Alice Glass accuses Crystal Castles co-founder of abuse
The former frontwoman of Crystal Castles, Alice Glass has released a graphic new statement further explaining her decision to leave the band in 2014. Glass notably departed from Crystal Castles to pursue a solo career that year.
The statement describes the prolonged sexual, physical, and psychological abuse allegedly inflicted by Crystal Castles’ co-founder, Ethan Kath, whose real name is Claudio Palmieri.
“Some of you may be aware that I’ve opened up about my experiences with abuse in the past.” Glass writes at the beginning of the statement, “I’ve been very guarded about the information I’ve given and I haven’t publicly named names — because I’ve been afraid. I’ve been threatened and harassed and as a result, out of fear, I’ve been silenced.”
Citing the various women that have shared their stories of sexual harassment or assault in the wake of the allegations against film producer Harvey Weinstein as inspiration for her to be “more direct, at whatever cost,” Glass offers a timeline of the abuse that she claims to have endured since meeting Kath when she was 15, then a student in the tenth grade. Glass reports that Kath was 10 years older than she the first time that he allegedly took advantage of her in the backseat of his car, a time at which Glass recalled herself as being “extremely intoxicated” from drinks that Kath had given her that evening.
Glass outlines the tenuous working relationship that formed after the initial alleged assault, stating that Kath would frequent the places that Glass herself did, his omnipresence ultimately leading to their eventual “reconnection.” “A lot of my friends from the punk scene had also been taken advantage of by much older men, so to me, it was a situation that was normalized,” Glass remarks. Glass and Kath later recorded their first EP, a product that resulted in an invitation for the duo to tour the UK.
Glass alleges that Kath was highly controlling, pressuring her to drop out of high school “only two credits away from graduation,” before supervising her behavior, dictating her eating habits, who she could talk to, where she could go, what she could say in public, and what she was allowed to wear. Glass accuses Kath of various instances of physical and sexual abuse, noting “He forced me to have sex with him or, he said, I wouldn’t be allowed to be in the band anymore.” Glass credits the songs that she wrote as reflections of her alleged situation: “I was miserable and my lyrics indirectly spoke to the pain and oppression that I was enduring.”
Upon departing from Crystal Castles in October of 2014, Glass said “For a multitude of reasons both professional and personal I no longer feel that this is possible within CC.” The decision to leave the band, however, was not easy for Glass, who concludes the new statement observing “Leaving Crystal Castles was the single most difficult decision I’ve ever made — that band was everything to me. My music, my performances, and my fans were all I had in the world. I gave that up and started over not because I wanted to but because I had to.”
Read Glass’s full statement here.
H/T: Pitchfork
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