The Runaways‘ manager Kim Fowley raped band member Jackie Fuchs, according to a new piece written about the band.
Fuchs (pictured above far right), who performed in the all-teen rock band under the name Jackie Fox, talked about her experience at the hands of Fowley in a piece published by the Huffington Post this morning (July 9). She explains how she was attacked, aged 16, by Fowley during a gig in Orange County, California on New Year’s Eve 1976.
The bass player in the band explains that women coming forward against their own alleged attackers, including Ke$ha’s lawsuit against producer Dr Luke and the ongoing accusations against comedian Bill Cosby, gave her the confidence to tell her story after nearly 30 years of silence.
Going into the details of the attack by Fowley, who died in January of this year, Fuchs says that he took the band to a hotel near the club after the show.
She then claims that she was given a number of Quaalude sedatives, something witnesses can verify, and heard Fowley ask one of the crew members at the party if they would like to have sex with her. He declined but she says she remembers “opening my eyes, Kim Fowley was raping me, and there were people watching me.”
Getty“You don’t know what terror is until you realise something bad is about to happen to you and you can’t move a muscle,” Fuchs states. “I can’t move. I can’t speak. All I can do is look him in the eye and do the best I can do to communicate: please say no… I don’t know what it looked like from the outside. But I know what was going on inside and it was horror.”
Fowley rose to prominence in the ’60s and worked with several big-name acts including Gene Vincent, KISS, Alice Cooper, Leon Russell and Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers.
Fowley famously recruited the Runaways in 1975 by placing an advertisement in Los Angeles fanzine Who Put the Bomp, and ended up producing the band’s 1976 self-titled debut album and co-wroting their biggest hit ‘Cherry Bomb’.
The likes of Ariel Pink and Sky Ferreira paid tribute to Fowley following his death. Ariel Pink worked with Fowley on his own album ‘Pom Pom’ in 2014.