As we discussed earlier, the New York Times did a lengthy exposé on Ryan Adams, where seven women and a dozen associates detail his pattern of abusive, manipulative, controlling and domineering behavior towards women and at least one girl, who was 14 years old when Ryan began communicating with her inappropriately. When I covered the story, I edited out some of Ryan’s denials because I didn’t really give a sh-t. But in case you’re interested, here’s the statement Ryan made on Twitter:
I am not a perfect man and I have made many mistakes. To anyone I have ever hurt, however unintentionally, I apologize deeply and unreservedly. But the picture that this article paints is upsettingly inaccurate. Some of its details are misrepresented; some are exaggerated; some are outright false. I would never have inappropriate interactions with someone I thought was underage. Period. As someone who has always tried to spread joy through my music and my life, hearing that some people believe I caused them pain saddens me greatly. I am resolved to work to be the best man I can be. And I wish everyone compassion, understanding and healing.
I don’t care. After all of the #MeToo stories which I’ve read and covered, I just stopped giving a sh-t about what awful men have to say about being awful. They always claim to be misrepresented – if anything, I tend to believe that they’re a lot worse than their accusers even know.
One positive thing is that Mandy Moore is finally out there, telling her truth and talking about the damage that was done to her in her 20s during her first marriage. Mandy told the NYT that “Music was a point of control for him” and she detailed how he manipulated her into firing her manager, and then he began to exert control over her career. He would diminish her and her talent, and “He would always tell me, ‘You’re not a real musician, because you don’t play an instrument.’” He discouraged her from working with producers, managers and songwriters. She would co-write songs with Ryan and then he would “replace her with other female artists” to record the songs. She also said: “His controlling behavior essentially did block my ability to make new connections in the industry during a very pivotal and potentially lucrative time — my entire mid-to-late 20s.”
Mandy posted this message on Instagram:
Photos courtesy of Instagram, Avalon Red.
I have always liked Mandy and found it kind of odd that her career just took a sudden downswing and rumors started about her being difficult and not very pleasant (she was not talking to anyone, basically). I will never forget her Cosmo interview shortly after it was confirmed she and that douchecanoe got married. Their elopement was one big old red flag even then and I was shocked that they were even dating let alone got married.
He killed her music career and her professional reputation took a hit because of his emotional and controlling abuse.
It is unforgivable and I hope his burns in hell. The hell where he is in a bar alone telling the same story to himself with a beer that will never get cold.
I hope this gives her a leg up in the music industry.
I’d love to hear more music from her. I know she’s having great success acting now (and she is great at that, too!) but maybe this will put her back in a position to record new material.
I think it’s time to call out people who engage in non-physical abuse too, whether they be partners, family members, bosses, etc. so I really appreciate Moore coming out and saying this. Yes, recounting tales of emotional or psychological abuse can be traumatic but I agree that overall it is cathartic and healing in the long run.
Thanks for acknowledging the damage caused by emotional and psychological abuse.
I agree so much. I have been in emotionally and psychologically abusive situations, and people will always ask if the abuser hit me. As though that is the only benchmark of harm. We need to acknowledge all abuse as abuse.
You can ignore everything before the word but.
He seems mostly worried about being charged with sex with a minor.
As someone else pointed out on Twitter, it increasingly feels like his 1989 cover was one last deliberate shot at Mandy considering… you know.
I was having a tweet conversation about that very thing. He totally did it to mess with Mandy. He went from dogging Swift’s music to thinking she was the bees knees.
“a modern Shakespeare” to be specific. Vomit. And I don’t mean that as a dig at Taylor; in this case she was used too.
I wish we didn’t have soft blowing of reality with “personal truth” its not an individual truth. Its just the truth. If you had an experience, were a victim are gay, trans, voraciously individual its not a sliding scale of truth its just the darn truth.
Individualized “truth” perceptions make it seem like its not just what is and that sucks. So many homophobic turds use “personal truth” phrasing as attacks on facts like if its individual its not real.
It sucks, its bad phrasing and it bugs me. The truth is the truth, like it or not, agree or not, people need to start dealing with it.
Its the truth or its a lie.
EXCELLENT point, thank YOU! Having chosen to speak truthfully about my experience, I’ve been told (by abusers, but also by others) that it’s about “my” truth and “my” perception. Folks, there is no individual perception when somebody’s fist hits your gut. There is no individual perception when someone else insults you or threatens to kill you. These are facts and many are crime facts. I’ll be careful to not fall into the “my truth” trap. Please remember this when friends and relatives confide their experiences of abuse with you. You’d never ask whether, if a stranger robbed them on the street, they were sharing “their truth.” You’d ask if they were okay, if the police got the f**ker, and if they wanted you to stay over till they felt safe.
We are programmed to minimize emotional abuse and control. Regardless of whether there is a physical strike by the abuser, the results cause biological reactions in the victim. Abusers justify their behavior, and the society around us helps them. When I was being emotionally abused, my mom would remind me of what a good father he was. Years later, he strangled our preteen whose head was struck against a wall causing hours of unconsciousness and a brain injury. Our child survived, and now we are free, but, before my kid told me, I minimized her first descriptions because I did not know that he was regularly physically abusive to her while she was with him. Now we worry that he may return to kill us. In short, I believe people. Things that sound far-fetched to others can ring true to me and my kid because we’ve been there.
Agree 100%
I’m already seeing people online quibbling about her statement saying that yeah, TECHNICALLY a SINGER isn’t a MUSICIAN. Please, if you are doing this, stop. Just stop.
Her voice is her instrument. RA is an abusive hipster prick. I’m glad he’s finally being called out.
That’s such crap. You create music, your instrument is your voice. Gah.
So Maria Callas wasn’t a musician. Pavarotti wasn’t a musician. Whitney Houston (did she play anything?) wasn’t a musician. I’ll stop here but what kind of mental gymnastics do these men/fans perform to make these ridiculous statements?
Also, she wrote music. She is a musician.
Good for her. Her life and career were so dramatically impacted. Hope she is finally able to do everything she ever wanted.
An awful guy, and I hate his music, and the weird cover version of Swift’s whole album was just terrible.
Glad that he is being called out all these women are sharing their stories. Mandy seemed to have a lot going on and then just bam gone until This Is Us, I’ve seen rumors she was difficult and not very nice but now I am wondering if there is more to the story. I mean we haven’t heard anything negative from This is Us set. Seems like a pattern these men have to discredit the women they are abusing label them difficult and “hard to work with”
Honestly with every story that comes out now I just hope the victims know it isn’t their fault and they are being heard.
At this point I automatically translate “he/she is difficult and hard to work with” into “this is a person who didn’t put up with BS from someone in a powerful position.”
Probably a smart way to interpret that
TQB, me too.
Yup.
He took over managing her. I have to wonder if the “she’s difficult” rumors started based on HIS treatment of negotiations and things of that nature.
I like Mandy and always wondered what she saw in him – he has ‘I’m a pretentious twat’ written all over him, even before this.
I like her too and I’m ashamed to say that when she married him it made me say “hmm, he must be OK after all, even though he seems like such a self-absorbed douche.”
Abusers are inherently charming because they wear masks all the time. They know how to turn it off. And emotional abuse is some of the worst because they isolate you. They link all of your self worth and happiness to their validation. I’ve no doubt he was a douche canoe that whole time. She was just too in love and too damaged to see it at that point.
It was very nice of her to post that message.
I really wish this was a conversation we have about the hidden cost of harassment and abuse – the destruction of women’s careers and opportunities. That’s an uglier sort of violence than a bruise because it can’t heal. A missed chance is one gone. You can’t always find a second. We don’t get to turn back the clock and reclaim our youths, which is why I get so angry seeing younger women wasting their years on older men.
True.
Just one thing, domestic violence can leave more than bruises. It can cause lasting physical damage, whether from burns, broken bones, organ damage etc. And sometimes the victims die. I don’t mean to be a Debbie Downer and understand the point about career damage, but all forms of violence are ugly.
Yeah, I don’t really like the implication that damaging one’s career is somehow “worse” than physical violence. Make no mistake, physical abuse has permanent, lasting effects. Not only physical effects, but psychological ones.
ALL abuse is terrible and wrong and leaves a permanent impact on the survivor. We don’t need to “rank” the different types, and it’s not some kind of competition.
I am glad that you brought this up Veronica because during the Weinstein scandal, I mentioned this and I brought up Gretchen Mol and totally believe that dillhole had a hand in her career going down the way it did. I know that she gave a quote saying it was not true but given what we learned about Weinstein and he tactics, it would not surprise me in the least that she said that to protect her family.
It’s sad that for the rest of her life, there will be members of both sexes who will continue to participate in misogynistic abuse by discrediting her and other women who say they weren’t raped/ didn’t sleep with men like that, every time a man is exposed as an abuser. That, too, is emotionally and psychologically abusive towards women, and it’s something that people feel extra free to do because female public figures ‘put themselves out there’. Millenials get called out a lot for needing to realize that not every thought needs to be shared on the internet, and while some of that criticism is definitely valid (and some of it isn’t), Gen X-ers and sometimes Baby Boomers are most definitely pretty guilty of that too when it comes to what they feel free to say about women online. #BelieveWomen
I am certain that story was planted, is false, and doomed her career, and every time I think about it (and the fact that I gobbled up all the details without question), I feel ashamed. #believewomen, and believe that some men find it easier to disable a powerful woman through rumors and lies than to just face her head on.
I wonder if deep down abusers like him are trying to sabatoge women’s careers, if thats the real underlying goal here?
To some extent, yes, but I don’t even think it’s a conscious act of destruction. I think we literally have misogyny so deeply ingrained in our culture that the instinctual response to a successful woman is to “put her in her place.” I consider myself feminist, even radically so at times, and I catch myself thinking and saying sexist things all the time. The programming is there whether I like it or not.
For thousands of years, we’ve been fed the narrative that men do and women are. It’s inevitable that it helps create men like Ryan Adams who consider their existence significant by default and women’s inherently lesser. Social imbalances in power inherently enable narcissism and exploitative personalities.
I strongly disagree with your statement that it’s an “uglier sort of bruise than violence”, and this is coming from a survivor of domestic abuse. We do not need to pit survivors against each other, which is what you are doing. There is no “less harmful” and “more harmful” kind of abuse. It’s all trauma and it all leaves very real, lasting damage.
This kind of language is what causes survivors to minimize their own experiences. Please think long and hard about the language you are using when discussing abuse.
We always talk about physical abuse but verbal and psychological can sometimes be much worse. I’m guessing a lot of women have suffered from verbal and psychological abuse. I know I have. I’m glad they are speaking out now.
Aimee, I’m sorry that you were abused, and I send you and every woman here who has endured this a hug. 🤗
Ugh. PLEASE don’t use words like “worse” and “better” when discussing domestic abuse. You might mean “more traumatic”, and if so, please say that. We don’t need to rank domestic abuse on a scale from bad to good. Word choice matters here.
I’m sorry she had to endure this.
I’m so happy to see her doing so well these days after this nightmare. I’m glad so many are speaking out against this abusive d*ckhead.
Variety did an article about all the tweets he wrote and deleted before this generic piece of PR crap and they really showed his douchebaginess to another level. I like that cases like his come out, because people still seem to think that unless the guy raped a woman while holding a gun to her head it’s “debatable” whether they should be taken down or not.
All I hear is an admission to being a pedophile.
I like Mandy Moore these days. I hope she makes music soon.