Throughout pop music history, victims of sexual misconduct and abuse, many of them young women and girls, have often been overlooked by fans, executives, and the media, their stories dismissed amidst, and even canonized as, rock star behavior. When David Bowie died in 2016, he was alternately eulogized as an “icon for sexual liberation” and decried as a statutory rapist for sleeping with underage fans.Even in the post-#MeToo era, fans and industry professionals have continued to support and elevate the careers of men who are accused of harassment, assault, and abuse. Two weeks after the Weinstein scandal erupted, Caroline, a Capitol Music Group subsidiary, signed a reported $6 million deal with the rapper XXXTentacion, who had been charged with allegedly attacking and strangling his then-pregnant girlfriend in 2016. (When contacted by Noisey late last year, a publicist for XXXTentacion confirmed the deal was on but said the amount was undisclosed.) He pleaded not guilty in December, and is still awaiting trial; his second album, ?, featuring Joey Bada$$ and Travis Barker, comes out Friday. Another rapper, 6ix9ine, continued his rise in the charts even as Jezebel confirmed in December that he pleaded guilty to the use of a child in a sexual performance in 2015. His sentencing hearing has been pushed back multiple times and is now scheduled for April 10; meanwhile, his debut album reached No. 4 on the Billboard 200 this month. A jury ruled last summer that radio DJ David Mueller had groped Taylor Swift in 2013; by January, he had a new job at a country music station in Mississippi, whose CEO said he "tend[ed] to believe" Mueller, not Swift.“I didn’t want to be ‘sexual harassment girl,’” Claire said. “I thought people wouldn’t want to hire me because they wouldn’t understand, and think I’m being over-sensitive to something that was just normal in the music industry.”
All these numbers have real-world implications for women in music. A 2016 report from a US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission task force identified a number of risk factors for workplace harassment, including a lack of diversity and significant power disparities. Other studies have have found that both women and men are more likely to be targeted in male-dominated environments that emphasize traditional gender roles.Women just starting out in a male-dominated industry like music may find their career advancement at the mercy of the men in charge—a situation some of those men take advantage of.“In music, oftentimes you have women who are working closely with a producer or manager or someone who has a lot of control over their careers, so they don’t necessarily have options of not working close to them or not responding to advances,” said Ginger Clark, a psychology professor at USC’s Rossier School of Education who specializes in women’s issues and trauma like sexual abuse. “So it creates the perfect environment for this sort of thing to take place.”“You have to be one of the guys,” Claire says. “I once had a boss tell me that I should learn golf and watch The Sopranos, because that’s what the men in the industry did. He wasn’t wrong. It’s all men for the most part, and I have to be able to hang with them.”
A majority of the women who spoke to me described feeling like they needed to put up with harassment in order to keep their jobs or further their careers. And all of the women who said they chose to report misconduct, either through formal or informal channels, told me that doing so had little effect.“These men have created a myth that they're the only ones that can do this,” industry veteran Dorothy Carvello told me. “So if you have a guy running a company, [for] example, and he's created an enormous amount of revenue, the corporate people feel like, ‘Oh this guy's delivering for us. So what, he does a few things. It's cheaper in the long run to keep him. We need him. Who else are we gonna get?’"Carvello said she was hired at age 24 as secretary to Atlantic Records co-founder Ahmet Ertegun in 1987; after helping sign heavy metal band Skid Row, she said she became the first woman in the label’s A&R department the following year. In a guest column for Variety last fall, Carvello alleged that Ertegun sexually assaulted her in 1988, and that when she informally complained about the incident to two senior execs, they told her she was “free to leave.” (Atlantic’s parent company, Warner Music, declined to comment about the allegation, but directed me to a recent Billboard article addressing the company’s HR policy and plans.) Carvello plans to share her story in a forthcoming book, Anything For A Hit: An A&R Woman’s Story of Surviving the Music Industry, out in September 2018 via Chicago Review Press.“It doesn’t stop at a certain age in music," said a former licensing assistant. "It’s an island of lost boys where everybody is the same age forever.”
“When your business is relationships, there are so many gray areas,” said a former label publicist. “We know what the obvious things are, but what are the not obvious things? When does flirtation become harassment? There is no road map.”
This includes freelance reporters tasked with covering the industry. Contracts for freelance reporters may offer the freelancer company support services such as HR, but music journalists I spoke to said it's not always clear what support is available if they experience harassment, how to access it, or who to talk to if they're working for multiple companies at once. And if a reporter is doing work without a contract in place—meeting an industry source, building relationships, or while doing the research necessary to get a story in the first place—they're likely on their own."There's a lot of confusion over what is the boundary and with whom. If I go out to [a drink meeting] with a publicist or a manager and he sexually harasses me, who do I tell?" — Rebecca Haithcoat
Claire, the woman who says she was assaulted by a senior colleague at the now-defunct label, told me that she initially declined to report the incident because she feared that it would affect her reputation. When she eventually did go to HR, she says she was faced with questioning and skepticism rather than support.“I was like, why am I being questioned?” she said. “They said our stories didn’t match up—‘We can’t do anything about it. We don’t have any proof.’” Even after a third person came forward and corroborated details of her story, Claire says HR dismissed the story as unreliable. Her coworker continued to work at the company, Claire says, although he was required to undergo sexual harassment training.“I just remember feeling like, I don’t even know what I could do to get them to believe me. At one point, I got so upset that I said I didn’t know if I wanted to work there, and they said, ‘Yeah, that would probably be best.’”Claire says the experience of reporting the assault was almost as traumatic as the assault itself. “Coming forward, you think that HR is gonna take care of you. I learned that really, they just don’t want to get sued,” she said. “He was the type of guy who would cause trouble a lot. Me, I’m a young girl. They thought, She’s not gonna sue us.”“Coming forward, you think that HR is gonna take care of you. I learned that really, they just don’t want to get sued,” Claire said. “He was the type of guy who would cause trouble a lot. Me, I’m a young girl. They thought, She’s not gonna sue us.”
Warped Tour, alongside Chicago’s Riot Fest and Coachella collaborators Do LaB, are among the organizations and festivals taking measures to fight sexual misconduct by teaming up with harm reduction groups like Safer Scenes, Between Friends, and Rape Victim Advocates. Together, they’ve worked to equip fans, artists, and staff with counseling, bystander intervention workshops, and codes of conduct.“You need clear policies in place from the get-go that everyone can point to, and there should also be a channel to report instances of gender-based harassment and violence that is unrelated to the person in charge,” Potter said. “If someone complains, you need to already have clear steps [about] what to do after that. That’s gonna be different for different arenas, but it means actually following through and taking it seriously.”Preventing sexual harassment and assault is also good for business: Loss of productivity, absenteeism, and an increased likelihood of turnover are among the economic costs cited in a 2007 meta-analysis of data from workplace sexual harassment studies. The report estimates that sexual harassment costs organizations $22,500 a year in lost productivity for every worker affected, not even taking into account any lawyer fees or settlements.In the long term, combating sexual abuse and harassment in the music industry requires preventing it from happening in the first place. This means making a healthy, respectful working environment a business priority through stronger leadership, increased diversity, and greater accountability. Above all, it requires fostering workplace cultures that support the people, and not just the dollars, that define the American music industry.Andrea Domanick is Noisey's West Coast editor. Follow her on Twitter. If you have witnessed or experienced misconduct in music and want to share your story, e-mail her confidentially at andrea.domanick@vice.com.“Grassroots activism is great, but if the people that actually hold power don’t care, or don’t take you seriously, or don’t listen to you, then the ways that sexism gets upheld don’t change." — Shawna Potter