who at his peak uncritically adored Manson’s controversial methods and limitless quotability? Not that every one of his feedback made it into print. The final episode comprises beforehand unheard excerpts of the audiotapes that had been a prelude to a Rolling Stone journal piece. For instance, “I’m not into rape in any respect … I desire to interrupt a girl right down to the purpose the place they don’t have any selection however to undergo me. Rape is for cowards, for lazy folks.” It chimes completely with the onscreen testimonies of his alleged victims, together with and particularly Wooden. Nevertheless it was most likely simply his persona talking. Only a efficiency. As a result of who may consider there are males on the market who’re actually like that?