“I personally didn’t feel he was guilty of the things he was being charged with,” Billy Corgan says of his old friend Marilyn Manson, who was accused of sexual abuse, domestic violence and more by Evan Rachel Wood and other women. “Ultimately the fact (is) that the D.A. didn’t pursue,” the Smashing Pumpkins leader added.
“So, basically, the person that I knew, and the way it all kind of went down, even though it was an elongated process, was commensurate with the person that I knew,” Corgan went on to say on a just released episode of the New York Times podcast Popcast. “I don’t want the world to tell me who my friends are and who I should associate with.”
It is a fact that back in January 2025, newly sworn in L.A. District Attorney Nathan Hochman closed the four-year long probe his office and the Sheriff’s department had been conducting into Manson. “We have determined that allegations of domestic violence fall outside of the statute of limitations, and we cannot prove charges of sexual assault beyond a reasonable doubt,” Hochman said of the much accused shock rocker born Brian Warner.
At the time, current The Shards star Wood, who had been engaged to Manson during their tumultuous 2007 – 2010 relationship, stated that she and her lawyer were told by “Deputy District Attorneys and the Sheriff deputies who investigated the case that there was compelling evidence to support our claims, but that the statute of limitations prevents many of those crimes from being prosecuted.” Writing online, Wood, who had testified before California’s state Senate on sexual and domestic violence and was a booster of the non-retroactive statute of limitations extending 2024 Phoenix Act, tersely noted “violent crimes should not have an expiration date.”
In his Popcast appearance, Corgan didn’t address the specifics of why the D.A. dropped the case and never mentioned Wood, Game of Thrones actress Esmé Bianco ( who settled her sexual assault and battery claims with the ‘Beautiful People’ singer in 2023), or other Manson accusers by name. He did however pull back the Gen X rockstar curtain a bit in offering his POV.
“The other thing that people should know, and it may gets lost in the gloss here, is Manson’s wife, Lindsay, is a twin, and her twin is Ashley, and Ashley is married to James Iha of the Pumpkins,” the Grammy winning guitarist explained to Popcast hosts Jon Caramanica and Joe Coscarelli. “So, Manson’s basically a part of our family. Anybody in that situation struggles with the accusations, the seriousness of the accusations.”
“I also knew the inside baseball of the case. I knew certain people who were involved, and so you make those evaluations.”
Despite the Popcast sit-down proving wide-ranging on a number of professional and personal subjects, Corgan, who had Manson as a guest at his birthday party earlier this year, did not elaborate on the aforementioned “inside baseball” nor who the other individuals involved were besides obviously Manson himself. Shifting his perspective somewhat, Corgan went on to say of Manson and the very high profile situation: “If he’s guilty or anybody in that situation is guilty, they should go to jail. I’m not saying I have any moral supremacy here. I’m saying it’s a case by case basis. This kind of witch mob thing bothers me.”
In the aftermath of allegations from Wood and then others, Manson was dumped by CAA as a client and lost acting roles in American Gods and Creepshow. From 2020 to 2025 and beyond, Manson has decried the claims from various women as “horrible distortions of reality. Even though he was ordered in late 2024 to pay Wood nearly $327,000 in legal fees from suing her for defamation in 2022, the now 57-year old Manson has insisted that his past relationships were “entirely consensual with like-minded partners.”
As he has for many years, accusations and otherwise, Manson is out playing gigs to a loyal fanbase. He will be playing L.A.’s Wiltern on Halloween and on November 1, with a show at London’s Wembley Stadium set for May next year. This weekend finds Manson on-stage at Fort Worth’s Texas Motor Speedway on October 24.