My name is Caroline Heldman. I wear a few different hats. I'm a professor of political science, and I've been involved in anti-sexual violence work since the early 90s. And I've recently teamed up with Sam. I have been working to pass legislation and laws, and I co-founded Stand With Survivors, which is an organization that shows up at high profile and lots of low profile trials, as well, to support survivors, because one of the things that we've discovered is being a public survivor is really terribly hard. You're just going to face a lot of trolling and death threats. And you'll also face intimidation in the courtroom. And so we show up, Stand With Survivors, comes to courtrooms to make sure that both within the courtroom, while they're on the stand, while they're sitting in the galley, and outside the courtroom, that they know that other survivors have their back. And as the executive director of the Representation Project, which is a gender justice organization, we've used our research expertise and experience to team up with Sam over at the Punk Rock therapist to form the Sound off Coalition. And this is a coalition of survivor-led, mostly musician-led organizations that are fighting to make sure that the music industry is

safe. Great. Thank you. And Sam.

Hi. My name's Sam Maloney. I've been in the music industry for well over 30 years. I had my first record deal when I was still in high school. I'm a classically trained percussionist, but I'm known as a rock drummer. And I've played in some amazing bands, such as Whole Motley Crew, Eagles of Death Metal, Peaches, many, many others. And I wound up after about 20 years of touring the world. I wanted to just kind of not be on the road anymore. So I wound up becoming a music manager. And then I was offered a job at Warner Brothers Records, where I became vice president of A&R. And it was like the best job in the world until it wasn't. So that's kind of what led me down this path of, holy shit, what the hell is going on in the music industry? I had never seen the amount of cover-up that was inside those walls of the label and other labels. And so I was basically forced out of the label, handed an NDA, signed it, and then it just opened up an entirely new world that I've been working with survivors ever since. This business is rife with sexual predators. And it's just it's time for a change. It can't work like this anymore.

Before we move on to the report that you just released, can we you've put it pretty succinctly there? Can we expand on that nutshell a little bit? You're saying that the industry is rife with sexual predators. What's the scale of the problem? What is that landscape like for women in the music industry today?

Well, this isn't just like another me to issue anymore. It's way bigger than that. What we're dealing with here is corporate corruption. And these labels have known of the artists that they're signing, that they're sexually abusive to women and children, and they turn a blind eye, and they continue to work with them. And they would find reports of women being assaulted, and they'd just hand over NDA's or just intimidate, like Carolinas said. And also there's a lot of men in the industry that are actually like pedophiles. And it's just it's insane to me. So we decided to have a recent the top research firm in DC, write a report. We had nothing to do with this report. We just asked them to write this report. And it came back a year later, and it's shocking. And this report was not for the music industry. It was for music fans and for everyone else to just be educated to know what exactly is going on here.

You published this report. It's linked below the podcast. We've published it as a news story, a music ally.com as well. It's an enormously large number and a depressingly large number of very well known men, almost all men, performers and executives in the music industry. And it details extensively their alleged abuse, and also sometimes it's convicted abuse. Tell us more about the report, why you did it, what it contains, and what the impact has been so far.

The Soundoff Report documents seven decades of sexual violence and cover up in the industry. And as much as it's a focus on sexual violence, it's actually much more a focus on industry corruption. An industry that operates on silencing survivors through NDAs, through payouts, in order to maintain artists in the industry who make them a lot of money, who may be raping children or women or engaging in other acts of sexual violence. So what we found is that it wasn't just an issue with one artist or one label. It is across the board. It's systemic. It's a culture. And artists who come into this culture very quickly learn what they can get away with. And what will happen if you make the label money? And so I think, you know, a really obvious example is Artelli, who, when he, after his allegations and later convictions, his record sales actually end up shooting up. So the incentive system in the industry is actually set up for corruption, right? It encourages this sort of corruption. And so if you read the report, you're going to find that some of your favorite artists are listed in the report with evidence of sexual violence. And it's heartbreaking because we can come to this as music fans. And as musicians, I'm a longtime musician, classically trained. And in recent years, I've been parlaying my operatic training into heavy metal arias, if you will. And I've experienced this firsthand in different rooms. I've been in Sam has experienced this. But almost every woman who interacts with the music industry has experienced this to a greater, lesser extent because it's in the water, right? It's baked into the culture of the music industry. And it goes all the way up to the highest levels where you see an incredible amount of money and resources being applied to attorneys and NDAs in order to cover it up. So it's the abuse of systemic, but more importantly, for our purposes of shifting the industry, the cover up is systemic.

What I'd like to talk about as a focus here is this covering up, this culture of, as you put it, you know, issuing NDAs, signing money over and moving the problem away in that sense, or at least that's the ambition. And you're saying it's systemic. The quote I've got taken here from the report is that, for decades, the music industry has condoned, perpetuated, and often marketed a culture of sexual abuse of women and underage girls. Thousands of artists, executives and shareholders have made billions of dollars in profit while engaging in and or covering up criminal sexual behavior. When you put it in those words, it's that is a shocking thing to consider, isn't it? That it is the success of the industry relies on this behavior that you've mentioned. So can we talk about this pattern of covering up by the big companies, music industry? Can you just explain how that process works for someone who perhaps just can't imagine how this works?

Well, we could talk about, say there's a woman, you know, say there's an executive at a high level in a label, and she reports multiple issues of sexual abuse that she's been told of by artists. Like literally, what if a woman came in a big artist and said, this other A&R guy tried to rape me? And then that label person would go, the executive would go to her bosses and say, hey, we have a problem here. And then other women say, he did this to me, he did that. We got a problem. What happens? The woman that says there's a problem, she's pushed out of the label, loses her job, and the guy gets promoted. That's literally in a nutshell what happens, whether it's women at the highest levels of executive positions of power or the assistant or the intern. They treat women like second-class citizens, they objectify us. There's such misogyny in this industry that is so baked in, like Caroline said, that it's so hard to change because these CEOs are also part of the problem. Why are they in the music industry? Because they couldn't actually become artists, right? So they still want to be in the music industry. And they think that gives them carte blanche to do whatever the hell they want to do, put their hands on women, sexually abused, sexually assault. And nothing is done except they push the women out, keep promoting them in.

I mean, that's, again, shocking. The simple question there is why? The simple to say question, there's a complex answer there. Why, when a woman in a position of authority in a major global company, when she goes to a boss or someone senior and says, hey, there's multiple women reporting that this person is sexually assaulting them, why does it work the way you described and not the way that we would hope it would work, where an investigation would be launched under this person. And there will be a full understanding of what is really going on and justice.

I think because the music industry has made this claim of it's all about sex, drugs, and rock and roll. It's like, it's all about the music. Sex, drugs, and rock and roll should not be the moniker for what we are operating under. That gives them the ability to say, well, you know, they knew what they were getting into. It's like, no, no. How many women have been pushed out of the industry as artists because they've been sexually assaulted and abused by the executives at the label? How many? We don't know. How many Taylor Swift's would we have had? Had there not been countless, countless women being abused in the industry? We don't know.

This might be a difficult thing to put a number on. I'm not expecting a specific number, but well, how many? I mean, like how you mentioned before that all women in the music industry experiences at some point, which is dreadful, but what kind of, what's the critical mass here? How often is this happening? And where it's something that is really bad and then being covered up in this way?

We know that in Hollywood, you know, we had the casting couch for 100 years and all of a sudden, that's no longer acceptable. And you pull back the curtain on the casting couch and you see that this problem is rampant and it's baked in. That's what's happening with the music industry. And it's the same incentives, right? It's assumptions about mail marketability and bankability that are driving this where men's artistry simply matters more. We've known for a very long time that men's artistry has mattered more. It's taken a lot to get women included in the industry. And mostly it's arguments of profitability. And of course you have the Taylor Swift's and the Beyonce's who are just breaking the mold and you look at this and you say, wait a minute, why haven't we been including women in the same way? And in the industry, as we've been including men, so the sort of value of men more in the industry is longstanding. It's kind of like Hollywood. Everyone has a story. So the question of that you're asking Joe about when they come forward and when it's covered up, that's a little more complicated because if you're smart and you're a woman in the industry and you're smart about your career, frankly, you're not going to come forward. And so very few women do come forward. And the few who do almost universally in our conversations with just dozens and dozens of women who have come forward, the retaliation is always the same. So we can't get a handle on the scope of the problem because it's so widespread. But what we can say is the small number of women who've come forward against especially prominent musicians who Sam has worked with most of them or we have at least had some connection to them, their experience, what Sam just described might sound like it's very specific but it's actually universal. You come forward and then you're retaliated against in some way and then maybe they throw a bone at you and you're definitely signing an NDA before you leave the industry, before you're pushed out. But at the end of the day, most women actually never come forward because it's just such a common practice and experience in the industry that it's normalized.

So they're not coming forward because it's a combination of either fear of the repercussions, they see what happens to other women who do come forward or it's so normal that they think, well, if I come forward, we're different to what it makes.

I have an issue with someone as big as say Lady Gaga, say there's a Lady Gaga out there in the world who has such a massive platform and say she has said she has been sexually assaulted by a music producer. Yet she doesn't actually name him and it's how can a woman of that stature not be able to name her abuser that still works in the music industry. What is it going to take these men have known for years about the problems that have been going on and they've done nothing but embrace these artists, embrace these managers and executives. Come on in, let's give, there are people that have, my friends work at Labels and they'll say, holy shit Sam, I just had a marketing meeting where the label head is so excited to go to the county jail and pick their artists up because they know that like, let's make sure, let's get them back in the studio. It's like, what is going on here? They're incentivized to give platforms to these men who are abusive. Why? Why? Because it's a boys club and they're protecting themselves at all levels. I've spoken to dozens of survivors of pedophile. He is hired by an international company. He's a radio DJ even when a credible rock and roll Hall of Fame inductee names him as her abuser when she was 15. No one cares. This radio station still has him on the payroll. Dozens of women have come forward. The radio station doesn't care. These companies say, we're not going to do anything until these guys are actually prosecuted and that is the problem and Caroline and I know that this is such a big problem because most of these guys will never be prosecuted.

This pattern of covering up, it extends to a blanket ignoring in a sentence as well. What should the industry response

be? The music industry that is absolutely a boys club that is amplifying patriarchy has gone unchecked. Our report covers 70 years. It's gone unchecked the entire time and there is unlike other many other industries, there's no economic incentive. There's no consumer pressure that is going to be applied because of the fan base behind these artists, which means that the music industry when it comes to sexual violence is way behind under other industries in terms of reforming. It's actually way behind Hollywood at this point. It's like the Luddite, the 1950s boys club and we are applying different forms of pressure in order to shift that. But I'll say it's tougher than other industries because yeah, they've been operating like the Wild West as though basic employment laws simply don't apply to them.

Well, you brought me onto a question I was going to ask you, which is why is the Me Too Wave not hit the music industry like it has other creative industries? You've answered that to an extent there and that makes sense. But it felt like in those other industries there was a sort of surge of, well, that's why it's called the Me Too Moon, right? There was a surge of momentum of change. Why not in the music industry?

Because it's so hard to get into the music industry to begin with. So once the door is open for us women, it's an honor to be a part of this industry, to be able to record an album, to be able to work with these artists. And then when something happens to you, all of a sudden it's like, okay, you're out. You're out. Wait, this just happened to me. Like, why is this? Why am I? Why do I have to get kicked out of the club now? And so, I mean, these CEOs, they have golden parachutes of hundreds of millions of dollars in stock options that they just cash out after they've been accused of multiple issues of sexual assault, harassment, and abuse. And they get paid out hundreds of millions of dollars. Do you think the shareholders would like to know that? I don't think so. If the CEO of Ford Motor Company had credible accusations of rape and sexual assault, the stock would drop for days and they would get him kick him out immediately. Instead, they just don't do anything but keep these guys in power because it is a boys club. And again, the perverse economic incentives, we need to change this. Like, RKLE has like five million listeners on Spotify or whatever. He's five million streams. It's like every month people are listening to RKLE. They should start diverting those that income directly to the survivors. These catalogs are not going to be worth much of anything anymore if people start realizing, you know what, this catalog that we paid 200 million dollars for the publishing, actually these guys were abusing women for years, people aren't going to want to listen to that music anymore. The consumers have the ability to say, you know what, I don't want to buy the rock band's t-shirt and target anymore. You know, so this is just about us giving the public an education on what's really been going on. The music industry has been sexually assaulting women for decades and it's time that somebody does something about it. Caroline and I have been working with legislators to open up windows, to allow these stories to even become public. The only reason why there's been sort of a me to wave happening in New York and California is because women like Carolina myself and others who talk to legislators testified to pass bills that allowed, gave these women the ability to actually hold their abusers accountable. And like just because you have the ability to do that doesn't mean that these women are actually going to do it. They say to me, Sam, you know what, I'd rather stay in the music industry because instead of speaking out, because I will ruin my chances of ever working in this business again. And that's just the reality.

Do you think that the new generation of people moving into the music industry are going to be able to facilitate some change here? We often hear that this is very broad brushstrokes, but we hear the Gen Z are a lot more open about discussing this kind of thing, they're more educated, they're more determined to support each other and bring these things out in the open. Do you think that that is close to a reality? Is that going to affect the music industry?