Guns N’ Roses singer Rose sued for rape 35 years ago

Former American model Sheila Kennedy filed a lawsuit against Guns N’ Roses lead singer Axl Rose in the New York Supreme Court. In the lawsuit, Ms. Kennedy claims that Axl Rose raped her in a hotel in 1989, and demands moral compensation from him. The magazine reports this Rolling Stone with reference to the text of the document.

According to the publication, in the lawsuit, 61-year-old Sheila Kennedy says that in 1989 she met Axl Rose at a nightclub in New York. According to her, after the party at the club, Mrs. Kennedy, her friend (name not specified) and TV presenter Riki Rachtman went to the hotel room.

The lawsuit says that in the room, Axl Rose offered cocaine and champagne to the guests, and then had group sex. When the musician began “violent sexual intercourse” with one of the girls present, Sheila Kennedy left the room. At that moment, outside the door, she heard the sounds of breaking glass and insults from the musician towards the girl, the lawsuit says. Afterwards, Axl Rose went out into the corridor, pushed Sheila Kennedy to the floor, grabbed her by the hair and dragged her into the room.

The document notes that the musician threw her on the bed and tied her hands behind her back with tights. The lawsuit says Axl Rose raped Sheila Kennedy anally without using a condom. According to the text of the document, Sheila Kennedy did not resist during sexual intercourse because she was afraid that the musician would cause her more serious injuries.

Rolling Stone reached out to a representative for the Guns N’ Roses singer for comment, but he had not responded by the time of writing. The Guardian reported that Axl Rose himself did not respond to a similar request from the newspaper.

According to the magazine, Sheila Kennedy suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and depression after the incident at the hotel. In the lawsuit, the model noted that due to PTSD, she now cannot listen to Guns N’ Roses songs. The former model wrote about her rape by Axl Rose in her 2016 autobiography, No One’s Pet, and also spoke in the documentary Look Away (2021), about sexual harassment in the music industry.

On November 24, 2022, New York passed a law that eliminated the statute of limitations on sexual harassment claims for a year. According to AP, by November 20, 2023, 2.5 thousand claims were filed under this law. In August 2020, a similar law addressing the rape of minors was passed. During the year the law was in effect, 11 thousand lawsuits were filed.

Polina Motyzlevskaya