Ducktails at BRIC Celebrate Brooklyn! Festival
Ducktails at Prospect Park in 2016 (more by Amanda Hatfield)

women share details of former Real Estate member Matt Mondanile's sexual misconduct

Last week, the news broke that the reason for Matt Mondanile‘s departure from Real Estate was that the band fired him after “allegations of unacceptable treatment of women were brought to [their] attention.” Details on the situation by seven women have now surfaced in a new SPIN article. Of the seven, SPIN wrote, “Two women alleged that Mondanile groped them while they were sleeping, and a third said that he did so while she was trying to sleep.” The allegations mentioned in their story span “about a decade.”

One of the accounts is from a woman, Mary (who asked to remain anonymous), who discussed an incident with Mondanile at Brooklyn venue Baby’s All Right. Mondanile asked her to show him where the bathroom is, and then, “He shoved me in there, shoved his tongue down my throat, then closed the door and left, and left me in there,” Mary said. “I was so shocked and distraught, because nothing like this had ever happened to me before. Afterward, I was crying and my friends were consoling me.”

Mary mentions that, later that night, Mondanile asked her to come back to his apartment in Brooklyn, “where they could talk more comfortably,” and she agreed with hesitancy. She said that he instead took her to his family’s home in Ridgewood, New Jersey and denied her requests to be taken home until the morning. “I was afraid, and the entire night I was trying to stay awake,” she said. “It was five in the morning, and he kept trying to move closer to me, and I was moving away. The best way I could describe it was that he was like a dog, dry-humping me.”

When Mondanile finally agreed to take her home in the morning, he dropped her at the train station in Ridgewood instead of driving her to Brooklyn. When she told him she had no money, “he threw a 20 dollar bill at [her].”

Mary’s story about the bathroom at Baby’s All Right is very similar to a story from a woman named Emily Langland, who described almost the same situation happening to her at a house party in LA.

Another account is from a woman named Elizabeth, who was college friends with Mondanile in 2005. SPIN writes:

At least twice that year, she said, she awoke in the middle of the night to find that Mondanile had entered the building, walked up to her third-floor dorm room, gotten into bed with her, and begun groping her while she slept. Because of the lapsed years and the fact that she was waking from sleep, she does not recall the specific ways in which he touched her. “He would say, ‘I just took a Viagra, I can’t help myself,’” she said. “He basically molested me in my sleep. My way of eventually dealing with that was to lock my door.”

The SPIN article goes on to detail more accounts, which you can read here.

As UPROXX points out, another woman, Detroit journalist and sex educator Zoë Ligon‏, tweeted “explicit details about her experience stating that Mondanile had coercive sex with her, and then offered to pay her if she’d “come over.” Zoë also tweeted screenshots of the texts from Mondanile.

In other related news, a Phillipines booking company cancelled their upcoming show with Mondanile’s band Ducktails. Ducktails were also removed from the recent Phuzz Festival in North Carolina.

Inflated Records, who released Ducktails’ WFMU session on vinyl as their second release in 2010, also made a statement on twitter:

Back in 2010, we put out Matt Mondanile/Ducktails’ WFMU session on vinyl as our 2nd release. While the record is out of print, I’d like to take this opportunity to say that Inflated has zero tolerance towards all forms of abuse. Over the years, we’ve strived to work with artists we know and trust. And we can do better: we can do better at recognizing warning signs of this type of disgusting behavior and choosing the artists we work with more carefully. For now, we’ll be making a donation to NYC Alliance Against Sexual Assault and open to suggestions on other orgs.