It’s never a good time when you’re being accused of rape and sexual assault, and that’s the situation which Guns N’ Roses lead singer Axl Rose finds himself in. There are some things working in his favor in defending himself, and some things working against him in allegations from former model and actress Sheila Kennedy, who claims that Rose sexually assaulted and raped her in a hotel room in 1989.
Kennedy claims not to have known who Rose was when she first saw him at a club that night, which would make her the only person in the world unfamiliar with him in 1989. According to her account, later that night Rose tied her up with pantyhose and anally penetrated her, leaving her bleeding and crying, during a group sex situation in a hotel room in New York City. Now it’s a matter of he said she said, but how can one get a fair hearing on an incident from decades ago? (SEE ALSO: November Rain: Song Interpretation)
Working against Rose is his public reputation and the image that he projected as part of Guns N Roses, with lyrics that were not exactly respectful of women and suggested at times sexual conquest or aggressiveness. Take “It’s So Easy” from their debut album Appetite for Destruction, for example:
"Turn around bitch I got a use for you
Besides you ain't got nothing better to do
And I'm bored." To be clear, that doesn’t make Axl guilty of anything, and I’m not sure he even wrote those particular lyrics. But it does play into an image which, though his music is cherished, is no longer politically correct, to say the least.
Also working against Rose is that his ex-wive Erin Everly and his ex-fiance Stephanie Seymour both claimed physical and emotional abuse. Seymour said that Rose at one point pushed a piano out of the window, which is plausible given the wild-man, hot-tempered image which Rose quite deliberately projected to the media. But again, that does not imply he’s guilty of rape.
Working in Rose’s favor is that this allegedly happened in 1989, thirty-four years ago, which is a little suspicious on the face of it. Also, Kennedy wrote a memoir in which she seemed to cherish the memory of her sexual encounter with Rose. If I had to guess, they probably did hook up, Rose probably doesn’t remember it, and it was consensual but maybe a little rough.
Here’s the relevant passage from Kennedy’s memoir published in People Magazine, which to my mind is pretty devastating to her Me-Too claims:
“Weirdly enough, I was okay with this. I had wanted to be with him the minute I’d first laid eyes on him, and now I was getting him. Once he was done he untied me and we f---ed around some more,” she writes. “I remember going down on him… And when we were exhausted he got up next to me and spooned me, and started playing with my hair.”Is it typical of rape that the pair would end up spooning afterwards and the rapist would lovingly play with his victim’s hair?
Another red flag is that Kennedy seems to be self-consciously adopting the Me-too language, which indicates that she’s more concerned with fitting into the feminist zeitgeist rather than matter-of-factly recounting what happened. She said that Rose used his celebrity status to “manipulate” and “control” her, which implies that she did not have agency as an adult.
Kennedy has stated elsewhere that she never even said “no” during this alleged sexual encounter. I’m aware that we’re in a universe in which not saying “no” still does not imply consent, but this is really a stretch, I’m sorry.
Finally, Rose in recent years has been a big booster of the Democrat party and the left, from whence this outlandish me-too movement originates. Blue state New York made a law which gave purported sexual assault victims a year to file charges *regardless* of the statute of limitations, which is how Rose got into this mess. Rose also suffers from Trump derangement syndrome, which is ironic since Trump himself had similar sexual assault charges leveled against him well after their expiration date. Bad karma?
Disclaimer: Obviously I wasn’t in the room, it could be that events happened exactly as Kennedy described them. However, one can express some skepticism.
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