Guns N' Roses: Axl Rose responds to sexual assault lawsuit
Last November news came that Axl Rose had been sued for an alleged sexual assault that occurred in 1989. The accusation came from the former Penthouse model Sheila Kennedywhich stated that the frontman of Guns N' Roses he had violently raped her after the two had met in a nightclub and went to his hotel room together with Riki Rachtman. Now, Axl Rose he decided to answer through his lawyers to the lawsuit filed a few months ago in New York.
In a new document, retrieved by Radar Online, Rose's representatives report two examples in which Sheila Kennedy publicly stated that the encounter had been consensual. According to the “Welcome to the jungle” bandleader's lawyers, “in his self-published 2016 memoir, 'No One's Pet,' Kennedy had described the alleged incident as consensual sex and had specifically noted: 'I was fine with it. I wanted to be with him from the moment I first saw him, and I was winning him over.'”
The lawyers also reported that later “in an interview for the 2021 documentary 'Look Away,' Kennedy described the alleged sexual encounter this way: 'It was permitted.' He also said that Rose 'wasn't trying to hurt me' and that he acted 'kindly', before reiterating: 'It was ok, he was fine. I didn't consider it rape. He was consensual'”.
Lawyers pointed to a change in the law that triggered this new indictment, arguing that Kennedy is attempting to “rewrite history. Prior to the passage of New York's Adult Survivors Act (the ASA), there was no financial motivation for Kennedy to do anything other than embellish the details of his alleged interaction with Rose. The ASA appears to have changed Kennedy's calculations.” Now, the singer's lawyers reiterated, “despite the fact that he made clear and definitive statements, both before and after the height of the 'Me Too' movement, that his alleged sexual encounter with Rose was consensual, his position is changed.”
Axl Rose's lawyers then argued that “the idea that the statute of limitations had been reopened and that she could profit by claiming – for the first time, nearly 35 years later – that the incident had not actually been consensual, it was apparently too great an opportunity to pass up. And so he filed this false complaint just two days before it was due.”