Axl sued for sexual assault that allegedly took place in 1989

I’ve never been a big metal fan, but my girlfriend Suzy from Queens was. She loved Poison, Ratt, Def Leppard, Judas Priest, all that shit. I was hanging with her in New York and she was really excited that Rikki Rachtman was importing his traveling metal club the Cat House to some New York venue that night, and she really wanted to go. Rachtman was a big deal at the time; a failed singer, he’d parlayed his friendship with various musicians into a gig hosting a metal-themed video block on MTV called Headbangers’ Ball. I had no idea about any of this shit.

Suzy was my manager’s secretary, Cuban extraction, a little on the zaftig side but still smoking hot by my estimation. Although I wasn’t into metal I was sure as hell still into nightlife. I thought it could be fun. She helped me dress the part by lending me one of her studded belts.

At the club, we were doing our thing, dancing, drinking. In the back of the room there was this table with a huge crowd around it: models and hangers-on, all gravitating around this incredibly good-looking guy with long red hair. I wanted that fucker, whoever he was.

I said to Suzy, “Man, he is gorgeous, who is that?”

Suzy said, “You don’t know who that is?”

“No.”

“That’s Axl Rose. He’s the lead singer of Guns and Roses.”

“OK.”

“You know, ‘Sweet Child of Mine’?”

“OK.”

I had no idea what the fuck she was talking about. All I knew was that he was beautiful. Google some pictures of him from the Appetite For Destruction era. I’m not lying.

Once we got closer to the table he noticed me, too. He got to the point pretty quick. “Hey, you wanna party with me and Rikki?”

“Sure, my girlfriend and I…”

“Not your girlfriend. She’s not hot.”

I was thinking, “Oh shit.” I didn’t feel great about abandoning my friend, but I fucking wanted this guy.

“Go find another girl, we’ll take some other girl but not your girlfriend.”

Fuck it. I said to Suzy, “I’m really sorry, Axl just wants me to go.” She was a pretty good sport about it, or maybe she knew she was about to dodge a bullet. When I got back to Axl, Rikki had found himself a nice looking model I’ll call B., and we were good to go.

We all went to the hotel where Axl and Rikki were sharing a suite. It wasn’t a rock and roll hotel, it was a pretty high-end place, near the Plaza. Could have been the Pierre. When we got to the suite there was a contingent of hangers-on hanging out, champagne, coke, all that, and Rikki has to play bad cop and clear all these leeches out. I asked Axl to point me to where I could freshen up.

I’m in his bathroom. And there’s all kinds of medication laid out on a towel by the sink. There’s lithium, there’s Adderall, there’s all this SHIT. Since this time a lot of Rose’s mental health issues have come to light, but back then his main problem as it was understood by the public was that he was a fucked-up rock star who did fucked-up rock-star things. Which is just a hair different from being a person on anti-psychotic meds, or whatever these were. On top of that, I’m thinking, he’s high on coke, on champagne, on Scotch. He’s very high. He’s a fucking time bomb.

In the bedroom, it’s the four of us, Axl, Rikki, B. So this is how it’s gonna go down, a little mini-orgy. Well, it wasn’t what I had in mind. And once Rikki’s clothes were off, I was looking at his cock and it was kind of on the massive side. Like potentially very uncomfortably massive. And I’m thinking, “I didn’t sign up for THIS.” I had not intended to fuck anyone except Axl. But soon B. is making out with Axl, and soon they’re fucking, and I’m going down on Rikki.

And NOW Rikki decides he wants me to go to another room with him. I throw on a robe. We don’t even get to Rikki’s room, and suddenly we hear screaming. And things being thrown.

Rikki knew what was up. He went white. He said to me, “You need to get your stuff and get out of here.”

“What do you mean, all my stuff is in there.”

“You don’t understand. It’s gonna get worse.”

In the other room I heard Axl screaming “You’re a fucking whore. Get the fuck out of here.” B. comes out of the room. The door of the bedroom’s open, I see a broken TV, and all this shit strewn all over. Axl stalks out of the room. Rikki is sitting in a chair in the main room all collapsed, just being a pussy.

And Axl sees me and says “What the FUCK are you doing back here.” He grabs me by the back of my hair and starts pulling me by the hair. And Rikki just looks at me. I’ve fallen to the floor and Axl’s dragging me across the floor. The carpet’s cutting my legs. And he throws me on the bed and picks up my pantyhose from off of the floor and ties my hands behind my back with them. I’m on the bed, on my stomach.

“Just fucking lay there. Don’t fucking do anything.” I’m crying and bleeding. Axl slams the door and locks it. The other girl is gone. Rikki’s in the other room. And I lay there. And he fucked me, anally. And I could handle it because he wasn’t too big.

Weirdly enough, I was okay with this. I had wanted to be with him since the minute I’d first laid eyes on him, and now I was getting him. Once he was done he untied me and we fucked around some more. I remember going down on him and sticking my finger in his ass and he really wanted that, he really got off on that. That’s what made him come. And when we were exhausted he got up next to me and spooned me, and started playing with my hair.

“Oh my God. I did so not want to do that. I’m so sorry. I did not want to hurt you, that shouldn’t have happened.” He went from being an absolute psycho to this spooning, mewling, apologetic child. I was so exhausted that I passed out. We both passed out. Then it was six or seven in the morning. I was awake and he was gone. Stuff was all over the place. Clothes. Belts. Broken bottles. The overturned TV. The maids were there. I was like “My fucking God. I’ve got to get out of here.” I got dressed as fast as I could and took a train back to Suzy’s. And she’s devastated because I forgot her favorite fucking studded belt. Can you believe it?

“You’re going back and getting it.”

“No fucking way. You don’t understand what happened.”

“I don’t care.”

But I schlep back up to the Pierre. It’s the afternoon. They’re still cleaning the fucking room because it’s in such disarray. But in Axl’s bedroom, everything is made up. Clean as a whistle. And laying neatly atop the bed: Suzy’s belt. And I’m like, “Yeah.”

Axl was gone, by the way, because he had to go on Howard Stern that morning. That was the main reason he was in town. And he was late. Stern wasn’t having it. “I know you’re fucking rock star, but let me tell you something. Nobody is late for my show. So what the fuck were you doing last night?”

“I was with this Penthouse Pet and it just got crazy,” Axl answered.

“Oh, did it now?”

Sure did.

I never saw Axl again. But I saw Rikki. What’s fucked up is that we’ve kind of become friends, and stayed friends. As for Axl, he’s not in a great place now. There are a lot of people out there who want to see him burn in hell. I don’t feel that way about him, but I do feel in a way that he got everything he deserved. Or everything he asked for, whether he knew he was asking for it or not.

I think I was 22 when I went to the Cathouse with my girlfriend Suzy. As soon as we walked into The Cathouse, my girlfriend spots Axl Rose and she goes, “Let’s go over there” and I’m like, “Whoa, he’s gorgeous.” I was like, “He’s so freaking hot.” I said, “Alright, let’s go. Let’s go there.”
 
I’ve been on the cover of Penthouse Magazine four times, which is kind of unheard of. Then I became pet of the year in 1983. I mean, those were amazing times. I felt like I won the lottery. I mean, here I was, came from poverty, I could party all night, sleep all day. I had the lifestyle of a rock star. And we were pseudo-celebrities back then, Playmates and Penthouse Pets, and we would get introduced to everyone because of, you know, my Penthouse status.
 
We were introduced to him, we were hanging out with Axl and he invited me, I won’t say her name, but this model - I’ll just call her "B." -, Riki Rachtman, some hanger-ons to come back to his hotel and party some more. It must have been 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning, we were still partying, drinking… And then I go to use the restroom in Axl’s room, and I noticed in the restroom there was all this medication. And I was like, “Oh my goodness, so he’s on coke, he’s on pills, he’s on lithium, he’s been drinking all night…” I mean, you know, we were all drinking and doing drugs – it’s like, that was a scene. As I come out of the bathroom, he sees me and he puts me up against the wall, like, gently and he’s… like, we were kissing. It’s really sexy, it’s really hot and he’s like, “Yeah, this is good.” But then it turned into this really weird thing. Axl starts going at it with B. and he starts, like, really going at it with B. and I’m like, “Oh God, I don’t want to be in here.” And I was like, “Okay,” so I go in the back bedroom.
 
And then, probably 20 minutes later, we could hear all the screaming, and yelling, and glass breaking in the other suite. He was verbally abusing the model, B., and she ran out. And then, all of a sudden, I hear Axl coming down the hallway, screaming at the top of his lungs and saying, “Get the fuck out of here! Get the fuck - what are you doing back here? What are you doing back here?!” You know, I didn’t know what to say. I was, like, in shock, first of all because here’s this really nice guy kissing me and making out with me, and now all of a sudden he’s Dr Jekyll. Then he comes for me, and I look in his eyes and I’m like, “Oh my god,” like, “Okay, he’s really freakin’ losing it. He is angry, I don’t know what he’s capable of doing.” And as I’m trying to leave the room, he grabs the back of my hair and he gets a really good hold to the back of my head, and he literally starts pulling my hair and pulling me through the hallway, and I fall. And as he’s pulling me, my knees are scraping against the shag rug and I notice that they’re bleeding now. And as I get to his room, he pulls me back up. Then, all of a sudden, he just tosses me on the bed. My legs are still bleeding and stuff, and I’m crying. Within seconds he turns into a different person. Like, now he’s quiet, he’s not screaming, he’s not yelling, he’s not trying to hurt me. And he sees that I have blood on my legs and stuff like that, and he literally just starts apologizing to me and he goes, “I’m so sorry. I’m so, so, so sorry.” And he gently pulls my hands behind my back, and he ties me up, and, like, then we start having sex. It was consented. I allowed it to happen and it was okay. It was… he was fine. And then after it was all over with, I was thinking, “What the hell is going on here?” like, “what just happened.”
 
What I signed up for was a one-night stand. That’s what I thought I was going to get. And then it turned into something really ugly. I kind of signed up for it. I was in that situation, I put myself in that situation. I did not consider it rape, I… it was consensual, that’s why I never went to the police or reported it. I just dealt with it. I felt so embarrassed and humiliated. Really. Honestly. It’s tough to tell somebody, “Oh yeah, this is what this guy did to me.” Once it was over with, I felt dirty, I felt the shame. I felt the stuff that he should have been feeling. I don’t want to cry, but that’s really the truth, like, I put myself in that situation and that’s what I deserved. You know, I carried all the dirtiness of him, all the stuff that he did to me, I carried it around. Even to this day, to talk about it it’s very emotional because, why isn’t he feeling that? I can say this now that… I didn’t deserve any of that. I did not deserve any of that. And shame on him, you know? And I know that I’m not the only one that he’s done this to. I actually went years later and googled his name, and found out all these horrible things he had done to other women that were famous models and actresses.