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Marilyn Manson sued by former keyboardist

He says he’s owed more than £9 million

A former keyboardist for Marilyn Manson is suing the singer for £9.8 million.

Stephen Bier says that he is owed the money in shared profits.

Bier, who played under the stage name Madonna Wayne Gacy, claims that he was not paid properly over a period of almost two decades.

He says that Manson spent the band’s profits on a house, drug treatment and collecting Nazi paraphernalia.

However Manson has said that the accusations were “really ridiculous”.

“It just seems like another ex-band member suing me and trying to assassinate my personality as a means to financial gain,” declared the singer.

In legal papers filed in Los Angeles, Bier claims Manson falsely told him the band was not making much money, before starting a two-year spending spree.

Between 2004 and 2006 he claims that Manson used band money to buy a £980,000 home and collect Nazi memorabilia, including coat hangers used by Adolf Hitler.

According to the legal papers Manson also brought “African masks made of human skin, the full skeleton of a four-year-old Chinese girl and the full skeleton of a 17th Century male in a wheelchair”.

Bier says Manson, along with the band’s lawyer and business managers, cut off his salary and band credit card access and refused to pay his medical bills for work-related problems.

The papers say: “Because of Manson and others' fraudulent conduct, Bier has spent almost two decades for working for one of the world’s most popular rock bands that has made millions of dollars in profit and now has almost nothing to show for it.”

However, Manson told BBC News: “The fact that he’s claming that I’ve treated him unfairly financially is really ridiculous. And I would never spend my money on a Chinese girl skeleton. That would be crossing the line.

“It's a Chinese boy, for the record.”
 

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Marilyn Manson performing live at this years Download Festival 2007  Pic Andrew Kendall

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