Good, We’re Talking About Anthony Kiedis Now…
It’s been nearly twenty years, and it seems to only recently be coming up.
Red Hot Chili Peppers is a very recognizable rock band from Los Angeles. Formed in the early ’80s, they’re pretty ubiquitous, in- and outside of the rock scene. Their frontman, Anthony Kiedis, published an autobiography in 2004, Scar Tissue.
In Scar Tissue, Kiedis describes his commission of statutory rape against a 14-year-old girl. It looks like the Internet’s finally ready to talk about that.
A sexual predator, a child predator, in the rock industry is not even remotely surprising at this point in history. Like the rest of the entertainment world, there are more than enough examples of rock artists’ sexual misconduct being an open secret. What is less common is an artist writing out the encounter, fully dramatizing it, and admitting to not only sleeping with the girl again after she says she’s 14, she’s the daughter of a police chief, and she is technically “missing”, but also to later writing a sexually explicit song about said minor.
Scar Tissue is a memoir about Kiedis’s past. He talks about various elements of his life, including his upbringing and drug abuse. We could chalk this criminal story up to Kiedis going over mistakes he’s made. We could, but we can’t, because it does not read as if it was a mistake. It was not written in a tone that makes the reader think this was a bad thing — a literal crime — that happened.
It’s clear in the book, page 159. They played a show in New Orleans, and after, a “lovely young woman” came into their dressing room. The way he, in his 40s when writing the book, describes meeting and sleeping with a child is disturbing.
The song written about this girl is “Catholic School Girls Rule” — a very eloquent and verbose set of lyrics, clearly unashamed about being capable of having this opinion only after committing statutory rape at least twice. On Genius, the description of the song now includes this necessary information, but that wasn’t always the case. As far back as 2015 and as recently as May, 2022, the blurb intentionally avoided making the situation clear.
Whoever contributed this information knew enough to note that Kiedis and the teenager met backstage. They knew enough to put “before discovering her age.” The person who took the time to give backstory on this song knew what happened. For whatever reason, however, they elected to not include that the two, according to Kiedis himself, really did have sex.
It’s avoidance such as this that helps fuel an industry’s open secrets. Anthony Kiedis is not the first, nor the last, nor the most egregious example of a rockstar taking advantage of minors and other vulnerable people. From authorities ignoring accusations to hordes of fans defending their idols even in the face of confessions, everyone is responsible for keeping these secrets from being handled the way they should be.
Regardless of how it may seem, I am of the camp that people, even child predators, can change for the better. As far as I can find, there is no evidence that Kiedis has done something like this in recent years. What he has done is discuss Scar Tissue in an interview. In 2016, as reported by Contact Music, Kiedis talked with The Sun about regretting writing the memoir due to the “pain caused” amongst the people in his life. Nevertheless, he admits that he sees the book as a good thing, that there has been a positive effect on those who have read it. Admittedly, the book as a whole may have done this; in its entirety, it might be an illuminating look at the negative impacts of drug abuse and reckless sexual activity. I believe Kiedis when he says people have told them they got their lives back on track after reading Scar Tissue. But where exactly does the commission of statutory rape of a fourteen-year-old fit in that effect?
Most people don’t want to, as an adult, have sex with a low-age teenager, let alone after learning that her chief-of-police father has people looking for her. One would be hard-pressed to argue that this tale would dissuade a predator from acting or convince a would-be predator to seek help. It’s merely a crazy story from tour, a wild thing that happened once.
The more we ignore, push aside, omit, and forget, the more there will be crazy stories from tour, more wild happenings like this that fade into the distance, leaving the victims as simply the remains of unaddressed open secrets.
