“As a Christian person, you have to stand by your friends, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have an opinion, and that doesn’t mean you’re not critical,” Corgan said. “I’m not here to adjudicate it. But, you know, the DA looked at the case for five years—I knew personal things behind the scenes that are not in the public sphere.”
Manson (real name Brian Warner) was accused by five women in 2021 of offenses including sexual abuse and domestic violence. Westworld actor Evan Rachel Wood, whose experiences with Manson were featured in the 2022 documentary Phoenix Rising was among the complainants. In 2025, after a years-long investigation, the Los Angeles district attorney’s office declined to press charges against Manson, citing the statute of limitations and the ever-present difficulty women face when trying to prove abuse. Manson has been accused in the past of other offenses such as sex trafficking and rape, with at least one of the ensuing lawsuits being settled out of court. In 2024, Manson was ordered to pay Wood and artist Illma Gore a half-million dollars after he unsuccessfully sued them for defamation.
That’s enough for Corgan, who added, “I personally didn’t feel that he was guilty of the things he was being charged with and ultimately the fact that the DA didn’t pursue [it]. So, basically, the person that I knew and the way it all kind of went down, even though it was an elongated process, was commensurate with the person that I knew.” Corgan has received blowback over the past decade for his vocal support of conspiracy theories, and for telling disgraced former InfoWars misinformation peddler Alex Jones in 2016 that “social justice warriors” were akin to the Ku Klux Klan. As he asserted to Popcast, “I don’t want the world to tell me who my friends are and who I should associate with. That’s politically or socially. In Brian’s case, we have a relationship that goes back close to 30 years.”
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