An Open Letter To The Misogynists and Abusers in the Rock, Metal and Extreme Music Scene

An Open Letter To The Misogynists and Abusers in the Rock, Metal and Extreme Music Scene
Written by Dark Juan, Beth Morait & Simon Black.

1) The Gospel of Dark Juan

It is not usual for Dark Juan to write something like this, especially because I spend a good half of my reviews making up the most outlandish shit I can about myself, and some of that is frankly lies about my exploits, be they sexual or chemical. The point of them is that I am taking the piss out of myself as much as I am mocking the bad old days in Rock and Metal of groupies, cocaine orgies and treating women as sexual objects to be passed around bands for their enjoyment solely. It’s the fucking 21st Century and we really should be doing better than the likes of Hair and Glam Metal in the 80’s and the debaucheries perpetrated therein.

This letter to you all is being written because, yet again, a young woman has been abused by a musician in this scene. It is unconscionable, because IT KEEPS FUCKING HAPPENING. However, this time Ever Metal are compelled to take action, because this time it was one of the EM family who was the victim of a predatory fucker. Now, Dark Juan has faults, and a somewhat elastic relationship with the truth is one of them, but the one thing HE WOULD NEVER DO is violate the sanctity of the relationships I have formed with fans, other writers, musicians and promoters in this generally fucking amazing family that I have found due to the music. 

This time, a young lady, entirely without solicitation, was asked whether a fat fucking 50-something could tempt them out of their relationship, AFTER he had asked whether she was happy in her relationship, and she had replied in the affirmative. Now, Dark Juan is not a man who is against people taking their shot, but when the person in question is trying his luck with someone young enough to be his grandchild – well, you start to get seriously uncomfortable vibes, and because of Dark Juan’s career in the real world, which involves picking up the pieces of abuse after it has occurred, Dark Juan is ANGRY. He is angry at the person himself for even considering that he could use his membership of a (very, very shitty band with whom many people have issues, which need not be discussed here) to try to get in the knickers of a girl at least two and a half decades his junior, and who has previously suffered abuse in the past. 

IT MUST STOP.

Dark Juan does not deal well with this, and neither does Ever Metal. We WILL call these people out and we will hold them to account in public forums so the people who adore our scene can be informed of the transgressions of predators and sexual abusers. Most of the people from our scene are beautiful, wonderful, friendly human beings I’d dearly love to have many beers with, but yet again the grubby, sleazy minority are tarnishing it. They are destroying it; they are a cancer eating away at our scene from the inside and they must be cut out, lest we send the message that we condone the actions of these predatory motherfuckers. We cannot do that, collectively or individually.

Dark Juan does not want to be the morality police. I am utterly against cancel culture. What Dark Juan does wish to do is to protect the inclusivity and diversity of our scene, because it has been a long time coming. If that means I must get on my high horse occasionally, then fuck it, I’m going to do it because I am in a position (very fortunately) of some small influence, and with that comes a certain responsibility. This is me exercising this responsibility. 

Again, I am not setting myself up as some kind of moral crusader. It is the duty, in my mind, of every single person in this scene to act against those who try to harm others. Sex and drugs and rock and roll are all awesome, but, and this is the fucking kicker, with CONSENT. Sending people you have never met in person or even communicated with before solicitations to get into their pants (regardless of gender) is simply not fucking cricket, and Dark Juan will happily destroy the careers of people such as these. The world has moved on from the dark days of misogyny and abuse being brushed under the carpet, or just laughed off as something the guys get up to and the girls wouldn’t do it if they didn’t enjoy it…

Look at the things women have to go through in their lives in general, let alone on a night out, but I will confine myself to the experiences of women on nights out – they dress in something revealing or tight fitting and they have to endure crude comments, groping and having to bat people away fairly constantly when they are out. They travel in groups for mutual safety and, entirely unforgivably, have to watch their drinks in case some **** spikes them. They are a target for unscrupulous people to try to exploit for their own gain. I, as a man, cannot expect to understand what goes with womanhood, but I can understand that everyone should be able to feel safe and secure in real life as well as on the internet.

This is the Gospel of Dark Juan: Fuck around with me and find out. I will defend the rights of people to not be propositioned, abused, assaulted, bullied or otherwise exploited with all the assets at my command. 

This man assaulted someone who is part of my Ever Metal family. His musical career is no more, and to make it worse he is unrepentant about it. Thankfully, the good friends and right-thinking people of the scene have rightfully called him out about his actions and have made sure he will never play a gig in the UK again. For this, I thank you all from the bottom of my heart.

Dark Juan.

2) From A Woman, and Mother’s Perspective

If you’ve read this far, thank you. I can’t begin to tell you all how I feel at the moment. Or how so many people feel about this subject. The mix of emotions is so much that it becomes a numbness. It’s an unsettling cavern of fear, shame, worry, and sadness that makes you overthink and be hypervigilant, and saps your emotional strength and resilience. But the worst thing is that, sometimes, we have a problem recognising what is causing us this pain, because it has become so normal. 

And the question I find myself asking all the time is ‘Why?’ Often that question is aimed at myself, and laced with a sense of guilt and self-doubt that has been put there by years of relegating my own feelings to a position a long way behind everyone else’s; because I’ve believed that I matter less, and my place in the world is worth much less because of my gender. Why do I have to react? Why am I letting it upset me? Why can’t I just let it go? Why can’t I just not say anything, and live a peaceful life? Why aren’t I better at protecting people, especially my own family, from this shit?…

But this thinking is all wrong, and has been the route cause of so much pain for me, and so, so many others like me. This is an attitude that’s been gaslit into me since I was a child. So many of the women in my generation, and our mother’s generation have experienced this. And alarmingly, so many are also still taught to feel like this, when the real questions we should be asking are 

‘Why does society allow this?’ 

‘Why has this behaviour been normalised?’ 

‘Why do people think they have the right to do this, and get away with it?’

The current situation has sideswiped me. I have worked so hard on repairing the damage in myself that’s been caused by abuse, but right now I’m back at square one. I have been the victim of unsolicited messages, as have so many of the brilliant women I know. But this one has hit so much closer to home, and messed with my emotions in so much more of a way. I wish that it had happened to me again, and not to someone who’s life was the most miraculous gift I’ve ever been given, and who I have spent nearly all my adult life trying to protect. I cannot describe the pain, hurt, and guilt that I feel right now. Please. For the sake of all our loved ones, who’s lives we cherish more than our own, and for all our dear friends, who enrich our lives just by existing. Please just stop this behaviour. And stop allowing society to normalise it. Recognise that if you can’t see anything wrong with it, then you are part of the problem. And make a pledge to learn to understand how you can change, to become part of the solution.

We are broken and exhausted. We shouldn’t have to live like this. 

Beth Morait

3) Another Day, Another Abuser….

Another month, another abuser appears in our beloved scene. We should be better than this… For those wondering where the hell this all came from and what the devil it has to do with you, then I will tell you. 

A few days ago, my FaceBook feed suddenly started filling up with some serious anger directed at the frontman of an underground band who had crossed a line. I saw this because people I know were directing their anger at this person. The trigger? Well, a bunch of unsolicited messages from this character to a girl a fraction of his age – asking if she was single, and pushing, and pushing. Someone who doesn’t like to take no for an answer basically, and not smart enough to realise that he’s done wrong when this gets shared on social media by the recipient in the vain hope that he might take the hint and go fuckity-bye. 

This gets called out. 

It gets shared. 

Pretty soon a lot of people are calling this guy and his band out. Promoters for upcoming gigs pick up on this, and sensibly pull the plug. And the wave builds. Then the disinformation campaign starts from this individual via his band’s FaceBook account. 

First he says one minute that the recipient of these solicitations was over the age of consent; he gets flamed. 

Then he changes tack, and this is all about agenda-driven click baiting; he then gets flamed. 

Next up, it’s actually about disgruntled promoters out for revenge or not just not having to pay for a band to play; he’s getting hot again.

Or that internet Trolls hate him, or that the victim doesn’t actually exist, and was just created as a honey-pot account to trap him… Anything in fact, other than an acknowledgement that his behaviour was out of order. 

Eventually he takes his page down, restoring it after it’s been sanitised of anything he doesn’t like, but the damage is done, his band’s bookings are getting cancelled, and the world knows all about him. All good, justice is done, right? 

Well, no, not by a long chalk…

I am conscious that I am wading into this debate as a late middle-aged white male, and that really, my perspective should not count for toffee, given the generations of bias to that cultural niche at the expense of the more vulnerable ones who inevitably end up as the victims. And to be fair, this guy’s antics in this instance are on the gentle end of the scale, but it’s the existence of the scale that’s the issue and the fact that not getting caught on the first naughty step only emboldens these people to keep climbing. The reality is he’s probably been getting away with this for some time, but got caught earlier because his intended victim had her head screwed on correctly and wasn’t having it.

But I am speaking up, because I’m pissed off. Why? Because the young lady at the centre of all this is someone I know, who does most definitely exist in real life, and is in fact the daughter of this very web site’s owner. 

And doesn’t it keep happening a lot of late? 

Well, no, it and much, much worse have been going for ever, it’s just that the very tools and platforms that have in recent years allowed these people to prowl and hunt with impunity are finally being used against them, as the likes of the #MeToo movement empowers victims to stand up to them. But the problem is, not everyone can take a stand, because this scene of which we are all a part of has a lot of vulnerable and damaged individuals, who have found a refuge in its very existence, but which also sadly has its own predators standing in plain sight. And that’s why we often get angry when these people get exposed, because sometimes they are people we know, or had worked with, or admired as artists and professionals in this industry.

Then there’s the really crucial fact that I touched on earlier – that for so many of us this subculture is supposed to be a safe place. I think it’s fair to say, without the benefit of any kind of verifiable statistical data to back this up, that there are a lot of people with an unsettled history in the Metal scene. We like an extreme form of music in the eyes of the world, but its appeal often lies in our own experiences that allow that music to speak to us clearly, where others only hear a noise that they do not understand. Generally, at some point in our youth, we meet others who felt the same, with shared experiences, who understand, and suddenly we don’t feel alone anymore and a community of mutual self-support that gives us the confidence to be different and feel human again. Which is why the people who abuse that vulnerability are the very worst humanity has to offer. And so often it has turned out recently that they are embedded into the very framework of the scene, like a tiger waiting on a tree branch for a hapless victim in search of shade.

I now need to be honest with you and explain why I feel the need to stand up here, and that is because in recent years two of these predators in the scene that have been exposed were people I knew, but about whose behaviours I knew absolutely nothing about, because one thing these pricks are good at doing is hiding in plain sight. In my case for 35 years, which really, really makes me feel a fool.

I can talk about one instance specifically (a DJ in the Rock pubs and clubs of Nottingham), because the individual in question now has a criminal conviction as a result of being caught for his behaviour and you will no doubt find him fast enough on a search engine with that bare information. The other one is still out there, and I can’t go further, because until he gets legally called to account, getting stuff out in the public domain may prevent the very justice that the keyboard vigilantes are hoping to achieve. 

And that makes me really fucking angry and is also the reason why I need to advise caution about reacting on social media, which it turns out is a double-edged sword. Sometimes, it can actually make the problem worse… to the point where I had to think long and hard about even writing this…

The second person I had known for my entire adult life and counted as a close friend. It turns out that I did not know him at all. I cannot say more at the moment, but he is another one who abused his position in the scene, and whilst most thought him to be the incarnation of his well-crafted image, the reality was someone for whom cheating on his wife countless times, putting her life at risk during Covid because she had a condition requiring shielding, abusing his position of responsibility at work within the Metal community and even attempted rape were nothing. When this started to come out, he quickly disappeared from the scene, but is still out there, and still a risk. The reason I am saying no more, is that I hope justice will be done as it did to the errant Nottingham DJ, and I don’t want to prejudice that process. But I feel a fool, because I, and many others who knew him had no fucking clue…

But in order for that justice to happen, we must be cautious about what is said and shared on social media, because the very vengeance we all seek can be turned against the keyboard vigilantes. Lawyers for defence have successfully used the material of public flaming to argue for defamation of character and undermine legal cases under the really simple legal precedent in this country that someone is innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. The court of public opinion does not count, and if the evidence against the perpetrator is weak, or the defamation and consequences of that outside of official legal proceedings, then these cases can collapse, the abuser walks free (and emboldened) and worst of all those pursuing the witch hunt against them find themselves the recipient of legal action and financial penalties for defamation of character. Because, at the end of the day, it’s not about justice, it’s about who’s got the best lawyer on the day, and because after all, as Dickens wrote in ‘Bleak House’, “the purpose of English Law is to make business for itself…”. 

The only way to stop this behaviour is for full and decent legal justice to be done, but the QWERTY Warriors can completely undermine this for the best of intentions. In the meantime, we need to protect the people in this scene, but with care and caution, because these people are often smart as well as dangerous.

But their presence will not be tolerated. Get out of our scene…

Simon Black.

Disclaimer: This article is solely the property of Dark Juan, Beth Morait, and Simon Black and Ever Metal. It is strictly forbidden to copy any part of this review, unless you have the strict permission of both parties. Failure to adhere to this will be treated as plagiarism and will be reported to the relevant authorities.