Others recall a spray-painted message above his bed reading “AIDS.” The carpets, furniture, and decorations were black, as were the curtains he used to blot the light out of every window nearly 24 hours a day. “There were vaginas everywhere,” says one person who visited the place. The rest of Warner’s apartment was decorated with blood, swastikas, and clipped photos from porno mags. I learned to not fight it, because that was giving him what he wanted. Even if I was screaming, no one would hear me.” As she tells it, “First you fight, and he enjoys the struggle. “At first, he made it sound cool,” Smithline says. “If anyone’s bad, I can lock them in it, and it’s soundproof,” Warner boasted to a magazine in 2012.Īshley Morgan Smithline, who is suing him for sexual assault and unlawful imprisonment, among other charges, tells Rolling Stone that Warner repeatedly forced her to stay in the space - which was about the size of a department-store dressing room - for hours at a time when they were dating. (Another former assistant, Ryan Brown, who worked with Warner for eight years, denies ever seeing any women confined in the so-called Bad Girls’ Room, but says, “It was common knowledge that’s what everybody had called it.”) In interviews, it was an open secret. “He always had a joking, bragging tone,” she remembers. He called it the “Bad Girls’ Room.”Īshley Walters, a former assistant suing Warner for sexual assault and other charges, says he enjoyed telling people about the chamber. They say Warner frequently banished his girlfriends there, keeping them inside for hours on end to punish them for the tiniest perceived transgressions. Manson, whose real name is Brian Warner, soon converted the booth into what several people who dated and worked with him now describe as a solitary-confinement cell used to psychologically torture women.
The only adornment was some foam for soundproofing on the walls. A decade before Marilyn Manson rented the apartment above a West Hollywood liquor store circa 2010, a former tenant - a label and recording studio specializing in electronic music - had built the cramped glass enclosure in the corner of a room with the goal of making uptempo, life-affirming house music.