Post by singingcat on Aug 26, 2010 7:49:00 GMT -5
Perhaps this was already posted (pardon me i'm new in the forum), but it's very interesting and exposes some of the lies fabricated in Cherie's book
web.archive.org/web/20010502163621/jackiefox.com/october202000.html
Jackie old website also contains a lots of articles related to Runaways' life on the road
web.archive.org/web/20010304085322/jackiefox.com/runaways.html
October 20, 2000 -- The Truth Shall Set You Free
A number of people have written to me about Cherie's appearance several weeks ago on rockandrollstation.com, wondering about Cherie's statement that there is "bad blood" between her and me, asking whether Lita is really responsible for there not being a Runaways reunion, and wondering if I have any idea what Cherie means by repeating "the truth shall set you free" over and over. I haven't really wanted to address these issues, since I believe in working through the bad times in private, but after much thought, I've decided to break the silence because Cherie is causing so much pain for her former band mates that not addressing her attacks no longer feels like an option.
I don't know the entire history of the proposed reunion since the band did not ask me to be a part of it, but I know from having talked to several other former band members that there were a number of issues that impeded talks along the way, including Kenny Laguna's involvement, Sandy being in prison, and no one being able to determine whether or not Joan was ever interested. But the other girls besides Joan, and Kenny on Joan's behalf, continued, nonetheless, to discuss a possible reunion and consider proposals and only recently have the talks broken off. Cherie would like everyone to believe this is Lita's fault, but the real story is more complicated.
As most of you reading this probably know, Cherie has been writing new material to update her book "Neon Angel: The Cherie Currie Story," which was released in 1989 for the juvenile market and chronicled Cherie's history of drug use and abuse. There was a lot of material on the Runaways, much of it inaccurate, but none of us really cared because it wasn't derogatory and she managed to capture the spirit of the band in spite of the inaccuracies. Cherie has now decided to cough up the seamier details of life in the Runaways for a new, adult audience. Only some of her accounts are false and damaging to the people about whom she writes. Many of the people affected (myself included) are not happy, especially with one proposed chapter of the book, which Cherie has titled "Kim Fowley's Sex Education Class."
In this chapter, Cherie claims that when we played the Golden West Ballroom in Norwalk, California, Kim Fowley drugged a teenaged girl and our other manager forced us to watch Kim rape her. Cherie claims that the rest of the band sat around and watched this, and that I, after seeing it, asked the rest of the band if they had any more hamburgers because I was still hungry.
The event described in Cherie's book never happened, and a number of people Cherie placed in the room during this alleged event have told Cherie so and have asked her to eliminate this chapter or remove them from it, but Cherie has steadfastly refused and has verbally abused the people who have asked. During my conversation with Cherie about it, Cherie screamed at me and told me that I was supposed to be her friend and so I should let her print whatever she wanted. The chapter is so sordid and erroneous, however, that in the face of Cherie's refusal to delete or change the chapter (or even have a rational conversation about it), a number of people, including me, have hired lawyers to demand that Cherie and her publisher not include this material in the reissue of the book. To date, neither Cherie nor her publisher have responded to any of the lawyers' requests or inquiries and, in fact, I have been told that Cherie's response to my lawyer's letter was not to remove me from the chapter as I requested, but to change the chapter so that the teenaged girl is now me.
Now I suspect that reading this makes a lot of you want to go out and buy this book so that you can read the salacious material for yourself. If you want juicy details about the sex lives of the Runaways, however, you're better off buying an erotic novel and crossing out the characters' names and writing ours in. It would be just as accurate and probably a whole lot better written, not to mention a whole lot less painful for the people that Cherie is dragging through the mud. Cherie has a lot of talent, but writing isn't it her strong suit and neither is her memory.
Cherie did a lot of drugs when she was in the band and her recall is atrocious. She is angry and bitter and looking to take a lot of people down for things both real and imagined that occurred, if at all, 25 years ago. She has come out recently and claimed that Kim Fowley "pimped her out to Rick Springfield." I was there the night that Cherie met Rick Springfield (and I mean I was there), and it's a falsehood to say that anything Cherie did that night wasn't voluntary. Cherie and I were both went over to Rick Springfield's apartment and I couldn't get Cherie to leave. I finally left her there about 5:00 in the morning!
Were our managers abusive and did they take advantage of us? Absolutely. I've written accounts in here of verbal and emotional abuse and financial mismanagement, all of which happened. Did they ever drug us or force anyone to have sex with them? Not that I ever saw. I believe that Cherie suffered a great deal of emotional damage during her time in the band and probably before and after as well. But that doesn't mean she remembers it accurately. Everyone in the band has different memories of the events that occurred, and it is tempting to want to believe everyone's accounts. Unfortunately, it's been almost 25 years since the Runaways were a band and even under the best of circumstances memory is a funny thing. You shouldn't take anyone's account of events from that long ago as gospel truth, but if anyone has a good memory of what went on during the Runways days I would have to say it's me. As Cherie herself wrote on page 68 of the original version of her book: Jackie's the real thinker of the group. ... She takes care of her brains the way the rest of us take care of our hair -- and it only figures that she doesn't do a single drug, ever.
It's a well established fact that drug use impairs memory. Cherie has written an entire book about her substantial drug use but would like everyone to believe it didn't affect her memory. But she just isn't credible. In fact, it was my memory and credibility that allowed Cherie's rapist from Dallas (the one she wrote about in her book) to be prosecuted. The district attorney investigating the case hadn't been able to verify crucial elements of Cherie's story and many details were missing. When he visited me at my mother's house to ask me about events that took place in Dallas on the night Cherie first met her attacker, I was able to remember critical details that were verifiable and which backed up portions of Cherie's story. Hell, I was able to remember what I ate for dinner that night and who I ate with (minute steaks with our roadie, Kent). The district attorney told me his great regret was that I decided to leave the club we all went to that night (Mother Blue's) several hours earlier than the rest of the band and couldn't, therefore, verify anyone's account of what happened later that night.
Cherie is obviously suffering and in those moments when I am not angry and upset with the horrible way she has been treating me and Lita and others, I feel genuinely sorry for her. I would love to see her get some help in dealing with her pain and anger. The truth will set Cherie free, but "facts" (even accurate ones) aren't the truth that does it -- the real truth is in acknowledging your pain and the value of yourself and others as human beings. It comes from the heart and isn't about blame or anger or hate. Cherie has tons of genuine talent that is being ignored while she focuses on blaming everyone else, particularly Lita, for ruining her and Sandy. I'd encourage her fans to write to her to encourage her to write songs and perform and to create art. Like a lot of people who have been abused, Cherie seems to be turning into an abuser herself, encouraged by people who want to take advantage of her anger, including her publisher, a man with questionable morals who seems willing to print anything if it will sell more books and who, according to accounts from Cherie's friends, is strongly encouraging her to include this chapter and similar dirt in her book. Cherie has been taken advantage of by enough people in her life. Putting these lies into the world isn't going to help her and is probably going to damage her further. I believe you can help Cherie by writing to her publisher, Robert Conte of Studio Chikara, and telling him that you will not buy the book if it contains damaging information about other members of the band. His email address is stuchikara@aol.com and he is not Cherie's friend.
There is enough "dirt" that went on during the Runaways days to fill a book without impugning the morality of the rest of us. I'm the person who stood up to five very tough homeless people in Massachusetts when I thought they were abusing their dog, even after they threatened to beat the crap out of me. I'm not the type of person who would have stood by and watched a rape, let alone asked for more food after witnessing it. If Cherie wants to talk about her abortions and her sexual encounters and drug use, fine -- it's not material I would want to print, but if Cherie feels it will help her exorcise some demons then I generally support her decision. But she loses my support when she makes up stories about me that would be inappropriate for her to print even if they were true, but are horrifyingly cruel when they aren't.
Cherie also loses my support when she blames Lita for the state of Sandy's life. Lita didn't put Sandy in prison, Sandy did. It is not Lita's fault that Sandy doesn't have a job. Sandy doesn't seem to want one. Lita has gone out of her way to help Sandy, and she has been repaid by being accused of letting Sandy down in her time of need. Lita doesn't owe anyone a reunion. She has a family, including a three year old child, and she isn't going to tear her life apart for a reunion unless the offer and the situation makes sense. And given the current state of attacks by Sandy and Cherie, no one really wants to spend time on tour with them. So at this point, it isn't about Kenny or Joan, that much is true, but isn't Lita's fault either. There are just a lot of unresolved issues for certain members of the band who are relying too heavily on a reunion to save or kick start their careers. In the meantime, the rest of us have developed our own careers and lives and it is not easy to just pick up and leave it behind, especially if you believe that doing so means spending time with nasty people. I don't honestly know how Vicki can stand working on Edgeplay on a regular basis since she has to deal with these issues daily. Fortunately it looks like something great is going to come out of that since it's a terrific film and Vicki seems to have an excellent sense about where the line should be.
I hope Cherie rethinks her plans and removes the damaging chapters from her book. If she doesn't, I would ask that you boycott any version that has this material. It would only encourage the publisher to go on taking advantage of someone who has been through such a hard time, and it would cause a lot of pain and damage to people after 25 years of getting their lives together. I certainly don't want this crap out about me. It's bad enough that I've talked about it here, but at least by getting out first with the inaccuracies, I can maybe get people to realize it isn't true and isn't worth printing. If it gets printed, at least you will know it's false and I can stop some of the damage before it starts.
The bad times happened. No one needs to exaggerate them in order to validate the mistreatment we suffered. But there were a lot of good times too and it would be good for us the realize that our former band mates aren't the enemies. We should respect one another, as people, as musicians, and most of all as humans. Sordid sex tales don't do that and aren't very interesting anyway. They should be left where they belong -- in Cherie's imagination.
web.archive.org/web/20010502163621/jackiefox.com/october202000.html
Jackie old website also contains a lots of articles related to Runaways' life on the road
web.archive.org/web/20010304085322/jackiefox.com/runaways.html
October 20, 2000 -- The Truth Shall Set You Free
A number of people have written to me about Cherie's appearance several weeks ago on rockandrollstation.com, wondering about Cherie's statement that there is "bad blood" between her and me, asking whether Lita is really responsible for there not being a Runaways reunion, and wondering if I have any idea what Cherie means by repeating "the truth shall set you free" over and over. I haven't really wanted to address these issues, since I believe in working through the bad times in private, but after much thought, I've decided to break the silence because Cherie is causing so much pain for her former band mates that not addressing her attacks no longer feels like an option.
I don't know the entire history of the proposed reunion since the band did not ask me to be a part of it, but I know from having talked to several other former band members that there were a number of issues that impeded talks along the way, including Kenny Laguna's involvement, Sandy being in prison, and no one being able to determine whether or not Joan was ever interested. But the other girls besides Joan, and Kenny on Joan's behalf, continued, nonetheless, to discuss a possible reunion and consider proposals and only recently have the talks broken off. Cherie would like everyone to believe this is Lita's fault, but the real story is more complicated.
As most of you reading this probably know, Cherie has been writing new material to update her book "Neon Angel: The Cherie Currie Story," which was released in 1989 for the juvenile market and chronicled Cherie's history of drug use and abuse. There was a lot of material on the Runaways, much of it inaccurate, but none of us really cared because it wasn't derogatory and she managed to capture the spirit of the band in spite of the inaccuracies. Cherie has now decided to cough up the seamier details of life in the Runaways for a new, adult audience. Only some of her accounts are false and damaging to the people about whom she writes. Many of the people affected (myself included) are not happy, especially with one proposed chapter of the book, which Cherie has titled "Kim Fowley's Sex Education Class."
In this chapter, Cherie claims that when we played the Golden West Ballroom in Norwalk, California, Kim Fowley drugged a teenaged girl and our other manager forced us to watch Kim rape her. Cherie claims that the rest of the band sat around and watched this, and that I, after seeing it, asked the rest of the band if they had any more hamburgers because I was still hungry.
The event described in Cherie's book never happened, and a number of people Cherie placed in the room during this alleged event have told Cherie so and have asked her to eliminate this chapter or remove them from it, but Cherie has steadfastly refused and has verbally abused the people who have asked. During my conversation with Cherie about it, Cherie screamed at me and told me that I was supposed to be her friend and so I should let her print whatever she wanted. The chapter is so sordid and erroneous, however, that in the face of Cherie's refusal to delete or change the chapter (or even have a rational conversation about it), a number of people, including me, have hired lawyers to demand that Cherie and her publisher not include this material in the reissue of the book. To date, neither Cherie nor her publisher have responded to any of the lawyers' requests or inquiries and, in fact, I have been told that Cherie's response to my lawyer's letter was not to remove me from the chapter as I requested, but to change the chapter so that the teenaged girl is now me.
Now I suspect that reading this makes a lot of you want to go out and buy this book so that you can read the salacious material for yourself. If you want juicy details about the sex lives of the Runaways, however, you're better off buying an erotic novel and crossing out the characters' names and writing ours in. It would be just as accurate and probably a whole lot better written, not to mention a whole lot less painful for the people that Cherie is dragging through the mud. Cherie has a lot of talent, but writing isn't it her strong suit and neither is her memory.
Cherie did a lot of drugs when she was in the band and her recall is atrocious. She is angry and bitter and looking to take a lot of people down for things both real and imagined that occurred, if at all, 25 years ago. She has come out recently and claimed that Kim Fowley "pimped her out to Rick Springfield." I was there the night that Cherie met Rick Springfield (and I mean I was there), and it's a falsehood to say that anything Cherie did that night wasn't voluntary. Cherie and I were both went over to Rick Springfield's apartment and I couldn't get Cherie to leave. I finally left her there about 5:00 in the morning!
Were our managers abusive and did they take advantage of us? Absolutely. I've written accounts in here of verbal and emotional abuse and financial mismanagement, all of which happened. Did they ever drug us or force anyone to have sex with them? Not that I ever saw. I believe that Cherie suffered a great deal of emotional damage during her time in the band and probably before and after as well. But that doesn't mean she remembers it accurately. Everyone in the band has different memories of the events that occurred, and it is tempting to want to believe everyone's accounts. Unfortunately, it's been almost 25 years since the Runaways were a band and even under the best of circumstances memory is a funny thing. You shouldn't take anyone's account of events from that long ago as gospel truth, but if anyone has a good memory of what went on during the Runways days I would have to say it's me. As Cherie herself wrote on page 68 of the original version of her book: Jackie's the real thinker of the group. ... She takes care of her brains the way the rest of us take care of our hair -- and it only figures that she doesn't do a single drug, ever.
It's a well established fact that drug use impairs memory. Cherie has written an entire book about her substantial drug use but would like everyone to believe it didn't affect her memory. But she just isn't credible. In fact, it was my memory and credibility that allowed Cherie's rapist from Dallas (the one she wrote about in her book) to be prosecuted. The district attorney investigating the case hadn't been able to verify crucial elements of Cherie's story and many details were missing. When he visited me at my mother's house to ask me about events that took place in Dallas on the night Cherie first met her attacker, I was able to remember critical details that were verifiable and which backed up portions of Cherie's story. Hell, I was able to remember what I ate for dinner that night and who I ate with (minute steaks with our roadie, Kent). The district attorney told me his great regret was that I decided to leave the club we all went to that night (Mother Blue's) several hours earlier than the rest of the band and couldn't, therefore, verify anyone's account of what happened later that night.
Cherie is obviously suffering and in those moments when I am not angry and upset with the horrible way she has been treating me and Lita and others, I feel genuinely sorry for her. I would love to see her get some help in dealing with her pain and anger. The truth will set Cherie free, but "facts" (even accurate ones) aren't the truth that does it -- the real truth is in acknowledging your pain and the value of yourself and others as human beings. It comes from the heart and isn't about blame or anger or hate. Cherie has tons of genuine talent that is being ignored while she focuses on blaming everyone else, particularly Lita, for ruining her and Sandy. I'd encourage her fans to write to her to encourage her to write songs and perform and to create art. Like a lot of people who have been abused, Cherie seems to be turning into an abuser herself, encouraged by people who want to take advantage of her anger, including her publisher, a man with questionable morals who seems willing to print anything if it will sell more books and who, according to accounts from Cherie's friends, is strongly encouraging her to include this chapter and similar dirt in her book. Cherie has been taken advantage of by enough people in her life. Putting these lies into the world isn't going to help her and is probably going to damage her further. I believe you can help Cherie by writing to her publisher, Robert Conte of Studio Chikara, and telling him that you will not buy the book if it contains damaging information about other members of the band. His email address is stuchikara@aol.com and he is not Cherie's friend.
There is enough "dirt" that went on during the Runaways days to fill a book without impugning the morality of the rest of us. I'm the person who stood up to five very tough homeless people in Massachusetts when I thought they were abusing their dog, even after they threatened to beat the crap out of me. I'm not the type of person who would have stood by and watched a rape, let alone asked for more food after witnessing it. If Cherie wants to talk about her abortions and her sexual encounters and drug use, fine -- it's not material I would want to print, but if Cherie feels it will help her exorcise some demons then I generally support her decision. But she loses my support when she makes up stories about me that would be inappropriate for her to print even if they were true, but are horrifyingly cruel when they aren't.
Cherie also loses my support when she blames Lita for the state of Sandy's life. Lita didn't put Sandy in prison, Sandy did. It is not Lita's fault that Sandy doesn't have a job. Sandy doesn't seem to want one. Lita has gone out of her way to help Sandy, and she has been repaid by being accused of letting Sandy down in her time of need. Lita doesn't owe anyone a reunion. She has a family, including a three year old child, and she isn't going to tear her life apart for a reunion unless the offer and the situation makes sense. And given the current state of attacks by Sandy and Cherie, no one really wants to spend time on tour with them. So at this point, it isn't about Kenny or Joan, that much is true, but isn't Lita's fault either. There are just a lot of unresolved issues for certain members of the band who are relying too heavily on a reunion to save or kick start their careers. In the meantime, the rest of us have developed our own careers and lives and it is not easy to just pick up and leave it behind, especially if you believe that doing so means spending time with nasty people. I don't honestly know how Vicki can stand working on Edgeplay on a regular basis since she has to deal with these issues daily. Fortunately it looks like something great is going to come out of that since it's a terrific film and Vicki seems to have an excellent sense about where the line should be.
I hope Cherie rethinks her plans and removes the damaging chapters from her book. If she doesn't, I would ask that you boycott any version that has this material. It would only encourage the publisher to go on taking advantage of someone who has been through such a hard time, and it would cause a lot of pain and damage to people after 25 years of getting their lives together. I certainly don't want this crap out about me. It's bad enough that I've talked about it here, but at least by getting out first with the inaccuracies, I can maybe get people to realize it isn't true and isn't worth printing. If it gets printed, at least you will know it's false and I can stop some of the damage before it starts.
The bad times happened. No one needs to exaggerate them in order to validate the mistreatment we suffered. But there were a lot of good times too and it would be good for us the realize that our former band mates aren't the enemies. We should respect one another, as people, as musicians, and most of all as humans. Sordid sex tales don't do that and aren't very interesting anyway. They should be left where they belong -- in Cherie's imagination.
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