In mild of intercourse trafficking allegations in opposition to Sean “Diddy” Combs, John Legend‘s longtime supervisor Ty Stiklorius has written an op-ed for The New York Instances that extensively particulars the music business’s “pervasive predatory tradition” that “actively fostered sexual misconduct and exploited the lives and our bodies of these hoping to make it within the enterprise.”
The piece, by Emmy Award-winning producer Stiklorius, founding father of Buddies at Work, a administration firm that works with, amongst others, Legend, is entitled “The Music Business Is Poisonous. After P. Diddy, We Can Clear It Up.”
Stiklorius begins by describing a yacht get together in St. Barts that she attended 27 years in the past, hosted by Combs, the place she says she was capable of persuade an affiliate of the rapper to unlock a bed room door and escape. (The Hollywood Reporter has contacted Diddy’s reps for remark). On the time, she says didn’t understand precisely what she had clawed her approach out of. “It was an indicator,” Stiklorius stated. “Energy has been concentrated within the arms of kingmakers: rich, entitled, almost all the time male gatekeepers who management almost each door that results in success and who can, with out consequence, use their energy to abuse younger ladies and younger males.”
Stiklorius reveals that girls “haven’t been secure in recording studios, on tour buses, in inexperienced rooms or in workplace” within the music enterprise. And it isn’t a bug of the business, she says. “It’s a serious characteristic.”
“After P. Diddy’s arrest, some observers puzzled whether or not the business would lastly face a ‘#MeToo’ reckoning,” Stiklorius writes. “However decreasing the scourge of sexual coercion, harassment and violence to some infamous people — whether or not Harvey Weinstein or R. Kelly — suggests they’re outliers and obscures the extra damning, cussed, systemic rot that had contaminated the music enterprise.”
Sean “Diddy” Combs is confronted with in depth intercourse trafficking allegations.
Frazer Harrison/Getty Pictures
She argues that there’s hope and these gatekeepers have much less energy than they used to: “They could nonetheless dangle the keys to success in entrance of younger artists, however the locks are altering.”
Stiklorius references the Gen-Z star Chappell Roan, who was compelled to battle along with her label to launch smash hit “Pink Pony Membership.” They dropped her when advertising and marketing plans didn’t result in hits, however Roan moved again to her hometown and launched music independently, ultimately constructing a social media fanbase that she used to leverage new distribution and monetary backing. “Within the course of, she demonstrated a brand new fact: The times of the gatekeepers are numbered,” Stiklorius says.
She continues: “My early experiences with predators, and those who enabled them, almost led me to surrender on the music enterprise. Just a few years after the boat incident, whereas pursuing my M.B.A. on the College of Pennsylvania’s Wharton College, I attended a dinner the place a senior music govt slipped his key card to me below the desk, an unsubtle invitation to his lodge room. I declined. … I solely endured within the business as a result of, in 2005, an previous school good friend who was beginning to discover success as an artist reached out to me. That artist was John Legend and, 20 years later, I’m nonetheless his supervisor and companion in a number of enterprise ventures. It seems that many artists, together with John, need to be part of a unique mannequin of enterprise and tradition.”
There’s a path ahead to show the web page on this tradition of exploitation and abuse, Stiklorius concludes within the op-ed. She writes, “What number of different ladies had early experiences much like mine and deserted their ambition to be artists — not to mention recording engineers, producers or executives? What number of ladies had been coerced, abused, assaulted and silenced on their approach to their desires — trapped by males who managed entry and who made us consider that the important thing to the dominion was a key card to their lodge room?”
The producer wraps up by saying that the business owes it to the numerous survivors of sexual assault and misconduct, “who suffered silently to unearth the reality… We owe it to the subsequent era of creators to remake the enterprise into one thing worthy of the artwork they create.”
Solely this week, Combs has been accused in one among two lawsuits filed Monday of drugging and sexually assaulting a 10-year-old boy in a New York Metropolis lodge room in 2005. The second lawsuit accuses the jailed hip-hop mogul of equally assaulting a 17-year-old would-be contestant on the fact tv sequence Making the Band in 2008.
They had been filed within the state Supreme Court docket in New York are the most recent in a wave of 120 lawsuits through which accusers allege they had been sexually assaulted by Combs at events and conferences during the last 20 years.
The musician’s attorneys have stated: “Mr. Combs and his authorized group have full confidence within the info and the integrity of the judicial course of. In courtroom, the reality will prevail: that Mr. Combs by no means sexually assaulted or trafficked anybody—man or girl, grownup or minor.”
