A woman is speaking out about decades-old allegations that Axl Rose sexually assaulted her when she was a minor in the 1980s, dating back to before Guns N’ Roses broke through as one of the biggest rock bands of all time.
Michelle Rhoades has previously spoken out about her allegations against Rose, speaking earlier this year at a press conference about sexual misconduct in the music industry, but she went into much more detail while speaking to the podcast over the past two weeks.
The podcast shared several recordings of interviews that another journalist conducted with associates of Rhoades in 2019, who recalled what Rhoades had previously told them about the alleged incident. The podcast itself does not mention Rose by name or any of the other members of Guns N’ Roses, though Rolling stone confirmed that Rhoades was referring to Rose in the podcast. (A rep for Rose did not respond to a request for comment.)
In an interview with the podcast “enough.”, Rhoades claimed to have met Rose when she was 15 and he was 23, saying the relationship quickly turned sexual. She claims to have become pregnant with Rose’s child, but suffered a miscarriage at the Troubadour, a West Hollywood music venue, on the night of one of the band’s early shows.
Rhoades said she then went to the band’s rehearsal room to tell Rose what had happened. “We went from ‘we need to talk because you’re pregnant with my baby’ to him yelling at me and saying I killed the baby to him sobbing in my arms and saying he should have been there for me,” Rhoades said.
Rose left her at the studio and Rhoades said she eventually went outside to use an outhouse behind the studio. She claimed she saw Rose having sex with another woman and she approached them to confront him about it. Rhoades claimed Rose “kept fucking her while he was talking to me, and he started saying really disgusting things to me.”
Rhoades claimed she went back to the studio to retrieve her purse before Rose took her back to the bathroom and ripped her dress off. “As soon as my clothes fell on the floor, his roadie came in and took my clothes,” she claimed.
Rhoades yelled at Rose demanding that she get her clothes back, she claimed, but he picked her up, took her across the parking lot and brought her back to the studio as she screamed for help, she claimed.
“He threw me into the studio and almost immediately he had me on the ground,” Rhoades said. “He had me on the ground with his hands on my knees and his knees were on this part of my elbows. I remember being in a lot of pain and his ass was in my face. He was calling people over to me like a carnival barker. Like, ‘She’s got the best boobs 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 bondage cuffs around my ankles” and that Rose “was really hurting me and allowing these other people to get inside me and pinch me and all these things.”
Shortly after, she claims Rose raped her. “Then he spun me around, got inside me, got inside me and put his face on my face. I remember trying to bite him,” Rhoades said. “And then it was almost like he came to his senses for a second. He threw everybody off of me, handcuffed me. And he held me again. I remember begging him to give me my clothes. I said, ‘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 naked out of the studio, and a member of a band in the next studio saw her and gave her a towel to cover herself, she claimed.
Her mother’s boyfriend, Vince Gilbert, who ran another local recording studio at the time, picked up Rhoades and demanded her clothes back. Gilbert confirmed he picked up Rhoades in an audio recording of a 2019 interview he gave, which the podcast shared this week.
“I was there immediately afterward, picked her up, walked back, and the next morning I took her to her mother’s house,” he said in the interview. He also claimed he knew Rose and Rhoades had some sort of relationship, but “I can’t say for sure.”
Rhoades claimed she told Gilbert not to tell her mother, but she found out and called the police. Rhoades said several band members contacted her to beg her not to go to court. Duff McKagan, whom Rhoades referred to simply as “the bass player” on the podcast, came to her house with his girlfriend and “begged my mother to drop the charges,” she said.
“I’ll never forget his words: ‘We know there’s something wrong with him, and we promise he’ll get his sanity back and he won’t hurt any girls again.'” (A representative for McKagan did not respond to a request for comment.)
Rhoades claims she experienced increased mental anguish and suicidal thoughts leading up to the trial date and ultimately decided not to press charges. She says Rose “apologized profusely” to her and that after she told the rest of the group she would not pursue the case, the group “came up and hugged me that night.”
Different versions of this story have appeared in books and memoirs chronicling the early days of Guns N’ Roses. In Slash’s 2007 autobiography, the guitarist wrote about an unnamed woman who he said “had sex with Axl in the loft.” Slash made no mention in the book of whether he knew the girl or knew how old she was.
“Towards the end of the night, perhaps when the effects of the drugs and alcohol wore off, she lost her mind and panicked intensely,” Slash wrote. “Axl told her to leave and tried to kick her out. I tried to help him sort it out so she could sneak out, but it didn’t work.”
Slash wrote that the studio was raided by the Los Angeles police and that he and Rose were charged with rape. Rose went to Orange County, Slash said, while he went to Santa Monica. “For fear of arrest, we didn’t book any shows and kept a low profile. The truth is that Axl did have sex with the girl, but it was consensual and no one raped her.”
A few weeks later, he and Rose moved in with their future manager Vicky Hamilton to stay on her couch. Rolling stone In 2016, Hamilton recalled some of the same details.
“Axl had a guest at the rehearsal studio, and he took her clothes off and locked her out, and the girl went to the police and said he raped her,” Hamilton said. “Slash called me and said, ‘Can Axl come stay on your couch for a little while?’ And I said, ‘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 few days, but it ended up being six months.”
Rhoades came out more publicly after former Penthouse model Sheila Kennedy filed a lawsuit late last year alleging that Rose sexually assaulted her in a New York hotel room in 1989. Through New York’s Adult Survivors Act, Kennedy was one of several women who filed lawsuits against prominent music industry figures, accusing them of sexual misconduct.
Rose filed a motion to dismiss that complaint in April, calling Kennedy’s allegations “salacious, inflammatory and false” and alleging that Kennedy “is a fabulist and an opportunist seeking to rewrite history in pursuit of a financial windfall.”