Mark Kozelek

Mark Kozelek accused of sexual misconduct by multiple women

UPDATE: Sun Kil Moon’s UK tour has been cancelled.

UPDATE 2: Mark Kozelek issued a statement: “I reject the false allegations and innuendo in the recent press.”

Mark Kozelek has been accused of sexual misconduct by multiple women in a lengthy new report from Pitchfork. Sarah Catherine Golden, a Los Angeles mental health specialist in her 30s, told Pitchfork that she spoke backstage with Kozelek following a Portugal Sun Kil Moon show in November of 2017. Afterwards, she says they went back to his hotel room, where she says she turned down his request for her to “lie down with him and stay the night.” At that point, she tells Pitchfork, “his whole demeanor just changed.” More from Pitchfork:

She claims that he then got up, pushed the beds together, and laid down on top of her. “At that point, I was kind of in shock,” she says. “I told him I really needed to get a cab, if he could please just call for it.” Kozelek called for the cab. After the call, she claims, he began masturbating, as well as grabbing at her body and clothes and trying to kiss her. At one point, he forcibly pulled her hand into contact with his penis, she says. She fled to the cab, which took her to her Airbnb. She thought about calling the police, “but I didn’t know how to do that. I don’t speak Portuguese,” she says.

Pitchfork confirmed that Golden spoke with two friends about the experience afterwards, texting one of them, “That went very wrong. He totally just pulled a Louis C.K. on me.” She continued to the friend, “He started kissing me and simultaneously was somehow naked and hard and jerking off. I seriously just became one of those women.”

Another woman, who Pitchfork identifies by the pseudonym “Andrea,” says Kozelek exposed himself to her without her consent in September of 2014, in a hotel room in Raleigh, North Carolina. She was attending Hopscotch Music Festival, which he performed at, and she says Kozelek gave her his phone number a previous time they’d met. He texted her his room number and an invitation to stop by, she told Pitchfork, and when she did, she says he took a bath, leaving the bathroom door open, and proceeded to walk around the room in a towel. After that, Andrea told Pitchfork he took the towel off and “pretty much just pounced on me,” beginning to have sex with her. “He was on top,” she told Pitchfork, “and I think I was visibly frozen, because afterwards he was like, are you OK? Because I was stuck in this hotel room with him, I didn’t have the courage to be like, no, that wasn’t OK, and that’s not what I wanted to do.”

Andrea told Pitchfork that she and Kozelek continued having sex while in Raleigh, and spent three months afterwards in a long-distance relationship. She says that while some of their encounters were consensual, in others, “the lines [were] really blurred,” and that she felt pressured into having sex in public by him. “I feel like our sexual relationship, every encounter was him trying to find another thing he could do, and not in a way where he asks for consent or permission,” she told Pitchfork.

A third woman, a female musician who asked to remain anonymous, told Pitchfork that Kozelek acted inappropriately after inviting her and a fellow musician to his hotel room following a 2014 festival.

Pitchfork says they made over a dozen requests for comments on this story to Kozelek and his representatives, none of which were returned.

Read their report in full here.

NOTE: We posted about a new Sun Kil Moon track shortly before learning of these allegations. We have since removed the post.

UPDATE: Sun Kil Moon’s UK tour has been cancelled.

UPDATE 2: Mark Kozelek issued a statement: “I reject the false allegations and innuendo in the recent press.”

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