Singer Alice Glass Says Her Crystal Castles Bandmate Repeatedly Raped and Assaulted Her

In the early 2000s, Alice Glass, then known as Margaret Osborn, was just two credits away from finishing up high school when she decided to drop out to make music with Ethan Kath—a pursuit that, in a few years, would become the electronic group Crystal Castles, whose first two albums promptly landed on NME’s list of top 100 albums of the decade and the Billboard 200 chart.

All that, until now, has been quite the group’s backstory. But on Tuesday, Glass provided a slew of horrifying details to go along with her version of how Crystal Castles, which she left in 2014, actually got started. In a post on her website, which she tweeted with the hashtag #MeToo, Glass explains that she first met Kath (real name is Claudio Palmieri) when she was in the 10th grade, an encounter she remembers this way: “The first time he took advantage of me was when I was around 15. He was 10 years older than me. I came to in the back of his car extremely intoxicated (from drinks he had given me that night).”

There’s more: Kath was allegedly “stalking” Glass and “driving past [her] high school” looking for her, intoxicating her while they had sex that “wasn’t always consensual,” and literally laughing off Glass’s allegations that their recording engineer sexually harassed her when they recorded their first EP. When the pair was then invited to tour the U.K., the apparently much older Kath convinced Glass to drop out of high school.

All that was just the beginning. “As we started to gain attention, he began abusively and systematically targeting my insecurities and controlling my behavior: my eating habits, who I could talk to, where I could go, what I could say in public, what I was allowed to wear,” Glass continued. “He kept me from doing interviews or photoshoots unless he was in control of the situation.” At a certain point, she said, Kath became “physically abusive”: “He held me over a staircase and threatened to throw me down it. He picked me up over his shoulders and threw me onto concrete. He took pictures of my bruises and posted them online.”

Glass said she tried to leave, but Kath swore the abuse would never happen again—a refrain commonly employed by abusers that often allows them to continue on as usual (as was notably depicted on the HBO show Big Little Lies). Plus, “as is sometimes the case in abusive relationships,” Glass pointed out, “[Kath’s] cruelty was often followed by kindness.” And being in the band, at the time, meant “everything” to her.

Still, Glass said, Kath eventually “controlled everything I did”; she wasn’t allowed to have her own phone or credit card or choose who her friends were, and Kath read through her emails and regulated both her social media usage and “everything” she ate. “He broke glass shower doors to frighten me, he locked me into rooms. He told me that my feminism made me a target for rapists and only he could protect me. He forced me to have sex with him or, he said, I wouldn’t be allowed to be in the band anymore,” she continued.

And, apparently, he repeatedly belittled her contributions to the band, which he’d tell her she “was ruining,” despite the fact that anyone who’s seen Crystal Castles onstage—with Glass giving her all and Kath hanging back behind a soundboard, often with his hood pulled up—can attest that Glass was in fact the one fronting it, a dynamic that was even seen during the group’s cameo on the TV series Skins.

Glass did eventually escape from Kath, in 2014, and even got some justice last year, when Tumblr pulled the group from its SXSW showcase celebrating feminism. Glass had already left by then, and would also release her first track as a solo artist, revealing that it was inspired by an abusive relationship that started in her teens (all sales proceeds went to RAINN). Soon after, she posted a follow-up on Facebook to clear up that her new career had “NOTHING” to do with Crystal Castles: “I left that band not because I wanted to but because I needed to.”

It’s telling, though, that it’s only now that the connection has explicitly been made—and not through a tweet or a settlement kept under wraps, but through a bold, lengthy, accusatory statement from Glass herself, which offers no apologies or illusions that simply leaving the band has now protected her. In fact, she doesn’t even bother to end her statement on an optimistic note; instead, it concludes simply, “It has taken me years to recover from enduring almost a decade of abuse, manipulation and psychological control. I am still recovering.”

The dozens of women who have come forward this month to finally accuse the former Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein of decades of abuse—and the hundreds of thousands of non-movie industry women who’ve come forward to share that they have experiences with their own Kaths or Weinsteins, as part of the #MeToo campaign—are, too. Each day brings more allegations, to the point that the surprise is finally beginning to wear off—not that women, who’ve long had to protect themselves from abuse so pervasive it stretches across not just class levels but also generations and industries, should be taken aback by any of this.

After all, the scenario that Glass describes of how she first got to be so involved with Kath is all too familiar. He allegedly “tracked [her] down” and “showed up places [she] was hanging out” at a time in her life when she was “very young and naive and in a compromised position.” She perceived Kath as a “local rock star” because she’d seen his band on TV—an unmistakable version of the predatory behavior that an imbalance of power enables, and that men like Weinstein have repeatedly taken advantage of.

Glass also added that “a lot of my friends from the punk scene had also been taken advantage of by much older men, so to me, it was a situation that had been normalized.” It’s important to note that she’s hardly alone in that line of thinking: as Laura Dern, who, like her actress mother Diane Ladd, was sexually assaulted before she even turned 18, put it, when she was growing up, sexual harassment simply seemed like “a prerequisite” for aspiring young women.

Related: Lindsay Lohan Has a Point: Why Didn’t More People Care When Her Ex-Fiancé Was Abusing Her?

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