Actress Evan Rachel Wood took to Twitter recently to cite Hopper, the fictional character from Stranger Things, as a person best avoided. She cites his possessiveness and jealous rages. The irony here is that Miss Wood has yet to call out her ex-fiance Marilyn Manson who confessed a daily fantasy of bashing her skull in with a sledge hammer. The nasty details of their relationship came out to the media over the years of their on-again-off-again romance included one day where he called her over 150 times; behavior bad enough in and of itself, but he upped the ante by cutting himself each time he called with a razor blade on his face or arms in order to demonstrate to her how much she her behavior was hurting him. 

In 2016, Miss Wood testified before congress that she suffered at the hands of an abuser she was involved with saying: “It started slow but escalated over time, including threats against my life, severe gas-lighting and brainwashing, waking up to the man that claimed to love me raping what he believed to be my unconscious body…And the worst part: Sick rituals of binding me up by my hands and feet to be mentally and physically tortured until my abuser felt I had proven my love for them.”

Was the person she was testifying about Marilyn Manson? The guy who fantasized about killing her? The one who told the press that she was willing to die for him? Quite possibly, but she neglected to name the abuser in her testimony. 

She has, instead, misplaced her pass failures to draw appropriate boundaries onto the character Joyce, who in Stranger Things is the object of Hopper’s affection. Yet over the course of Stranger Things Season 3, Hopper never physically acts on his rage against Joyce. Hopper struggles with feels of aggression and has a hard time drawing a boundaries, which seems appropriate for a character that, as we learn in the show, was completely along for many years prior to finding El at the start of season 1. Does he have some rough edges, sure? But he never steps over the line. 

Which is unlike Miss Wood herself whose affair with Marilyn Manson was the catalyst to ending his marriage to Dita Von Teese. Ms. Teese acted appropriately at the time in her attempt to deal with her then husband’s out-of-control behavior. She told him to shape up or she was leaving. And leave she did. 

Ms. Teese’s mature reaction to Miss Wood’s attack on her marriage did not end happily. Marilyn Manson made himself out to be the victim of a controlling woman and expressed his joy at finding Miss Wood in order to explore true freedom and happiness. How strange all these years later, Miss Wood has still not named her relationship with Marilyn Manson as the obvious example of toxicity it is. She has instead displaced that blame onto a fictional character. 

If you like, you can watch my YouTube video on the topic.