For decades, the Red Hot Chili Peppers have occupied a peculiar position in popular culture, their music providing the soundtrack to everything from teenage rebellion to mainstream radio. Kiedis, meanwhile, has become one of alternative rock’s most recognisable frontmen, celebrated for his charisma, longevity and remarkable survival story. Yet behind that familiar image lies a series of incidents that raise uncomfortable questions about the behaviour the music industry has historically been willing to overlook. Some of the most troubling details are not buried in forgotten court documents or whispered accusations among industry insiders. They were openly acknowledged by Kiedis himself.
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In 1986, Kiedis began a relationship with Ione Skye, the daughter of Donovan, who was just 16 when they started dating, meaning she was a minor in the state of California. At the time, Kiedis was around 24, and the two stayed together for several years. Furthermore, Kiedis even included a nude picture of the couple in his autobiography.
Kiedis also documented another troubling encounter in Scar Tissue, one that would inspire the Red Hot Chili Peppers song ‘Catholic School Girls Rule’. According to his autobiography, he met a young fan backstage at a concert in Louisiana and began a sexual relationship with her. He subsequently discovered that she was just 14 years old.
“The next day we drove to Baton Rouge, and of course, she came with us,” Kiedis wrote. “After we got offstage, she came up to me and said, ‘I have something to tell you. My father’s the chief of police and the entire state of Louisiana is looking for me because I’ve gone missing. Oh, and besides that, I’m only 14’.”
Kiedis continued: “I wasn’t incredibly scared, because, in my somewhat deluded mind, I knew that if she told the chief of police she was in love with me, he wasn’t going to have me taken out to a field and shot, but I did want to get her the hell back home right away. So we had sex one more time.”
Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of this admission is the circumstances in which it became public knowledge. Kiedis was not confronted with an accusation during a police investigation, nor was he forced to disclose the relationship under questioning. He voluntarily included the account in Scar Tissue, his best-selling autobiography, published in 2004. By then, the Red Hot Chili Peppers were one of the world’s biggest bands, and their singer was reflecting on his past for an enormous audience. That he chose to recount having sex with a 14-year-old after learning her age, apparently without anticipating the seriousness with which such an admission might be received, says something troubling about the culture in which these stories were once treated as acceptable rock ‘n’ roll anecdotes.
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In a separate incident in April 1989, Kiedis was accused of sexual battery and indecent exposure following a Red Hot Chili Peppers performance at George Mason University in Virginia. According to contemporary reports, a female student alleged that the singer had exposed himself and made unwanted sexual contact with her backstage. Kiedis denied the allegation.
In April 1990, a Virginia jury found Kiedis guilty of sexual battery and indecent exposure, recommending fines of $1,000 for each misdemeanour. Unlike the incident described in his autobiography, this case resulted in criminal proceedings and a conviction. It was not simply another controversial story from the band’s notoriously chaotic early years, but an incident that had been examined in court and resulted in a guilty verdict.
I had no idea, jfc. Between him and Stephen Tyler, ruined my damn childhood. Gross bastards.
Never meet your heroes.
I don’t agree with the reasons but I see them:
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Including a nude picture of him and his underage girlfriend makes the viewer/reader complicit. Sadam Hussain did something similar with purging generals… Making those who stick with him (and get to live) kill those who disagreed with him. It’s a way to make them guilty too.
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He admitted it himself. This cuts off the media frenzy. He knows, you know, he admitted so. The media won’t put it on the front page (they could be accused of promoting his book after all, so even if they do it, book sales go up, Keidis wins either way).
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He has a known history of drug abuse. He says he was deluded at the time. He can thus cite that context of mental health issues. Double down on pleaing guilty, saying it was wrong.
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His age and looks. People don’t often say it, but they believe the victim “choosing” their partner in crime is better than say, a much older or uglier perpetrator forcing them into it.
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Rock star, wealth, celebrity, status privilege.
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Initially not knowing.
In actual fact he should have checked. Been more skeptical. Understood/known the groupie mindset better, and been on the look out for the vulnerable people around him. I don’t agree with the totality of these mitigations, but they are disagreeably comprehensible.
Kiedis knowingly raped her after he was informed she was 14 years old. It’s in his book. It’s in the excerpt above. Just to add a note to your last paragraph.
Yep, he definitely knowingly had sex with a minor. Which makes him a pedophile, and a rapist.
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It is worth considering that 1990 was nearing 40 years ago. For context, my grandfather was still alive and in some position of power in business. He was raised by people born in the 1800s.
Today, yes, this shit seems wild. But in the 1990s some old timey folks still held positions of power, both public and privately. A lot more people’s grandmas who married and had kids underage were still alive.
But while society has shifted, the politics around it hasn’t. The power class is unmoved. (See: Epstein.)
Anthony Kiedis, Steven Tyler and Mick Jagger all did this and no one batted an eye.
A fourteen or fifteen year old can not consent to being raped by anyone much less a rockstar.
Elvis, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, Marvin Gaye, Ted Nugent, Jimmy Page, Iggy Pop, Joel Madden, and Prince just off the top of my head.
Also, Fergie, T Swift, and Bieber all dated 17 year olds.
At least Jerry Lee Lewis put a ring on his cousin’s finger and made her an honest girl.
David Bowie is the one that gets me. I liked his music. I still like his music. But he had sex with a 13 year old child.
Rehtorically speaking - how do we deal with that? He’s now dead, she said later in life she didn’t regret it. There’s no impetus on society to make a legal exception for such outcomes, as that would risk removing the stigma on such behaviours, or worse encouraging them (what we do instead is leave it up to the victim to press charges or not).
I do think it’s important to say: It’s not on any one person to answer these questions. So much of this stuff is about struggling with gray areas. But it is on everyone to think about these topics with a view to doing better.
Perhaps there’s some precepts of humanism, egalitarianism, and empathy to be cited - but ultimately what can be said? That humans are a kind of animal that sees morality and ethics, but does not always have the sense of goodwill to choose, ethics, empathy, and morality.
Maybe we need better stories and a better culture to enable us. No one can stop us, and no one can save us but ourselves. Each other. Humanity. Our collective humanity.
I always judge people who still listen to RHCP. Being able to “separate the art from the artist” when it comes to something this heinous is a massive red flag.
Crazy how wealth, power and fame will protect you. He obviously feels so secure in his position and ultimately is correct that he is insulated from consequence. Don’t support artists with this kind of conduct, it just contributes to the issue. Buying someone’s album is almost like voting for them, you increase the size of their platform.
Some of it may be this, but honestly, a lot of it is that people don’t believe women, and they eapecially don’t believe young girls. It’s far worse when you add fame to this, but even without that, this likely would have gone nowhere.
Wealth, power or fame, I would say. And yes, our societies are toxic in this way at the moment.
It was overlooked because “if you’re a star, they let you do it”, which rightfully pissed everyone off, was simply the truth. Kedis was a star and everyone let him do it.
Personally, as someone who remembers this time, I knew it was illegal, but there are many things that are “illegal” wink wink, and if you don’t play along you will get got. Because they are only illegal as a show.
As an anecdote, in the 90s there was a trove of publicly accessable CSAM stored legally at every university in America, for the express purposes of sexual gratification. This went on for at least twenty years that I know of, but probably more. I’m not being hyperbolic. The worst imagery you can imagine. This is what finally sent me over the edge into “my god people, how much do we take?” territory.
Because I can’t express this enough, everyone overtly seemed to be very against pedophilia. Even though in my own experience as a minor, and the experience of others, it was common and completely acceptable as long as the perpetrator didn’t talk about it openly. Stars ofc being the exception.
Well, I barely escaped trying to ring the alarm bell on that university CSAM. Everyone, and I’m telling you literally everyone, not just officials responsible for the storage of it, or those responsible for the prosecution of criminals, jumped on me for pointing it out. I had to stop, at risk of grave harm. I’m telling you, no one was an ally.
It was terrifying. To this day I personally believe that there is like 10% of us who don’t find children sexually attractive. The rest of the population is lying. Though I think most of those can totally help themselves and see it as a “choice” that they don’t indulge.
Your last point is something I’ve always wondered also. 4 out of 5 of my siblings were molested by family members, friends, or even just neighbors. Nearly a third of the people I’ve met in my life had something terrible happen to them while they were kids.
I’ve mentioned in other posts that I’ve done a lot of manual labor before getting into IT permanently. I worked with a lot of very vocal republicans. They would all say that all pedophiles need to die, then gawk and comment on the bodies of the high school or middle school girls jogging by. I’ve thought for a long time that a much larger portion of the population is attracted to children and they all just act completely disgusted by it. Look at all the Republican politicians that get caught with child porn.
Yeah, it was then that I realized that it’s not that people don’t believe victims, it’s that they don’t care and don’t want to get popped for it themselves if they ever do it. It was also then that I understood why no one did anything to known pedos except warn their own kids to stay away from them.
This current climate, or at least the one from ten years ago, was an anomaly. The backlash for it has been so big that America elected a very open and well known child trafficker to the presidency, to take care of it.
It’s the fame game.
Not purely fame, as it doesn’t always apply to all types of fame. But musicians and artists get a pass because it’s assumed they’re a little skeevy. It’s a prejudice that exists even among creative sorts.
When you already assume someone is likely to be sexually extreme to some degree, finding out it’s a fact is going to cause a lot of people to just shrug and move on.
Rock musicians in specific get a lot of passes because of it. Everyone “knows” on a subconscious level at least that rock stars aren’t purely pushing through those struggle years in the hope of success the artistic reasons. They want to get laid, and get rich. Enough of them have said it out loud that it might as well be assumed purely on that basis, without any other observations.
And, truth be told, a recent event is harder to shrug off. Since a lot of this stuff with the older musicians happened longer ago than significant parts of the population have been alive, it’s harder to care. Twenty years later, it is harder to give a damn. Let the victim sue, hope they weren’t too horribly traumatized, and there’s really nothing else to do about it. Even ignoring statute of limitations, a crying 16 year old that’s been diddled is getting a more emotional response than a 30 year old that isn’t in visible distress. Even a 14 year old isn’t going to get a deeply emotional response when she’s faceless and nameless, just a character on a page.
Since what the public sees is reports about things, rather than the actual consequences, it makes empathy way, way harder even for people dripping with it. Ione Skye? She’s distant, an actress, not a person you can talk to in line at the grocery store. Making the connection between the name and public self with the teenager that was in that situation, that’s not as easy to do as we all might prefer. I’m generally good at empathy, but I can’t even remember her face, so connecting with that kid that she used to be is hard. It’s a purely intellectual exercise.
So how is someone that doesn’t have that human connection supposed to do more than shrug and hope it gets sorted by someone else? It doesn’t help that everyone screams pedo at the top of their lungs these days. I’m fucking exhausted with it, and I actually care about child abuse, including teenagers.
I mean, we’re coming off of decades of Republicans and other right wing nutters pointing at anyone they don’t like and saying groomer. Adrenochrome! Groomer! Pizza party!
The general populace has had their give a shitter crushed into dust.
Kiedis? He’s at the low end of the shitty scale, and that means a shit ton of people are just not going to care at all. There’s bigger fish to fry. And there really are. Is what he did okay? hell no, and if I met him I’d call him a douche to his face, and gladly put a foot up his ass if he wanted to get froggy. But I’m sure not going to spend my limited spoons on something that happened twenty plus years ago. And I think that’s where a lot of the shrugs come from even from people that would otherwise care.
It’s about keeping the conversation going. It’s about awareness. It’s about making sure the next time this happens, people don’t shrug it off.
It’s outrageous. It was outrageous then and it’s outrageous now.
We’re collectively calling out pedophiles more often. That doesn’t mean there are more pedophiles than there used to be. There’s a lower tolerance for it and that’s a good thing.
Victims are speaking out more. How terrible that your reaction is that of tired acceptance of pedophiles.
Edit: this reminds me of the man commenting yesterday about how he raped a 16 year old when he was 24 years old. He is still of the mindset that he didn’t rape anyone. That having sex with a child was perfectly ok then and is ok now.
These topics are for people like him. And for the people in that man’s life that have been touched by his lack of respect around children and consent.
Don’t mistake exhaustion for acceptance. It’s just that once enough bull shit flies, the occasional bit of human sewage slapping you in the face is less disturbing. Sustaining outrage is… not sustainable. There’s so much fucked up shit that trying to keep any kind of energy for any of it is hard. Like, in the face of dealing with gestures to the world, one more bad thing just isn’t enough to get mad about. The victims have the ability to lawyer up, people that can actually do something other than just be sad and angry. It’s impossible to be emotional at, but it doesn’t mean it’s acceptable.
If the was found guilty in court for it, was it really over looked?
I get that it’s about keeping the conversation going, but this was last century and he paid for it. (Not defending the dude, I’m just saying it’s old news that was resolved)
Oh you didn’t read the full article.
The time in 1990 when he was found guilty of sexual battery and indecent exposure wasn’t connected to the 14 year old he raped.
It’s a pattern of behavior.
Also yes, this type of thing is very overlooked. You should see the amount of defense these guys get even here on Lemmy. It’s disgusting how many people excuse this behavior to this day. The conversation isn’t done, it’s only just begun.
Edit: I added more context to the excerpt in the post.
I did read it, and understood that as the same situation. I guess I misread it
What a weird article. It could be about anyone in the music industry from the 80s. Focusing on Kiedis just seems like - a choice. Because he already wrote about it?
‘It could be about anyone in the music industry from the 80s’
Yeah so about that
The argument ‘but they all raped children’ isn’t doing what you think it’s doing. Think people won’t go scorched earth on all of these motherfuckers? ‘Everyone did it’ and everyone shut up about it or looked the other way because ‘everyone was doing it’ and because they knew it was wrong.
It’s rape now and it was rape then.
Who the hell are you, Jerry Seinfeld?
Did you have a point in there?
They’re calling out your attempt to downplay child rape.
Yuuuuuuuup
‘Everyone was doing it’
Ok so I guess Trump’s Epstein escapades aren’t that bad either. Since everyone is doing it. We’ll be sure to pass it along to the victims.
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Well then they’re a fucking moron. Because I wasn’t doing that.
Unsurprising though. Anyway, back to the incoherent screeching.
Why point out that everyone was raping children? What was the goal in saying that?
It’s to normalize it. It’s to shut us up. You are trying to get people to stop talking about how inappropriate it is to rape a 14 year old child.
Why?
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You didn’t answer the question.
What’s your goal in telling us that we shouldn’t care about Kiedis because everyone was raping children back then?
Why is it weird?
Many of them wrote about these experiences.
And an article on “many of them” would not be weird. Exactly.
How does that make it weird to focus on Kiedis’ crimes?
Because a) they come from him, himself, there’s no news here. b) what we just said about everyone else. And c) its a long article for no news and just one guy.
There’s no requirement to be a new story for an opinion peice or social analysis. It just has to be a relevant/worthwhile topic for society still (which it is). Likewise there’s no restriction or statute of limitations on discussing these things.
So maybe stop trying to manufacture or simulate that there is. The claim that “things written today can only be about new events” or “Wrong doings should only be analysed up upto a point” are arbitrary decisions/assumptions.
…and they don’t serve to open up consideration or thoughtful progress.
So why raise such arbitrary or subjective restrictions?
Is it because the discussion makes you feel a certain way? Or is it because you think your time is important and don’t want to have to skip to the next post? Why fuss that these things can be discussed as necessary to process them?
You might see value in a more over-arching meta/pattern analysis… But that doesn’t mean there’s not another kind of value, or answers to be found in granular investigations of a specific case/instance.
Both modes are valid.
they come from him, himself, there’s no news here.
Not everyone knows this about Kiedis. Red Hot Chili Peppers is still played on the radio often.
Why do you care if we talk about how rapists are given a pass in our society?
Oh I see, so this is a public service announcement on behalf of yourself and the author to ensure we Expel Anthony Kiedis from civilization as the true child crime Hitler of all time.
Yeah, no that makes . . . that makes sense.
I “care” only that it’s a hyper-focused attack on one guy. It’s weird. Gene Simmons? Anyone? Fucking Gary Glitter? No? Just Anthony Kiedis. Okay.
Talking about Kiedis isn’t mutually exclusive with caring about rape in general.
Why are you defending Kiedis when he has admitted that he raped a 14 year old?
What’s wrong with talking about how Kiedis is a child rapist?
Playing devils advocate; It could be seen as an attempt to character assasinate a specific person, by conspicuously leaving out the broader context that this behavior was commonplace at the time. Someone who’s goal is to bring this behavior to light would surely talk about the phenomenon as a whole, and not just one dude in the crowd, right? Although, personally I think in our engagement based attention economy, shocking people with a headline like this and then turning around and talking about the whole thing is a little scummy, but ultimately an effective strategy. Being up front about the issue would get less interest, and fewer eyes on the problem.
Needed to note that just because it was commonplace at the time (it still is commonplace by the way), doesn’t make Kiedis raping a 14 year old any more acceptable. It was deplorable behavior then and it’s deplorable now. Just because more people openly talk about the trauma of rape now doesn’t mean there wasn’t countless untold traumas playing out in those victim’s lives then.
The devil doesn’t need an advocate on child rape.
The article quite literally talks about the behavior as a whole.
How is it scummy to get people’s attention on it if you think they would have ignored it otherwise?
Do you believe this is an issue that should be ignored?
