W.Axl Rose - Chapter Nine - You Are All
Little People (continued)
Stephanie, however, had her own ideas
about to deal with Axl, and by 1994 she had launched a legal
action against him, claiming compensation for the domestic
violence issues she alleged she had been a victim of. Axl was
horrified at this latest turn of events. In his heart, he had
never quite given up hope of having some form of reconciliation
with Stephanie. This lawsuit proved that to be a forlorn hope.
To add to the pressure he was now under, when Erin Everly found
herself subpoenaed to give evidence in Stephanie's lawsuit, she
decided to file one of her own, accusing her former husband of
assault and sexual battery.
Suddenly, it was all starting to get very
messy for the singer. It was one thing to be humiliated by a
former band-mate, as he felt he had been by Steven and, to a
lesser extent, Izzy. But to have the grimmest details of his
personal life discussed openly in court was simply too much for
him. Especially when those details included such choice items
as Erin's former flatmate, Meegan Hodges-Knight, testifying
under oath about the time she woke up in the night to overhear
Erin begging Axl, “Please stop. Don't hurt me, don't hurt
me,” as Axl screamed abuse at her. “And then all of
a sudden he'd come out and he'd, like, break all of her really
precious antiques, and she would be, 'Please don't break them,
please', and trying to get them back from him. And he'd push
her and he'd break everything that he could get his hands on. I
remember sleeping and waking up to crystal flying over my head,
shattering on the floor.”
Hodges-Knight, who had been dating Slash
at the time, recalled “asking Slash to do something, or I
was going to do something. I said, 'I have to do something' or
something like that. And [Slash] said, 'No, you're going to
make it worse'.” She also recalled in her sworn
deposition how she'd witnessed Axl kicking Everly and dragging
her around by the hair one night while she was wearing a
see-through tank top and panties. He then threw a television
set at her, she said, which had luckily missed, and then spat
on her. “That pig,” Meegan scowled. “He spit
on her.”
In her own sworn deposition, Erin claimed
Axl sexually assaulted her, describing in shocking detail one
occasion when he first ordered her to take off a swimsuit she
was wearing, tied her hands to her ankles from behind, put
masking tape over her mouth and a bandanna over her eyes, then
led her, naked, into a closet, where he left her bound and
gagged for hours. She said that at one point she could hear Axl
talking in the next room to a mutual friend of hers, oblivious
to her plight.
When Axl finally allowed Erin to leave the
closet, she said, he picked her up and placed her face down on
a convertible bed. He then, “forced himself on me anally
really hard. Really hard.”
“Were you screaming?” she was
asked.
“Yes.”
“How long did that last?”
“I don't remember.”
“What happened when it was
over?”
“He took it out and stuck it in my
mouth.”
Erin also testified that Axl believed she
and Seymour had been sisters in a past life and were now
“try¬ing to kill him.” Axl had also told her
“that in a past life we were Indians and that I killed
our children, and that's why he was so mean to me in this
life.” Even more ludicrous, Erin claimed that Axl told
her “he was possessed” by the spirit of “John
Bonham”, the notoriously fiery Led Zeppelin drummer who
had died in his sleep in 1980 after drinking himself
unconscious. She also claimed Axl had once removed all the
doors in her apartment in order to keep an eye on her wherever
she went.
It also emerged that at one point while
they were married, Axl had been “ripped off” when
he tried to perform some form of exorcism, in order to cleanse
the marriage of its bad energies. “Mainly it involved
getting some kind of herbal wrap,” a clearly embarrassed
Axl testified. Some “work on my skin” for which he
said he was charged $72,000. “I ended up getting ripped
off for a lot of money in the long run.”
This kind of exposure was way beyond
anything Axl had bargained for, and even though he denied many
of the allegations he immediately instructed his lawyers to
settle the case out of court, which they did: an action which
saw the former Mrs Rose walking away with an undisclosed sum
believed to be for over a million dollars. Axl also ordered his
minions to hurriedly gather up the few existing copies of a
tape containing the unreleased version of the 'It's So Easy'
video from five years before, which featured Erin tied-up in
bondage gear, with a red ball pushed into her mouth, while Axl
screams at her: “See me hit you! You fall
down!”
Stephanie's case dragged on considerably
longer - with Axl applying for a restraining order at one point
after alleging she had taken cocaine in his house in the
presence of her two-year-old son, Dylan. But, once again, with
Axl unwilling to have Stephanie publicly sift through the sorry
details of the worst aspects of his relationship with her -
according to one close friend Axl also be¬lieved he and
Stephanie had been together in more than 15 past lives - he
eventually settled before the case could come to court,
agreeing to pay out a reported $400,000. Again, Axl would later
deny much of what his former lover alleged, even the fact that
he'd paid her to drop the case. Stephanie's lawyer, Michael
Plonsker, would neither confirm nor deny the sum involved,
except to say that the suit was eventually resolved
“amicably.”
Neither Erin nor Stephanie ever pressed
for criminal charges. The damage was done, however, and the
story of their joint actions against Axl hit the front page of
People magazine in 1995. Coming only a month after the magazine
had led with the story of OJ Simpson's arrest and charge for
the alleged murder of his estranged wife Nicole Simpson, most
people took a decidedly dim view of this new domestic abuse
story. Ironically, Erin herself still seemed to retain some
sympathy for her beleaguered former spouse, admitting: “I
felt sorry for him” and “I thought I could make it
all better.” Clearly, though, she could not. As for
Stephanie, she married her new lover Peter Brant in Paris just
a few months later, causing Axl to suffer yet more paroxysms of
despair. Adding salt to the wound, Stephanie gave birth to the
first of two sons by Brant shortly after, and they remain
happily married to this day.
It was the beginning of Axl's withdrawal
from the world. According to Stephanie's nanny, Beta Lebeis,
who went to work for Axl after the couple split, he had
“adored her.” Despite the terrible arguments and
fights, when Stephanie moved to New York to be with Brant, Axl
was utterly devastated. “When the band was over, he
thought he could have a family, he would be married and would
have children. This would be the second part of his life. He
would have enough money and would dedicate his time to his
family. He dreamed of a family, children, everything he never
had.”
Losing Stephanie had destroyed that dream.
“Axl is a person who wants to do everything right,”
observed Beta. He was “that kind of passionate man a lot
of women would like to have in their lives. He was like a
charmed prince. He did, for Stephanie, all kind of things you
could find in a romantic book. When they were almost breaking
up, he went to her house, riding a horse and carrying flowers.
The things he did for her could only be read in books of
ancient history. What he did doesn't exist in real life
anymore! I think a lot of women would have loved to be in her
place. I would never leave a man like that. But Stephanie is
very pretty and sexy; she can have any man she wants. She uses
men as toys.”
Beta added: “Have you ever seen a
child with a new toy? They play with it and later they don't
want to play anymore. I always told her she could hurt Axl more
than she thought. Other men who fell in love with her would
never suffer like Axl did. He wanted to do everything right,
and he really thought everything was going right. He took this
relationship very seriously. She almost killed him.”
Certainly, the messy end of his
relationship with Stephanie Seymour appeared to bring a
significant chapter of Axl's life to an abrupt close. On
January 20, 1994, he had been one of the guests at Elton John's
induction into the Rock 'N' Roll Hall Of Fame in New York.
Later that night, he sang 'Come Together' with Bruce
Springsteen. It was the last time he would perform in public
for six years.
Meanwhile, with sales of The Spaghetti
Incident? tailing off dramatically - another platinum-selling
chart hit in the US, it was, nevertheless, considered a flop by
comparison to the gigantic sales enjoyed by all its
predecessors - Slash spent the early weeks and months of 1994
writing, in anticipation of “the real next album,”
drawing from a Geffen advance thought to be around $10 million
- superstar money.
However, when he presented his new song
ideas to Axl, the singer was decidedly unimpressed. With Axl
now in sole control of the Guns N' Ros¬es name, there
wasn't much Slash or any of the others could do to force the
issue so Slash took them back and began working on what
eventually became, in all but name, his first solo album, It's
Five O'clock Somewhere, credited to Slash's Snakepit - a band
featuring Matt Sorum and (the now discredited, in Axl's eyes at
least) Gilby Clarke, along with vocalist Eric Dover (formerly
of Jellyfish) and Alice In Chains bassist Mike Inez - which was
eventually released in February 1995. But not before Axl had
had his say first. “He threatened to sue over the first
Snakepit record, you know,” Slash says now, the pain and
astonishment still there in his voice. “He didn't want
the songs but it was like he didn't want me to have them
either. Like he owned me.”
Exactly three years before, Slash had told
Rolling Stone, “We really would all feel sorta lost and
lonely if it fell apart and we had to go out and do solo
records, because it wouldn't be Guns. None of us could
reproduce that. Axl's got so much charisma - he's one of the
best singers around. It's his personality. He can go out and do
something. What freaks me out is if the band falls apart, I'll
never be able to shake the fact that I'm the ex-Guns N' Roses
guitar player. And that's almost like selling your
soul.”
Now, though, both he and Duff - whose solo
album, Believe in Me, featuring cameos from Slash, Gilby, Matt,
Dizzy and Sebastian Bach, had been released in October 1993 -
were finding themselves having to do just that. The whole band
was suddenly beginning to fragment into side-projects. Even
Gilby was now working on a solo album. Gilby, in fact, would
become the next to leave when Axl summarily ordered his firing
without explanation - or consultation with Slash or Duff - in
March 1994. In fact, Axl had failed even to tell Gilby. When
his regular stipend suddenly failed to appear in his bank
account, he “pretty much took that as a hint,” he
says. When the payments suddenly resumed, however, he assumed
he had been rehired. When they then stopped again - then
started and stopped for a third time, all within a period of
weeks - he consulted his lawyer, Jeffrey Light. continue reading
