Abusers Don’t All Look like Marilyn Manson

There is no way to tell an abusive man from his looks alone

Over the past couple of weeks, it has become fairly clear that the Armie Hammer abuse rumors — which include screenshots of his talk of cannibalism fantasies and details of him carving his initials into a woman’s genitalia with a knife — are going absolutely nowhere. (For more on those, see this fab piece by Carrie Wynn).

Hammer has already been dropped like a stone by both his agent and his publicist, and most of us are cynical enough to understand that when that happens to a previously highly bankable star, it’s usually a hand-washing exercise ahead of confirmed, or perhaps worsening, revelations. His previously glittering star, for the moment at least, seems to be on the wane.

Meanwhile, bad boy Goth rockstar and famous “satanist” Marilyn Manson has also been dropped by both his agent and by his record label, after his ex-partner, Evan Rachel Wood announced publicly that he had been abusive to her during their relationship and that he was the man she referred to in previous discussions about abuse and sexual assault.

She confirmed that he groomed her when they met and that he subjected her to several years of what she describes as “horrific abuse” before they separated for good.

Looks can deceive — and so can showmanship

On the face of it, the two men spotlighted in the news right now could not be more different. Manson is a full generation older than Hammer; he’s 52 to Hammer’s 34. He is a hard-partying rock star, famous for his Halloween-esque dramatic makeup and viciously misogynistic rock stage shows that have featured such scenes as naked women on dog leashes and graphic depictions of satanic worship.

His “pass” (if the blind eye that was always turned, by those in his circle, to anything more sinister can be called that) was always based on the idea that his extreme persona was nothing more than a stage-based fiction. Just a performance. It might even be described as art.

But even in his own autobiography, he describes questionable issues around consent in the context of sexual encounters with heavily intoxicated women. In 2009 he admitted in an interview that he fantasized daily about smashing Evan Rachel Wood’s head in “with a sledgehammer” after they separated and that he had once called her 158 times whilst self-harming (so that she could “understand the pain” she had put him through in the split).

There are places where the blurred line between his theatrically dark stage persona and his real-life personality should, perhaps, have been recognized more clearly than it ever was.

Hammer, by contrast, is smooth and blond, a typically clean-cut Hollywood leading man. He could have been made on a production line for charmers. He played both of the ultra-fit Winklevoss twins in The Social Network and was also cast as the archly, naughtily seductive older man in the languid coming-of-age gay romance Call Me By Your Name. In both films, his good looks were an intrinsic part and parcel of the role he played.

If the people around him were lulled into a false sense of security by Marilyn Manson’s rockstar bad man “performance”, believing that his real personality must surely be far more wholesome, then perhaps the exact opposite occurred with Armie Hammer — perhaps it was difficult to believe that such a classically handsome man might be a purveyor of the sort of dark cannibalistic fantasies he revealed in his private messages. Or, at least, perhaps they were dismissed far too readily as nothing more than harmless mutual fantasy.

What does a “bad man” look like?

Just as abuse takes many forms — just as the guy who would scoff and genuinely recoil from any suggestion that he would ever be physically violent in a relationship might still engage in constant “negging”, destructively and systematically eroding his partner’s self-esteem through the drip-feed of his cruel words to the point that she becomes powerless — abusers, too, are not all of a type. Never has this been more evident than now.

The first few weeks of 2021 have seen Hammer, Manson, and Shia LaBeouf all brought into the public spotlight with serious abuse allegations. The only thing all 3 of them have in common (apart from being wealthy and successful men, each at the top of their particular game) is their high-voltage charm, which they all turned successfully on their partners in the “honeymoon” early days of relationships which later became abusive and sour.

All of the women speaking up now were once seduced by a facade of shine and charm; all of them fell under the spell of the brilliant man who had secured them with it, and all of them then learned the hard way that sometimes, too often, this is how abuse works. It starts with sweetness and light and charm.

FKA twigs described the early days with Shia LaBeouf as resembling “a honeymoon”. Courtney Vucekovich, who dated Armie Hammer after his marriage to Elisabeth Chambers ended and spent 3 weeks living with him during the first Covid-19 lockdown, said in an interview that “he…captivates you and while being charming, he’s grooming you for these things that are darker and heavier and consuming”.

And Evan Rachel Wood, who met Marilyn Manson at a party when she was a teenager (he was 36 and she was 18, which is not a power dynamic that will ever be OK), once told Rolling Stone that when their eyes met “I met somebody that promised freedom and expression and no judgments, and I was craving…excitement.”

Three very different men. Three very different careers, three entirely different women. But three identical tales of the irresistibly seductive charm, the love-bombing, and the obsessive “honeymoon” experience of the heady early days that characterize almost all abusive relationships of this type.

Because of that seductive charm, that honeymoon period, and that obsessive love-bombing: they’re all part of the abuse process too.

In her book Too Close For Comfort: Exploring The Risks Of Intimacy, Dr. Geraldine Pierkowski refers to this excessive affection and charm at the outset of a relationship as “a bombardment…designed to break down resistance — that is, the protective walls we all erect to shield ourselves from harm”.

Once he’s through those walls, it’s easy for an abusive man to erode a woman’s defenses further. She is held in place by a dim memory of how beautifully honeymoon-like the relationship was at the start, and a constant sense of wanting to get back there, to re-attain her lover’s full approval once more. It is a vicious cycle, and it’s incredibly destructive.

I’ve been there myself, and the overwhelming sensation I remember is one of slowly losing a grip on a past reality I could only recall in bright snippets and pieces. It was a gradual, hard-to-describe loss of my core self, and once that self had started to disappear, it was incredibly easy for my partner to tell me who I used to be and for me to believe him.

And to believe him, too, when he told me that I used to be indefinably better, and that I was now worse, and that he was disappointed by my inability to be the person I used to be. To be wrongfooted daily in this way is not just tiring, but it makes it almost impossible to recognize the other types of abuse when they begin.

The (power) struggle is real

Despite their apparent distance from each other, what all of the famous men listed above have in common is the fact that unlike when I met my own abusive ex-partner, the playing field they each started from in their own relationships was never going to be level.

Each of them — Manson, Hammer, LaBeouf — was already established as a star when they began the relationships in which they exercised their alleged abusive acts. Their partners, for whatever reason (extreme youth in Wood’s case; comparative lack of celebrity in Vucekovich’s; being far from home in Twigs’) were on the back foot in power terms from the very outset.

Which makes their respective descents into abusive relationships so incredibly easy. Abusive relationships are defined as always involving an imbalance of power. This imbalance usually arises over time, as women are manipulated into putting their own lives and interests on hold and realize only later that their partner has elevated himself at their expense. But when the abuser is already a star — already accustomed to adulation — the journey to a position where they feel absolutely in control of their romantic partner is so much shorter.

Perhaps, then, they’re not so different, these men hitting this year’s early headlines. They’re linked by power.

It’s not for nothing

I see a strange, faint glimmer of hope in the coincidental timing of these news stories. I think that the apparently wide disparity between the three men who are being publicly brought to their knees right now (by the brave words of the women they abused, who have spoken up in a climate that I believe is only slowly changing to make this more possible) is something for us as women to note and something for us to be grateful for.

In observing their wide disparity — but their linked ability to claim an insidious agency and power over their partners — we can see how all sorts of apparently different men in “real life” can develop the ability, in their own way, to wield their own sort of power over women. It makes our own experiences (should it happens to us) more relatable, and easier to bring into the light.

I think it’s important, too, that none of the beautiful, articulate, independent women who are now talking about the details of their relationships with these men is a visible “victim” in the way that the victim role has traditionally been cast. Because very few of us start out seeing ourselves as victims. Recognizing that abuse can happen to absolutely anyone is crucial in ending the self-delusion and silence we are all tempted to hide behind.

Any one of us can be dazzled by a brilliant charm. Any one of us can get to the point where we only see the true nature of the shadows when the brightness has faded so far that you can’t see a way out of the darkness anymore. It could happen, it does happen, to any woman anywhere. It could be perpetrated, and it is perpetrated, by any type of man. From goth to jock to geek. All it takes is an ability to snake through our defenses and to acquire some power.

For years, rich and famous white men have enjoyed the privilege of hiding in plain sight, but — hopefully — not anymore.