Evan Rachel Wood hits back at claim she “manipulated” Marilyn Manson accuser

completemusicupdate.com:

Evan Rachel Wood has hit back at claims by Ashley Morgan Smithline that she “manipulated” her into making allegations of sexual assault against Marilyn Manson.This is the latest development in Manson’s defamation lawsuit against his former partner Wood.

He sued her and her girlfriend Illma Gore a year ago, ahead of the premiere of a documentary in which Wood made her own claims of abuse against Manson.Smithline recanted claims she had previously made against Manson in a sworn statement presented by his lawyers to the New York court over seeing the defamation case last week.

She said that her 2021 lawsuit – which was dismissed earlier this year after Smithline missed a deadline to appoint new legal representation – was filed as a result of Wood and others pressuring her to do so.However, in her new filing, reports Rolling Stone, Wood says that Smithline contacted her about her experiences with Manson in 2019, presenting screengrabs of Instagram DMs and text messages to support this.Wood also provides voicemails from June last year left for a friend by Smithline, in which she says that she believes that Manson’s lawyer Howard King will attempt to get her to withdraw her claims.“Don’t repeat this to anyone”, she says in the message. “I swear to God, don’t say this to anyone … but I did get a private message on my cellular telephone from Marilyn Manson’s lawyer saying, ‘I was wondering if we could just talk’.

The only reason he’d be calling me is that he thinks I’m the weak link and he might want to settle with me to turn on the other girls and say that it was all a ruse”.In her filing, Wood says: “The real pressure Smithline faced was not to make allegations against plaintiff – it was to retract them.