Sheryl Crow recalls sexual harassment she endured during Michael Jackson tour at hands of late manager Frank DiLeo
Sheryl Crow says the music industry may be better at listening to women now than when she suffered sustained sexual harassment during Michael Jackson’s 1987 “Bad” tour.
But there’s still work to do.
In a new interview with The Independent, the nine-time Grammy winner recalled her abuse at the hands of Jackson’s manager Frank DiLeo and how it tipped her into a long bout of depression.
“Naiveté is such a beautiful thing,” Crow, 59, told the outlet, referring to how she blindly walked straight into the “long bout of sexual harassment.”
“It was incredible in every way, shape and form for a young person from a really small town to see the world and to work with arguably the greatest pop star... But I also got a crash course in the music industry,” she said.
“It’s really interesting to go back and revisit some of this old stuff and the experiences that went along with it, and then to compare it with where we are now,” she said. “To talk about it in the midst of the MeToo movement... it feels like we’ve come a long way, but it doesn’t feel like we’re quite there yet.”
Crow referenced DiLeo in two songs on her 1993 debut album, including “The Na-Na Song,” which includes the lines: “Frank DiLeo’s dong / Maybe if I’d let him I’d have had a hit song.” But it wasn’t until the release of her “Words + Music” audiobook last year that Crow went into detail.
She said the audiobook, released last September, was “the first time I’ve ever talked about it and it felt really uncomfortable, but it felt, to me, so much more empowering to be able to talk about it and then play the music that was inspired by it.”
In the book, she said Frank DiLeo “took a liking” to her, sexually harassed her and threatened her career if she ever outed him.
“Not only was Frank promising to make me a star, he also promised that if I didn’t, that I would never work again, that he would see to it, if I ever opened my mouth,” she said.
She recalled always having to “ride in the limo with him.”
“It was scary enough for me that I actually told my parents. And that is not the kind of thing you want to drag your parents from Kennett, Missouri, into,” she said.
“I hired a very high-powered attorney, and I sat down with him and told him everything, and at the end of the conversation, he said, ‘Well, it seems to me you have someone promising you a career with songs and albums coming out in the Top 10 who’s willing to make you, and you should feel lucky,’” she recalled.
She said the message was loud and clear: “Knuckle down and put up with a little sexual harassing for what I was going to get out of it.”
She said that was a moment when “my innocence was lost.”
Speaking to The Independent, she said moving to Los Angeles was something she did after plenty of preparation, earning a music degree and doing her homework. But that’s not what the industry rewarded.
“You’ve practiced your whole life, you’ve listened to the greatest artists, you’ve played in coffee bars, and then you get out there and you learn: ‘Okay, this is how the music industry works: A corporation buys so many records. It puts you in the top 10. We take your publishing.’ It was disillusioning,” she said.
“I think when your dream bubble is burst you either go: ‘Okay, well, I’m going to forget that dream,’ or you do what I did, which was wallow in it for about a year, and then you pull your bootstraps up and you get back to work,” she said.
On Friday, Crow she will perform a solo show live-streamed from a church she built in her backyard. She plans to play her music and offer insights about her writing process, The Independent reported.
“It’s really interesting to go back and revisit some of this old stuff and the experiences that went along with it, and then to compare it with where we are now,” she said.
