Something Was Wrong - S18 E14: [Jimmy + Andrew + Anthony] It’s From the Heart

Episode Date: December 21, 2023

*Content Warning: misogyny, rape, grooming, sexual assault, suicidal ideation, misogyny, threats of sexual violence involving children, racism, bigotry, white nationalism, bigotry, homophobia, transphobia, transmia, emotional abuse. Sources:Die Laughing // BITCH JAGGER IG page and statements: http://www.instagram.com/wearebitchjagger666 BITCH JAGGER on Bandcamp: https://bitchjagger.bandcamp.com/Andrew Saxena's Podcast, Baywatching: https://www.instagram.com/baywatchingpodcast/Anthony Kapfer on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/anthonykapfer/Free + Confidential Resources + Safety Tips: somethingwaswrong.com/resources SWW Merch: merch.cameo.com/store/somethingwaswrong Follow Something Was Wrong on IG: instagram.com/somethingwaswrongpodcastFollow Tiffany Reese on IG: instagram.com/lookiebooArtwork by the amazing Sara Stewart: @GreaterThanOkay - Instagram.com/greaterthanokaySee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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The podcast and any linked materials should not be construed as medical advice, nor is the information a substitute for professional medical expertise or treatment. Thank you so much for listening. You thinkin' on me, you don't know me well. treatment. Thank you be reached for comment. on this weird transphobic rant came at me with some weird shit. I was just really bothered by that whole conversation. The dude knows my brother's gay, you know, all the bands I've been booking for, all the connections I've been making, Drew's wearing dresses, till our shows, Drew's been supporting the LGBT queer punk scene since before me. Anthony's super level headed. It's just this one guy's hatred that's coming out more and more and it was just really bothering me So I drop him off and I noticed immediately that he left his phone in my car In weird relationships when you have these red flags and feelings sometimes people tend to go through the people's phones

I open his phone and that's when I open this bombshell of weirder shit I open Pandora's Box and find out him and this other dude have been going off the rails for the last his box and find out him and this other dude have been going off the rails for the last six to eight months that we've been active as a band or trying to be a band. He's talking to this guy, John Bennett. He had added me on Instagram and I knew he was one of Kevin's friends, but I didn't know the extent. I just knew him as an Instagram mutual friend of Kevin's that was supporting us. I immediately seen like a message between him and John Bennett, something about how he wants to kill all of us. So I start going through it, I had to go back to when we started a band.

I'm going between his text threads and Instagram and I just come up on this trove of the most vile shit, weird, rapy, grumey, just all of the grossest shit you can think of between him and his friend John Bennett. It's basically him talking shit about all of us and how they want to fuck my wife and Anthony's wife and Drew's girlfriend of 20 years. All this gnarly shit. Plus, he's talking racial shit about all these people that he grew up with that he still talks to you today.

Just a pain of further picture I'm looking at. Some of the screenshots of the messages between him and John Bennett to give people some examples of the kinds of things that they're saying to each other. A lot of it is really racist and really anti-Semitic. He really, really hates Jews and says words that I don't even feel comfortable saying. Extremely derogatory and racist and Kevin sends a picture of his niece. It says, quote, the fact that my niece is this hot and still hasn't figured out how to make money

is just astonishing. End quote. He had just sent him also a picture of him with a Hitler mustache, with a thumbs up right above that. Then he says about his niece, quote, like bitch, I will, all caps will pay you for sex you could be fully employed blood relatives even end quote and John responds which of these horrors is your niece then Kevin says far left john says damn she needs to be stuffed then another conversation between the two of them, Wednesday, May 25th, 720PM, Kevin says,

Hey, I just want to say one thing. Fuck trans people. John responds, man, fuck you fool. Then no response. They text fuck you back and forth quite a bit. Like they call each other prick quite a bit. Also, John, the school teacher says, quote, I also feel like autistic people don't get

enough shit either. Fuck these fools. Learn how to have a damn conversation." Kevin even says here Tuesday, September 6. Quote, sometimes you got to stop a show, leave your band members on stage, throw a tantrum, and chastise everyone in the room, then go smoke weed while the band is still on stage standing there like idiots." Both of their responses are just terrible. He was invited to my wedding, he was going to be in it. Months before I had invited him, we got married October 22nd,

I'm seeing the shit in late July early August. Um, right here in bed laying next to Lisa, just shaking it late at night. She hasn't seen it yet because she was asleep. By the time rehearsal was over, I dropped everyone off and got this phone charge and read through the shit. It's probably past midnight. I'm definitely feeling betrayed. So taken back, I know I need to bring it up with everybody.

I have all this information that I'm just sitting on. I remember not being able to go to bed at all. I stayed up basically watching the clock rereading everything, taking screenshots of everything. At the time, I wasn't taking them to like throw them onto the bus publicly, but I was smart enough to screenshot this shit from my phone. I definitely wanted to show Anthony and Drew the real person he was. So we could all really make the best decision on what to do and how to handle it. And that way like nobody else got suckered or lured into believing his bullshit because he was kind of good at that. Getting out of shit. I waited till the morning and then I texted Anthony. I told him, you know, Kevin left his phone in my car and I went through it.

It's real bad, dude. Like real real fucking bad. I don't even know how to tell you. He's like, what do you mean? You got to tell him. You know, like I rather do it face to face with you, me and Drew, that way you could see. He's like, not fucking whatever you send me. I know it's real. So I send him all that shit and the entire day of me and Anthony are just like, holy shit. Here's Andrew. I remember seeing the texts in the emails that Jimmy had shared. Seeing that, I was like, this is extremely toxic. You're offending people and then defending it by claiming comedy. I feel like something needs to be figured out here, dude. You're hurting people. When I saw all the texts and stuff, part of me was completely unshocked. This is how this guy talks. It was a bit of an awakening. This is just how he

treats people. John was a guitar player in one of Kevin's early bands. I knew of John in high school. I never played in a band with him, but I think he played guitar one time in the studio on one of the Kevin projects that I was in. I always thought of him as a more successful musician guy. I didn't really have much of a friendship with him. He was a teacher.

Sometimes I had noticed that these are like very profane things that this guy does and then claims that they're jokes. He found some sort of gross camaraderie there, or felt like he could truly be that version of himself, and there was an intimacy, perhaps, in that. Here's Jimmy. We had the Silver Lake Lounge show. They just wanted to get through the Silver Lake show and then call it quits. Then we had the one that I booked with another great band, Trap Girl, which is a trans-fronted band, who's done so much for us when they never had to Relay show and then call it quits. Then we had the one that I booked with another great band trap girl, which is a trans-fronted band who's done so much for us.

When they never had to, they're a bigger band out here in LA, especially active in the trans punk scene. I was just going to pay out trap girl or book another band in our place. We go into that silver lake show and Kevin doesn't say a word to Anthony. It's a terrible step for us because Kevin doesn't cue anybody in at the right parts. I remember playing just want to get the hell out of there. Here's Anthony. We had a big blow out at one of the rehearsals. Kevin left his phone in Jimmy's car. Jimmy started looking through some text conversations. And there was this one friend that he would chat with, John. All of the crazy

texts that I saw from when Jimmy found them, they were, I think, exclusively with this John guy. He texted this guy and he was like, yeah, he's refusing to do his job as a drummer. And they were just saying all this crazy racist misogynistic stuff, comments that he made about our wives that were inappropriate. He said he wanted to murder us at one point. I ended up chatting with those guys about how mad they were about it. I would relay it to Kevin. He would not accept where we were coming from. This is when it all started falling apart. Kevin never owned up to anything. He always found a way to make himself the victim.

It came out somewhat quickly and once we knew about the text messages, there was no coming back from that. The gig was coming up soon enough that it couldn't happen if we quit or if he fired us. So I was like, I heard that you said I'm not doing my job as a drummer. We had a little back and forth. This was actually the last time we spoke. So I was like, okay, I'm gonna just tell him everything that I'm upset with and let him know what the rest of the band is upset with. I tried to communicate clearly.

I tried not to insult him or curse at him. I tried to be professional about it because this is maybe the last time I'm ever gonna try to reason with him. We talked for like about an hour and it was all text and at one point he goes, you know what? Fuck you, you fired.

You won't be missed. And that was it. And so I sent a screenshot of that to the rest of the band. I believe that was the couple of weeks before we were doing this Halloween gig. Jimmy had a bunch of songs at this point, so we threw a set together last minute that didn't involve Kevin or his music. We had like three or four weeks to put a new set together and we played the gig under a different name without Kevin.

And then I never heard from him again. The whole lifespan of the band from the photo shoot the first night before we actually rehearsed together. To the last show we played together was maybe three months. Here's Andrew. We need to let you sit down and talk to each other. And he didn't want to have a band meeting. The last show we ever played, it was kind of a weird experience because the three of us all knew it was going to be the last show. And then we never played again.

I'm like, dude, we're trying to do this professionally. I've got these other bands I'm in where nobody has to come to practice loaded. We can understand how to play a show and when you show up to a show, we all know what we're gonna perform and people don't get in random brawls on the street and leave because they're too drunk. This isn't cool man, like I can't do this anymore. So like left again because the band fell apart. I think that's a big reason why Anthony left. He's no nonsense. So he quickly was like, this is not a functional artistic relationship. I'm out.

Here's Jimmy. Kevin tried to kick Anthony out. I pretended like I was on Kevin's side. I didn't show my card till all this is over. I could figure out how to pay the other band for the show that was going to be coming up in a couple of months. And they were like helping me with that, holding their tempers back, especially Anthony Kevin tries to once again Isole Anthony make him the problem me and Anthony started talking about other ideas and he's like why don't you take your music and

Start another band. I started coming up with the whole bitch Jagger thing We need to end like this is the last show. That's when I made the decision to go full force with Locking Kevin out of the die laughing Instagram account. I changed it to bitch Jagger. The band name, bitch Jagger, came about partially by Anthony. It was him who they hit on that name and I was like, that's fucking awesome. That's a great name. I started doing research for like any tags or handles

or anybody with that band nameing because it's gold. I couldn't find anything except for one profile that was this old Twitter handle. This girl, Erin, she used to go by a bitch Jagger on Twitter and she had this whole crazy story on there that really warranted what we were doing. She was bullied almost to suicide by this dude from another punkish band. The dude had pretty much made her life a living hell and also was an outright racist. So it was like fate stood for what I thought was the bit of satire mixed with truth because mostly all our songs are true and it's really just me bitching about shit

like gatekeeping, sexual abuse, shit like that. We talk out right about being a deadbeat dad, you know a lot of these songs are stories that hold a lot of truth and weight. But they're also meant for satire trolling the whole California beat down culture at these hardcore punk shows that it's been going on for 20 plus years. That's how bitch Jagger got started from Anthony and Aaron's old handle from like 17 years ago helped to breathe life and get this project going. I didn't talk to Kevin. I just blocked him on every platform and I left him in the dark.

I don't even think we brought it up to him. We just had all this info and we just wanted to leave it out that we just knew who he was and we just wanted to be out of the toxic shit. Instead of me having to pay like a thousand bucks for this next show that I booked going to all the other bands. We changed it to pitch Jagger. We rehearsed a set, Drew, Anthony, me and we got the ex-catsars of dilaphing our friend Justin. We did take like any of his material we want nothing to do with it. I would do it again, then I'll hurt you." In May of 1980, near Anaheim, California, Dorothy Jane Scott noticed her friend had an inflamed red wound on his arm and seemed unwell. She insisted on driving him to the local hospital to get treatment. While he waited for his prescription, Dorothy went to grab her car to pick him up at the exit,

but would never be seen alive again. Leaving us to wonder, decades later, what really happened to Dorothy Jane's Scott? From Wondery, Generation Wise, a podcast that covers notable true crime cases like this one and many more. Every week hosts Aaron and Justin sit down to discuss a new case, covering every angle and theory, walking through the forensic evidence and interviewing those close to the case to try to discover what happened. With over 450 episodes, there's a case for every true crime listener. Follow the Generation Y podcast on the Wonder Yap, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to Generation Y ad- right now by joining Wondery Plus.

It's not more than a week of him being blocked by all of us and locked out. We start getting all these reports, texts, and DMs sent to us with screenshots of Kevin's Twitter rants and new songs that he's writing and posting on Bandcamp and his new songs have really racial titles. One song is called Kikes. One of the song titles was The Date of Our Show. It was like death date 10, 22, something and it was The Date of the Show that we booked as Bitch Jagger without him. So we knew as directed towards us, Kevin ramps up his Twitter attacks, trying to spin it as we kicked them out, we stole his amplifier. Anyway, to make him look like a victim, it got to me so much that I couldn't let it go.

So I wrote a song and I recorded it and I put it out. The way I put it out was through Instagram Stories and it was a song all about John and Kevin and all the shit they put us through They kind of challenged it and so did their friends since I kept dilaphing's original Instagram I still had all the followers which a good portion were friends of Kevin from where he used to live as I put this song out People started kind of catching on and I just started dropping all the text threads It didn't get to be a reaction this song out, people started kinda catching on, and I just started dropping all the text threads. It didn't get me the shure reaction I thought. I thought people would wake the fuck up

and be like, these dudes are pieces of shit, but instead I immediately just saw the followers drop. People leaving, people questioning it, and then other people verbally attacking me. Kevin fans coming out saying like, oh, how dare you, this is victimization. It's just like, man, y'all ride for your boy. So fucking hard. The people who dipped, dipped, but they don't, this is victimization. It's just like manual ride for your boy so fucking hard.

The people who dip, dip, but they don't, because they still watch my stories every day. They're still there for the tea. They just don't want to give us the satisfaction of being a follower. But also, it was real sensitive shit that I felt like anyone would want to know. I just wanted to make sure everybody knew that.

They were talking about their wives. I'm going to expose these motherfuckers for who they are. I had them blocked. You couldn't get a hold of me. The one person who did try to reach out to us was John Bennett, who kind of says his name got dropped. Take video on me and type a shit. I'm a man, I made a mistake. It's not like he's like one mistake. He's like a lifetime of bad behavior, bro. He wanted to quiet me, he wanted his name out of it. One of the worst elements about this story to me is uncovering how this John person is

because he's a teacher and he works with kids and he's talking about raping children in these text messages to be clear. So essentially he begs for mercy, but his name was already outed at that point. Yeah, cause he's married and just wife's Asian, but even it's like made that a point. You know my wife's Asian. I'm not racist.

I'm like, no, you're fucking racist. At this point, I was at a full spy double agent mode playing good cop ad cop. I was like, okay, I'm going to hear you out. He was my liaison between Kevin, so I didn't have to talk to him. He basically helped in a way get off Kevin's hateful music offline, all of his social media offline. I was telling him, if you want me to keep your name out of this, I'll stop posting the segments where I call you out. I'm not gonna block your name out, but I'll try to focus more on Kevin than you. And he was appreciative of that and backstabbed Kevin

by like working with me to convince him to pull all his music down to get out of LA. We got him to get Kevin to wipe everything. Bandcamp, SoundCloud, Apple iTunes I tune store Amazon and he did I don't know if it's because John applied the pressure on him He's probably like, you know if you don't do this shit. I'm gonna get divorced It took about a week or two because when you do pull your stuff through your distributor It does take some time especially through streaming sites to come down all of his social media cease to exist He liked to lead it as Instagram deleted most of his shit apparently still has a YouTube up. He does have a social media, but that

got hacked. It's just dead in the air. He hasn't had access to it since die laughing had started. He hasn't been on it since then. That was a big thing because he had like 4000 followers and thought he was a god and he got locked out of his Instagram. And he still kept trying to go with this narrative that I stole his band and took everything from him and stole his amp that he did nothing to us. And I'm like, all this is right here. This is what you did. And he kept going with his bullshit about my sense of humor.

Like I didn't really mean it. Never apologize for anything. On the Instagram account, I made a bitch Jagger email for booking. How long after you start sharing the screenshots of their text messages before the group of women start emailing you? I wanna say about a month later,

I get an email through my booking handle. It's an anonymous email from someone who goes by Lucía Rising. She's representing a group of women. She comes to me with how Kevin has over the past, I want to say like 20 years, been sexually assaulting, stalking, harassing via text, mobile and social media. He's just been like a plague doing this shit his whole life. There's been numerous, previous band members and people that have either slutshamed these

women or strong armed and into silence or straight up scare the shit out of them. We end up corresponding for almost a month mean this group of women. They want me to share this. The first email they said, Hi there, a friend of mine recently showed me some screenshots from Instagram

where you blew up Kevin Elliott. He's a garbage human being who doesn't care for anyone other than himself. I'm part of a group of women who have been sexually assaulted by Kevin in the past. And anytime we spoke up about it, his friends came to his defense and made us feel like it was game over. Thank you for putting the truth out there. We have some texts if you want them. Thanks again. That's what their initial email to me was.

And I was just like, anything I could do to help. If you guys want to remain anonymous, I have no problem carrying this sword for you guys because this has gone to a whole another fucking level where it's not about some ban bullshit. We were going back and forth daily through the emails and through setting up their own blog. I believe it was on WordPress. They didn't get to get you far into it because it was only up for a little bit before it got shut down. It was them just sharing their stories.

They were trying to offer a place for other women or survivors of his bullshit to come out and vent or just feel some peace to come together. I remember getting quite a few responses, not just from women, but from other people that he had tried to start bands with. One of them was a drummer. He obviously had a fake handle that said,

remember me, the drummer, through all the email correspondence with that group. It seemed like these were the women of some of Kevin's best friends. A lot of these women have real trauma and it's been ignored and pushed under the rug. It seems like this is coming from a much tighter circle. It started like that. And 100 emails later, it turned into this whole story about how he's been sexually assaulting, stalking, abusing the text message, phone stalking. There's for sure been one rape kit or an instance of a rape kit.

Two cases I've been filed. It also involves people who are in their group of friends that are married. For sure, he's a sexual predator. The game he consent. I post our email correspondence and blacked out the names that they want to blacked out. They emailed me and then I said my piece on it too. I didn't stay anonymous. I was all for this is who I am. If you have any questions or one event or share stories feel free to

contact me my name is Jimmy Imperial like I've dealt with this comeback and I want you to know that I'm standing with you guys Here's Andrew The band fell apart. I don't know how much later, but bitch Jagger in terms of my record election starts up and bitch Jagger is loosely The same group of guys from before Jimmy comes into the band We have a friend of ours Justin for a little while who plays in bitch Jagger the last ever show that we were supposed to play with Kevin Was the first bitch Jagger show. Still he would be texting me like, I've got these song ideas. I've got this and that.

And I would just not respond. I was still a little bit in communication with him as the band had been dissolving. I was like, dude, all this is going on. You won't talk to me about anything in terms of our relationship, in terms of what's going on. And you're sending me song ideas. I remember C&M had taken her Instagram account for the band from Kevin and we're all like yeah, Jim is going to use it

for his new band. At first it was showing all of these emails and text messages. I don't know what to make of this. Jim reached out and was like hey these women reached out and they were abused by Kevin. There's this long history of abuse. Here's a bunch of them reaching out their stories. They've asked me to share it. I remember I read one or two of the initial posts. I was like, what is this, Jim? I was kind of glad to be away from the band

and everything because it was consistently toxic and frustrating. At this point, me and Jim, we hadn't come full circle in our friendship yet in terms of understanding what each other had been through in all this. If these are people who are suffering, then I'm glad that these stories are being shared. And I just didn't know what to make of any of it. And then more and more was coming out. I don't think these are made up. The bag of my mind was always that idea that heaven's out there being way more toxic than he is to me and he's continuing to be abusive.

It seems like people could really have suffered and have suffered because this guy, he doesn't want to address even the mild suffering he's put us through. It really could be that he's this horrific dude in the rest of his life. Here's Anthony. Jimmy started his band, Bitch Jagger, and on the Instagram account he's having this saga unfold of outing Kevin. I wasn't sure how it involved to get with that, but it seems there were some women that reached out to him that Kevin was really terrible too.

I think that he found some people that were really happy that the information was getting out there. I didn't have access to these text messages, so I didn't know what the best way to release them would be. He took the lead with that, and by that time he was looking for a lineup for the band, I was doing my own music. At some point, he had to have given Kevin his phone back,

but it just seemed like more texts were coming out every day. I heard that John got really scared when those texts started getting posted and he reached out to Jimmy. He was trying to get Jimmy to stop. Maybe he thought I was more involved with that than I was, but he reached out to me on Instagram. He sent me a message and he was like, hey, I'm sorry about the things that I said about you and your wife. I didn't even respond to him. I thought it would be better for him to be sweating it out, wondering if I was gonna tell people or not. There was some legal pushback somewhere in between us,

leaving the band and the texts being shared publicly. Kevin's dad died and left him some money, so he was able to kind of get some legal backing. There was a cease and desist or some kind of thing where Jimmy had to maybe show up in court for some of the stuff that he was posting, talking about the pattern of behavior. That was the main pattern that we were finding was that no matter what the situation was, he never owned up to anything that he was doing that made other people feel bad. I'd already left, I had no contact with him

and I was starting to hear about the legal trouble. I was like, I don't need this. I'm done with him. Jimmy has it under control. lol Shortly after that kevin's dad died and some people had got back to me trying to like tell me to take it easy But as you go through those emails, I believe you'll see in real time at that time Kevin was still talking still messaging women At that time Kevin was still talking still messaging women vile shit calling him horrors I'm like no fuck that. We'll see his dad died yesterday And he's still a day later messaging the same type of shit

And he still has the audacity to do this shit. So I was just like nah fuck it I'm gonna keep running it. You're gonna put fear into these girls still fuck with them But you want it to be left alone for your dad's funeral so you can fucking mourn like no Someone had sent me his dad's obituary info to where the funeral was. I posted it on the story saying, hey Kevin we'll see you at your dad's funeral. Someone had apparently called in a bomb threat. That is dad's funeral and I got blamed for that and my wife actually did too. I wouldn't call a bomb threat and ever pre-shots a federal offense and what's that going

to solve. That only messes with his family, not him. I think it was really him who called the bomb threat and to generate pity for himself because that's his mo. He's always done that. Try to get the tension diverted away and for people to feel sorry for him, that way someone else could be the bad guy. I just kept running the stories posted which eventually led to him having to take out a restraining order on me So I got served and in there

It's like stuff about a bomb thread and I posted the restraining orders so people could know like just how far this shit was going He was pushing for me to not be able to like post anything on the internet about him anymore He really was trying to stop me from running his name more and more I chose to not even go to the hearing at that point I wanted nothing to do with him. I made the decision to just say fuck it. I cut a file they got for an appeal but I didn't need to. This was about a way bigger thing. I'm getting messages at this time from these women, from other people. Now I'm starting to get support, right? I'm getting support from other people from Riverside or

like, hey man, I've known Kevin this long and he is a piece of shit. And a lot of his people coming about John Bennett saying it was really hard to take in and accept, and to have known this person for so long and have worked with his colleague of mine and couldn't imagine him talking like this. It was feeling a lot better than it was a month prior to where people were challenging the truth of it. I got some apologies, sorry for doubting you, it's just a lot to take in. Once the bomb threat came out, the girls shut down their WordPress blog, they got scared through threats of being sued. I think they were just scared

in general because they didn't know what was going on. They deleted their email handle and it just went dark. All corresponded stopped. This is as far as I got it. The story's out there. I just don't see him ever coming to terms with it. Definitely not about the rape. Have you spoken sense? No, but we did run into each other. I didn't say a word to him because I still go to the building he lives in. My bass player lives in the same apartment unit. I go there a lot to record. Yeah, we ran into each other in the lobby and he had a handle of some cheap ass bond good who would have been the ideal moment to just light them up. But I just looked at him and he looked at me and he was like really creepy smile and I kept walking. I just chose not to do anything. I was able to take away

what he loved. He can never be a rock star. He can never go public. He can't have social media, at least not as wide as he wants. You can't put up music anymore without us finding it. And if we find it, we'll get at him the proper way. It was taking away his ability to harass people on the internet. It was important to me. I'm glad that they were able to reach out to you and at least be validated through that experience. You offer them nothing but support every step of the way, which I really appreciate. I can't even say thank you, I feel like I just just something I had to do. I was friends with this guy and he heard a lot of people, I felt bad especially for this

group of people because they were still being bullied. No one believed them, if you go and read the through the emails, he still to that day had people hushing these women or like threatening them, denying them of their fucking pain and trauma and that's so fucked up. These women to this day don't feel safe. It really seemed like they wanted it to get to the highest plateau so they could feel safe about coming out or sharing their stories in a sense of real. I was listening to your podcasts that work at my lonely mechanic job and it's what got me through the day and I was thinking like, man, this is the perfect platform for these women. I didn't want to be seen as just another fucking band member who let this abuse go because

it's a toxic circle and it's a pattern. He's done it for the last 10 years. Here's Andrew. A band that I was in with Kevin, which was like a 10 plus year thing. There was a very short period of time where it wasn't a frustration. The people in my life were always like, why do you put up with it? And it was almost like, it was part of my identification as one of being an artist, wanting to stay a musician.

I'm like, for a long time, it was almost an obligation. Now, I guess it's been a year and a half, two years we're out of it. We're all doing our own projects and everything is blooming. It makes sense. A lot of the criticism that was told to me in the past. It was never a functional communication, and it was always pretty one-sided in terms of getting his needs met. It started with me feeling antagonistic towards Jimmy,

continued that way until the whole fracture happened, but I do want to get on the record that now, and after all of the blow-up, Jimmy has turned out to be an actual friend, and a cool guy that I enjoy supporting, and he supports my shit as much as he can as well. So it's like in a way my getting sour on the Kevin relationship clouded my vision a little bit of Jim and made me learn to not be such an asshole. None of us spoke to each other except for in context of the band and we all kind of had a frustration around Kevin that we didn't really communicate to each other.

And so I projected shit on Jim. Anthony. And Jim had been inspirations to me because it's like now we're all able to learn from each other and work together. So I'm still working with Anthony. Jim and I still are creatively going and helping each other. We have some future plans to work together. They're all good guys except for Kevin but it took that asshole to link us together.

It's unfortunate that he's not great, but some great relationships came out of it. There's some sort of a Kevin orbit with a lot of these bands and creators. Seems like they're all flowering a much more than they were when they were Kevin's centric. It's my day job, I'm just a substitute teacher right now. I'll have a ukulele. We'll do as much social art interactive roleplay stuff I sub to pay the art bills and the rent bills What do you hope that listeners will get out of hearing this story?

This is like the Jiminy cricket answer, but if I had made a more conscious decision about like some of the things That I was seeing just in my own experience with this guy If I had taken earlier steps to just set my own boundaries and figure out what I wanted my relationships and communication to look like, I just would have learned lessons maybe quicker than they took for me to learn. Listen to yourself and be as present and aware as you can and when stuff affects you, don't let it roll off process it. I suppose that some people can have stories that they felt have been not heard and hidden that I guess need to be heard and it's the art scene. It's like the band scene where a bunch of this toxic stuff could have been

happening. I feel like these people are my family and so to like introduce predatory behavior or anything into those situations, into those communities feels like the worst thing I could imagine, if these stories and people's experiences can be heard, then hopefully these spaces where people should be able to express themselves and feel comfortable can be a little more comfortable. Because art's a vulnerable thing, it sucks to have to mix your vulnerability in an area where there might be predators. Sharing the story can eliminate that on some level, creating safer spaces for people to be themselves

and to create. Here's Anthony. Hopefully people know to stay away from Kevin Elliott in any capacity, creative or otherwise. Maybe some of the stories we've told will help people pick up on certain patterns in other people's behavior that maybe are in their lives so they can avoid them Anyone who had any involvement with Kevin experience some kind of pretty much all negative with him

Other people dealt with worse things than we did But it seems like there's almost nobody in his life besides this John guy that had a positive image of him Hopefully they stay away from him And hopefully they take something away from our stories to help them stay away from similar people. Thank you so much for your time and your willingness to share. I hope that the women who emailed me hear this story and know that I took it as far as I could get it. I really just want them to feel like they have a place now to come to if they want to. I just want them to know that it is from the heart.

This was never some kind of like publicity thing if anybody ever thought that. This was really just about trying to set something right, shed light onto what's happening and it's still going on in our local music scene. I mean, this is a problem everywhere, not just music. I just want this shit to open people's eyes and ears. If they see somebody doing some fucked up shit, no matter how good of a friend they are, hold their homies accountable. If you see someone acting in a certain way, pull them aside, check them, and if not, hold

them accountable. Don't be afraid to do the right thing. When you just turn your cheek, it allows it to keep going, and this is something that had been going on for like 20 years, not just with dilaphing and bitch jagger and these women, but this is a pattern of behavior that's continued and it has been allowed. I really appreciate you submitting the story and showing up for the survivors and every email that you sent back trying to support them and share in a way that they requested and and still trying to spread the word and I really appreciate that. I thank you so much for being willing to share. Thank you too for picking up the

story. Thank you for using awareness and giving people a platform to speak on their trauma and a safe spot. I think it's fucking awesome because you're the one really holding the sword for everybody. Next time on something was wrong. When we were dating, he had two phones, which obviously is a little suspicious. I'm sure I had a lot to do with the drugs and with the cheating. which obviously is a little suspicious. I am sure I had a lot to do with the drugs and with the cheating. The biggest thing was that I married one of his friends,

so I felt obligated to keep the peace. This Twitter account, someone had started it because they were hearing a lot of rumors about him abusing sex workers. People that grew up with him, they don't even know who he is and they're mourning a friend that they had who was turned into a complete monster. Thank you so much for listening. Until next time, stay safe friends. Until next time, stay safe friends. Something was wrong is a broken cycle media production, created and hosted by me, Tiffany Ries.

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