Content warning: sexual assault
Hess says she remembers hearing about the Orwells as early as two years ago, but the sketchy rumors that reached her barely scratched the surface of what the band has since been accused of doing. “My boyfriend told me that they had a bad reputation, but it was more for being violent or having crazy raucous shows than anything else,” she says. “He had been at the show at Bonnaroo that got cut off mid-set because the crowd was absolutely insane and Mario was egging them on instead of controlling anything.” When she saw the Orwells at Chop Shop in 2016, she says it was “fairly uneventful.” But she does remember something that seems potentially significant in retrospect: a girl in the audience who spent the whole show sobbing. “I never found out who she was, or why she was crying.”
The Metro show also provided a catalyst for Connelly to step up. “When they announced the show at the Metro, it sort of hit me that something actually needed to be done this time, because it would be so unfair for them to still have a thriving career when they have abused and manipulated so many people,” she says. “Since I have no history with anyone in the band at all, I suppose I felt obliged to help the survivors who were too scared to speak up about their experiences with them yet.”
The women who assembled the Google Doc say they wanted the Metro show to be canceled and for the band to take accountability for their actions. However, they never expected everything to happen as quickly as it did. On August 27, the day after the Google Doc went live, the Orwells issued a statement denying all allegations of sexual assault against the three implicated members. That same day, the Metro show was canceled (it’s still not clear whether the band or the venue pulled the plug). On August 29, the Orwells announced that they’d disbanded with a terse post on all their social-media platforms.
Kmet was ecstatic about the breakup at first, but her grief and anger quickly returned when she remembered that most of the women who shared their stories are still enduring trauma from those events. “The memories of the things that I read through pierced through me, because ‘disbanding’ does nothing to rectify the hurt that they have caused,” she says. “There was no apology, only an empty statement that hardly even sounded as though it was written by any actual member of the band.”
