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Artist News Legal
Conor Oberst rape accuser retracts claims
By Andy Malt | Published on Wednesday 16 July 2014
A woman who made online comments accusing former Bright Eyes frontman Conor Oberst of raping her as a teenager has issued a statement, via Oberst’s lawyers, retracting her claims.
As previously reported, Oberst filed a libel lawsuit over the allegations in February, seeking $1 million in damages. The accusers comments were originally made below a post on the xoJane website, before being deleted.
Issuing the statement to Spin, Oberst’s lawyers said that the retraction came “after seven months of attempts to reach” the defendant, whom we are choosing not to name.
The woman herself said: “The statements I made and repeated online and elsewhere over the past six months accusing Conor Oberst of raping me are 100% false. I made up those lies about him to get attention while I was going through a difficult period in my life and trying to cope with my son’s illness”.
She went on: “I publicly retract my statements about Conor Oberst, and sincerely apologise to him, his family, and his fans for writing such awful things about him. I realise that my actions were wrong and could undermine the claims of actual sexual assault victims and for that I also apologise. I’m truly sorry for all the pain that I caused”.
It is not clear whether or not Oberst’s lawsuit will now be dropped, or if he will continue to pursue legal action. The musician came under criticism from US domestic violence awareness charity Right To Speak Out after he said he would donate the damages from the case to such organisations, saying: “It is offensive to imply that filing such a lawsuit is a respectable way to procure money regardless of what he declares he intends to do with it”.
The charity went on to say that launching a $1 million lawsuit, regardless of whether the claims against him were true or not, would only add “to the problem of under-reporting that enables sexual assault to proliferate at alarming rates” in the US.
