Woman explains decades-old allegations of sexual assault against Axl Rose

A woman is She is speaking out about decades-old allegations that Axl Rose sexually abused her when she was a minor in the 1980s, before Guns N’ Roses broke through to become one of the biggest rock bands of all time.

Michelle Rhoades has spoken out about her allegations against Rose before, during a press conference about sexual misconduct in the music industry earlier this year, but she went into much more detail on the podcast over the past two weeks.

The podcast published several interview recordings that another reporter conducted in 2019 with Rhoades associates who recalled what Rhoades had previously told them about the alleged incident. The podcast itself does not mention Rose or any of the other members of Guns N’ Roses by name. Rolling Stone has confirmed that Rhoades was referring to Rose on the podcast. (A spokesperson for Rose did not respond to a request for comment.)

In the podcast “enough.” Rhoades claimed that she met Rose when she was 15 and he was 23. The relationship quickly turned sexual. She claims she became pregnant with Rose’s child, but suffered a miscarriage on the night of one of the band’s first concerts at the Troubadour concert hall in West Hollywood.

Rhoades said she later showed up at the band’s rehearsal space to tell Rose what happened. “It went from ‘we need to talk because you’re pregnant with my baby,’ to him screaming that I killed the baby, to him sobbing in my arms that he should have been there for me,” Rhoades claimed.

Rose left her at the studio and Rhoades says she eventually went outside to use a restroom behind the studio. She claimed she saw Rose having sex with another woman and she approached her to confront him. Rhoades claimed Rose was “still fucking her while he was talking to me and he started telling me these really sick things.”

Rhoades claimed she went back into the studio to get her purse before Rose took her back to the restroom and ripped the dress off her. “As soon as my clothes were on the floor, his roadie came in and grabbed my clothes,” she claimed.

Rhoades yelled at Rose and demanded that she get her clothes back, she claimed, but he picked her up, walked with her across the parking lot and back into the studio while she screamed for help.

“He threw me into the studio and almost immediately held me down,” Rhoades claimed. “He held me down with his hands on my knees and his knees were on this part of my elbows. I remember it hurting so much and his ass was in my face. He was calling people over to me like a barker. Like he said, ‘She has the best tits in town,’ and people were coming up to me and touching me. I was surrounded by people and I was screaming. And he kept screaming that he was going to shit in my face if I didn’t shut up.”

She claimed that Rose and others “put shackles around my ankles” and that Rose “really hurt me and allowed these other people to penetrate me and pinch me and all these things.”

Shortly afterward, she claims Rose raped her. “And then he turned me around and entered me and pressed his face into my face. I remember trying to bite him,” Rhoades claimed. “And then it was almost like he came to for a second. He threw everything off me, the shackles off me. And he held me again. I remember begging him for my clothes. I told him, ‘Please just give me my clothes, I’m never coming back here.’ And he told me I didn’t deserve my clothes.”

Rose threw her out of the studio naked and a band member in the neighboring studio saw her and gave her a towel to cover herself, she claimed.

Her mother’s boyfriend, Vince Gilbert, who was running another local recording studio at the time, picked Rhoades up from the room and demanded that she be given her clothes. Gilbert confirmed that he picked Rhoades up in an audio recording of an interview he gave in 2019 that the podcast released this week.

“I was there right afterward, picked her up, went back and took her to her mother’s house the next morning,” he said in the interview. He also claimed he knew Rose and Rhoades had some sort of relationship, although “I couldn’t say for sure to what extent.”

Rhoades claimed she told Gilbert not to tell her mother, but she found out and called the police. Rhoades claimed several band members contacted her and begged her not to go to court. Duff McKagan, whom Rhoades referred to only as “the bass player” on the podcast, came to her house with his girlfriend and “begged my mom to drop the charges,” she said.

“I’ll never forget him saying, ‘We know there’s something wrong with him, and we promise he’ll get mental health treatment and he won’t hurt another girl.'” (A spokesperson for McKagan did not respond to a request for comment.)

Rhoades claims she experienced increasing mental anguish and suicidal thoughts in the lead-up to the court date and ultimately decided not to press charges. She says Rose “apologized profusely” to her and after she told the rest of the band she would not pursue the case, the band “came up to me that night and gave me a hug.”

Various versions of this story have appeared in books and memoirs recalling the early history of Guns N’ Roses. In Slash’s 2007 autobiography, the guitarist wrote about an unnamed woman who “had sex with Axl up in the attic.” Slash did not mention in the book whether he knew the girl or how old she was.

“Towards the end of the night, perhaps as the effects of the drugs and alcohol wore off, she lost her mind and completely freaked out,” Slash wrote. “Axl told her to leave and tried to kick her out. I tried to mediate the situation to get her out quietly, but that didn’t work.”

Slash wrote that the LAPD raided the studio and he and Rose were charged with rape. Rose went to Orange County, Slash said, while he went to Santa Monica. “For fear of being arrested, we didn’t book any shows and kept a low profile. The truth was that Axl definitely had sex with the girl, but it was consensual and no one had raped her.”

A few weeks later, he and Rose moved in with their future manager Vicky Hamilton to sleep on her couch. In an interview with Rolling Stone In 2016, Hamilton remembered some of the same details.

“Axl had a guest in the rehearsal studio, and he basically took her clothes off and locked her outside. The girl went to the police and said he raped her,” Hamilton said. “Slash called me and said, ‘Can Axl stay on your couch for a while?’ And I was like, ‘Why?’ He told me this story and it was pretty clear that I was harboring a fugitive at that point, but I let him come. It was only supposed to be a couple of days, but it ended up being six months.”

Rhoades came into the spotlight after former Penthouse model Sheila Kennedy filed suit against Rose late last year. In the suit, she claimed that Rose sexually harassed her in a New York hotel room in 1989. Through New York’s Adult Survivors Act, Kennedy was one of many women to file lawsuits against prominent figures in the music industry, accusing them of sexual misconduct.

Rose filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit in April, calling Kennedy’s claims “offensive, inflammatory and false” and claiming Kennedy was “a fabulist and opportunist seeking to rewrite history in order to obtain a windfall.”