Game of Thrones alum Esmé Bianco details abuse allegations against Marilyn Manson

Esmé Bianco, who played Ros on Game of Thrones, tells her story about suffering abuse at the hands of Brian Warner, aka Marilyn Manson.

Early this month, Westworld star Evan Rachel Wood talked openly about being abused by Brian Warner, better known by his stage name Marilyn Manson. Since then, several other women have come forward to tell their stories. That includes Esmé Bianco, who Game of Thrones fans will remember as Ros, a character from the first three seasons.

Bianco details a pretty horrifying story to The Cut, starting with her meeting Manson in 2005 through his soon-to-be-wife Dita Von Teese. He said he wanted to cast her in a horror movie he was making, and as a huge fan of his music, she was excited. “I thought, My teen idol wants to work with me. Don’t eff this one up.”

Things took a turn in 2009 when Manson invited her to star in the music video for his song “I Want to Kill You Like They Do in the Movies,” which was shot on a flip camera for a home video feel, meaning there didn’t need to be a big crew around. The shoot — for a video that apparently never came out — was alarming and violent, without any of the safe words or discussions of consent common among BDSM practitioners, but Bianco excused it at the time by telling herself she was making art.

A couple years later, after Manson’s marriage to Von Teese ended, Manson asked Bianco to move in with him. She had filmed the first season of Game of Thrones at this time, had been having a long-distance relationship with Manson and decided to go for it. After a brief “honeymoon” period, things got dark fast. Manson dictated what she would wear, when she could come and go from the apartment, and when she could sleep. (“I was often violently shaken awake should I go to sleep without permission,” she told the California Assembly in 2018.) “I basically felt like a prisoner,” Bianco said. “I came and went at his pleasure. Who I spoke to was completely controlled by him. I called my family hiding in the closet.”

Manson would play Bianco’s Game of Thrones sex scene in front of people, humiliating her, and his personal assistant Ashley Walters remembers seeing bruises on her arms and back — Bianco has even posted photographic proof of some of what her body endured at the time. “I think I would have made excuses for him,” Bianco said. “I was in survival mode at that point, and my brain had taught me to be small and agreeable.”

Bianco remembers a time Manson repeatedly cut her torso with a knife. That was the breaking point, along with an incident where he chased her around the apartment with an ax. She moved out around two month after moving in, leaving while Manson was sleeping.

For years afterward, Bianco had night terrors and panic attacks that made it hard to eat or sleep, let alone to hustle in Hollywood as an actress. It took a lot of therapy, the Me Too movement, and seeing Wood testify before Congress in 2018 about her own experiences with Manson, where she labeled what he did as “domestic abuse,” for Bianco to come to terms with what had happened. Since then, she and Wood have teamed up to help pass The Phoenix Act, which extends California’s statute of limitations on reporting domestic-violence offenses from three years to five.

For Bianco, Manson went from being a “massive role model who really helped me through some incredibly dark and difficult times as a teenager” to a “monster who almost destroyed me and almost destroyed so many women.” She calls Manson a “serial predator” who has been up front with the world about how much he likes to hurt women. “He’s not a misunderstood artist. He deserves to be behind bars for the rest of his life.”

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