Berlin’s state prosecutor said Wednesday that it had launched an investigation into accusations that Till Lindemann, the frontman of the German rock band Rammstein, had drugged and sexually assaulted women.
Accusations against Mr. Lindemann — including that he oversaw a system to recruit female fans for sex before, during and after Rammstein shows — had been swirling on social media and in reports by German news outlets, citing anonymous sources, for nearly two weeks. But there had been no legal response until Wednesday.
Mr. Lindemann’s lawyers did not reply to a request for comment on Thursday, but last week, they issued a statement denying that Mr. Lindemann had drugged women and warning that they would take legal action against individuals making such claims and news outlets reporting them.
After news of the investigation broke, the band’s record company, Universal Music, announced that it would suspend promotional and marketing activities for the band. “The accusations against Till Lindemann have shocked us,” a record label spokeswoman said in a statement on Thursday.
Rammstein, a metal band that is arguably Germany’s most famous musical act, is currently in the midst of a 35-date European stadium tour. After one of the tour’s first concerts, in Vilnius, Lithuania, in May, Shelby Lynn, a 24-year old woman from Northern Ireland who was at the gig, posted an extended Twitter thread in which she said she had been invited into “row zero,” a special zone in front of the stage, inaccessible to regular concertgoers.
In her telling, she and other women were led from there to a preshow party where they were offered alcohol. Later, after the show began, Ms. Lynn said she was singled out and taken to a small room below the stage, where she was told to wait for Mr. Lindemann. The singer appeared during an instrumental number expecting sex, she said, adding that when she declined, he behaved angrily.
Ms. Lynn said she believes that she had been drugged, possibly when Mr. Lindemann served tequila shots to women attending the preshow party. After drinking one of those, Ms. Lynn wrote on Twitter, she felt like “a human zombie, singing, dancing, but also stumbling.” She said she was violently ill the next day and discovered bruises on her body.
Ms. Lynn filed a police report in Vilnius, but the Lithuanian authorities said they would not investigate because they saw no evidence of a crime.
The Twitter thread by Ms. Lynn was quickly picked up, and as many as 50 other women got in touch over social media to share similar stories, she said in a direct message exchange with The New York Times over Instagram. She posted some of the messages on her own feed, with the women’s names deleted.
Many major German news outlets investigated and published evidence of a system to recruit young women to backstage parties. Women who spoke anonymously to the newspaper Die Welt said that, after attending the gatherings, they experienced symptoms that could indicate they had been drugged. But no one, besides Ms. Lynn, agreed to put their name to the charges.
Then a German social media influencer, Kaya Loska, 21, who posts as Kayla Shyx, posted her own story on YouTube, where she has nearly 800,000 subscribers. In the 37-minute video, she says she was recruited to attend a backstage party at a Rammstein concert in Berlin, in June 2022. She had to give her cellphone to security, she says, and was led into a room where young women were offered alcohol and sandwiches, and told to wait.
“We were simply brought in there so that Rammstein could choose some for himself,” Ms. Loska texted a friend hours after the concert, according to screenshots she shared in her video. She left the party after having that realization, she says in the video.
It was well-known on Rammstein fan sites and in Reddit threads devoted to the band that women who wanted to attend the band’s backstage parties could get in touch via Instagram with Alena Makeeva, a Russian woman who called herself Rammstein’s “casting director.” Ms. Lynn and Ms. Loska both said that Ms. Makeeva had invited them to attend the parties.
Ms. Lynn, whose social media posts ultimately led the Berlin investigation, said she was encouraged by how many women had spoken out already. “Already there has been so many girls,” Ms. Lynn said in an Instagram direct message, adding that she believed the state prosecutor’s investigation would encourage more to come forward.
“I can’t imagine how many more there will be,” she said. “I can only hope the girls too afraid know that they can have faith in me, and have faith we will get justice.”
Christopher F. Schuetze covers German news, society and occasionally arts from the Berlin bureau. Before moving to Germany, he lived in the Netherlands, where he covered everything from tulips to sea-level rise. @CFSchuetze
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