Alice Glass’s Los Angeles home is a picture of gothic splendour. Her kitchen resembles a graveyard of dead flowers; she is annoyed that her living black lilies never droop when she is looking. There is a fake Goya on the way down to her basement studio, where skulls surround the drums. A spider crawls out of the toilet roll when I use her bathroom. It is probably not part of the decor.
Glass is less macabre: there is a tattoo of Bambi on her thigh. She loved the royal wedding. Her voice only rises above its perpetual whisper when she calls to her cats, Mr Peanut and Fuzzy, the alpha who dominates her pit bulls, Jacob and Shadow. She apologises for the boxes that entomb the sofa, merch from her recent debut solo tour. She had polled fans on Twitter to ask which song she should play from the back catalogue of her former band, the anarchic electro-punk duo Crystal Castles, which she quit in October 2014. Ultimately, she decided to play the material to which she still felt connected – “where I’m feeling worthless and hopeless”, she says. It took time in rehearsals to shake off their negative associations.
It was not until allegations surfaced against Harvey Weinstein that Glass (born Margaret Osborn) was emboldened to go public with detailed allegations of abuse against her ex-bandmate, Ethan Kath (real name Claudio Palmieri). She felt it was her responsibility, “especially after I had been told he had done similar things to at least one other woman”. Glass had previously alluded to her experience when she released her debut solo single, Stillbirth, in July 2015: “You don’t own me any more,” she shrieked over music that she likened to “being eaten by fire ants”.
The song allowed her to speak covertly at a time when she was scared of going outside in case she was served with a lawsuit, she says, claiming that Kath started making legal threats in response to her tweeting stats about domestic abuse fatalities shortly after she announced her departure from the band. Glass says she received cease-and-desist letters from the same firm that represented Bill Cosby, which quoted her tweets and intimated that Glass was making these statements to benefit her career. But seeing other women speaking out about abuse last October was like watching “someone jumping off a cliff”, she says. “If someone goes first, it lets you know that you’re safe. It really put things into perspective. If it wasn’t for them, I’m not sure how long it would have taken me to speak out.”
She published a lengthy statement accusing Kath of nonconsensual sex, stalking, manipulation, intimidation and isolation, violence (including being dangled over a stairwell), control and derision. Kath has repeatedly denied Glass’s allegations, describing them as “pure fiction”. He sued her for defamation and issued his own statement: “Alice and I had a long ongoing relationship both personal and professional. When she suddenly left Crystal Castles to handle her mental health issues and substance abuse issues I fully supported her. I will continue to support her quest to wellness but I can’t support extortion, false claims, and accusations put forth after the band attained new success without her.” (She says his comments about mental health and substance abuse are “bullshit”.)
Kath’s defamation lawsuit was dismissed in February, as was an appeal in May, in which he was ordered to pay Glass almost $21,000 (£15,800) in legal fees. The lawsuit was rejected under a California statute designed to protect freedom of speech; the court did not make any finding on whether Glass’s allegations were true. He remains under investigation by the Toronto police sex crimes unit after complaints from several women, the police service confirmed to the Guardian. Glass does not know if he can bring the suit again. “Probably, he’ll try, but it’s not getting in my head,” she says. “I want him to know that he can keep trying to sue me and it’s not affecting me in the way that you think it is, you’re just spending more of your money and wasting more of your life.”
Now 29, she attributes leaving the band to “growing up. I wasn’t a teenager any more. I had some idea of what my value was, especially in the band. People would be cheering my name at the shows and I’d walk off stage and [Kath] would get in my face about how terrible I was. I just woke up to it slowly.”
In the early 00s, Glass was a teenage outcast in Toronto. She had difficulties with her parents, who agreed that she should move out aged 15 – she will not discuss why. She turned her flat into a squat for fellow punk runaways – “It was always an aspirational dream to live in a community of people that you can trust” – and formed bands. Fetus Fatale played only a couple of chaotic shows, but Kath has claimed he saw one of them and felt he had “discovered a great poet” in Glass. She doubts that; she recalls them meeting when she bought his CD after a show. Her statement details what came next: she alleges that he intoxicated and had sex with her while he was sober. “I feel like, for a lot of it, he could have been anybody when I was lost and desperately searching for someone validating to my experiences,” she says.
They recorded together, but she says he told her that the results were so poor that they would not be released. They lost touch; Kath was in two other bands, “hedging his bets to see which would be the most successful”, says Glass. But then a song called Alice Practice started taking off on Myspace, so named because, according to Kath, Glass’s parts were merely a microphone test. Glass denies this, too, saying that she had written lyrics and melodies. She had no idea the music was online.
A small record deal materialised and Glass says Kath encouraged her to quit high school to tour. She had never left Canada and was 18 when they arrived in Britain, where Crystal Castles experienced viral success, miming on the TV series Skins and leading a bratty noise scene. “Moshing with your friends is the best kind of medicine when you’re an aggravated young person,” Glass theorises of their popularity. She had no such community, was unable to connect to fans’ idolisation and felt like a misfit in the scene: “I don’t think that my expression was necessarily taken seriously, because I was a woman screaming in people’s faces.”
The media portrayed her as a feral creature: Kath would extol her violent and accidental genius; NME dedicated a spread to her knuckles after she punched a man at a festival. It is expected that violence and outlandish behaviour is concomitant with male musical genius. But when volatility is part of a woman’s artistic persona, her work is presented as an accident, rather than a purposeful statement. “It seems like a by-product of trauma or some expression that she’s not completely in control of,” Glass says. She wanted to explain herself – that she was violent at live shows because men groped her. But Kath told her it would be better to remain mysterious, disaffected. “That idea of nihilism leaves you completely open to let people come and take advantage of you.”
She felt men came to shows to target her. “Like: ‘She doesn’t care what you do to her, pull her hair, try strangling her with your shirt, grab her around the groin, why don’t you rip her skirt off?’ They were all things that happened to me regularly. When a woman doesn’t really have agency – not doing interviews, having music that seemed unintentional, seeming like a vessel who’s there to fulfil someone else’s idea – then you can treat her not as a person and do whatever you want to her.”
Glass began to see herself as abject. She had neither friends – she says Kath restricted her personal relationships – nor family ties. She felt “robotic”, escaping on stage then returning to the bus alone, scared to go out. She claims Kath told her that men liked to gang-rape feminists, dissuading her from sharing her ideals. She was so disconnected from reality that she believed him.
Glass says the band’s manager, James Sandom, would lament Kath’s behaviour, but she feels he never offered her genuine support. “He pretended to care and pretended to help me at times – or sometimes would just say whatever it took to keep me working.” She says it took until 2012 for Sandom to acquiesce to her demands for a phone and a credit card. Kath allegedly held her passport and controlled the band’s finances, giving Glass “some money throughout the years, but not a proportionate account ... The ‘joint’ bank account,” she sneers.
Last year, Sandom who still manages Crystal Castles – told the Daily Telegraph that he could offer “no further insight” into Glass’s accusations: “During our time managing Crystal Castles whilst their professional relationship was occasionally volatile, their personal relationship was never fully clear.” Glass disputed this, posting screenshots of emails in which she told Sandom that Kath had thrown her phone out of a moving car and ripped hair from her head. Sandom’s replies characterised Kath’s behaviour as “domestic abuse” and said he would call the police next time. I tried to speak to him prior to meeting Glass, but he declined, saying he had “nothing but admiration for Margaret” and wished her “the best on the path ahead professionally and personally”.
“Fuck you,” she says at Sandom when I repeat this. The sun has dipped; we have been talking in the dark. She bolts to look for a cigarette. Minutes later, her boyfriend, the musician Jupiter Keyes, comes upstairs with Glass, who has been crying. “Let me give you some light, OK,” he says, switching a lamp on before going out to buy wine.
Glass sits back down and says: “It’s cliched to be somewhat triggered by that, but it’s a little weird that he would still be supporting him. I just don’t even know what to say to that. The amount of … cruelty? It never ceases to amaze me. But it’s not just me – there are people that will continue to suffer because they believe the person who’s telling them they wish them all the best really does. I would rather people like that said: ‘Y’know, she can go fuck herself, I don’t care that this happened to her.’”
Glass does not know if Sandom talked to Kath about that incident and she does not think he called the police. She alleges a wider picture of neglect. Glass played on crutches for a year with a fractured ankle and performed through broken ribs and food poisoning. Her behaviour ties in with a pattern of self-abasement, but she says it was encouraged. When she proposed cancelling shows, she says Kath told her they would be sued, that fans would stop coming. It played to her sensibilities: “My entire life was performing, so I couldn’t imagine not being able to do that – it was my identity.”
Kath always said Glass broke her ribs in a car accident in 2008. “Which he also lied about. The tour manager [one of the production team] grabbed me from the stage. I asked him not to and he pulled me by the foot and I hit a monitor from a 90-degree angle in my ribs.” (Crystal Castles cancelled nine dates after Glass sustained this injury.) She says she was concussed so often that one doctor told her to avoid bright lights and loud noises, “so, of course, we played a show the next day”, despite her pleas to cancel. She worried about blood clots and brain trauma. “My therapist told me that hypochondria is somewhat psychosomatic to feeling like you don’t have control of your own life.”
She says she repeatedly tried to quit, but she was told that doing so would be “such a shame, that kind of language”, she says. “It is hard to walk away from a project that you put everything into, especially if you almost believe that you’re being received as an artist by a fluke chance.” Glass says she had to get a lawyer to access her half of songwriting and publishing, and her new management had to lobby Twitter for the account that Kath had registered in her name. She was dating Keyes by the time Crystal Castles were supporting Depeche Mode in September 2013; as they drove away from the last date, she knew it was over.
Glass goes to the balcony to smoke, gesturing at her “anxiety table of disgusting old cigarettes”. She is not surprised that Kath continued the band with another young, female singer who looks just like her. She says he would often threaten her with the prospect of a nameless girl waiting in the wings “who’s a better singer and who would put up with a lot worse than I would”. Part of Glass leaving entailed coming to terms with the fact that she probably would not be a musician any more. But after she freed herself she decided to write anyway, even if she did not think anyone would care. They did: she signed to Loma Vista (St Vincent, Iggy Pop), released Stillbirth and, last year, the Alice Glass EP.
Her new single, Mine, was written with the songwriter Justin Tranter, who she chose for his work on Justin Bieber’s Sorry. None of Glass’s solo material has been an easy listen – eerie melodies snake around blasts of digital static – but Mine is a profoundly heavy listen, describing self-harm: “Abuse myself till I’m finally mine,” she sings. “That’s how desperate I felt,” she says now.
She is more comfortable with people idolising her since she spoke out; proud, even. But she still grapples with guilt: after her statement, more women alleged that Kath had abused them as teenagers. It was “surreal and fucked up” to know she was not alone, but equally so to contemplate that “a lot of these women – girls – met him because they were fans of mine. If I didn’t exist, then a lot of those experiences wouldn’t have happened.”
Her eyes are glassy again. Easier said than done, but she can’t blame herself for that. “Some people have told me that, too, but in the brief times I got to express myself – this one-dimensional side that’s not a completely true representation – that is destructive. And the people that would feel connected to that are most likely damaged themselves and it’s a breeding ground for creeps. There’s no way not to feel guilty. I’m just gonna have to live with it for the rest of my life.”
These days she attempts to think about Kath as little as possible, preferring to try to discern the logical explanations behind how she feels about herself. “Justice is just being able to live my life,” she says. Her left hand bears a fresh tattoo of white roses, to symbolise new beginnings. She repeatedly says that she is lucky to be here, to have a career. “That really is an ideal scenario for somebody like me – a damaged high-school dropout.” But she also knows that she put the work in to get here.
- This article was amended on 15 June to correct the assertion that James Sandom still manages Crystal Castles. He no longer works with the group.
