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Sun Kil Moon's Mark Kozelek accused of sexual misconduct by multiple women

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Mark Kozelek, the musician behind critically acclaimed indie rock bands Sun Kil Moon and Red House Painters, has been accused of sexual misconduct by three different women in a long feature story published by Pitchfork on Thursday.

One woman, an unnamed female musician, told Pitchfork that she and another female musician were invited to Kozelek's hotel room after a music festival in 2014, where Kozelek "acted inappropriately" with her, even by the standards of blurred lines in the music industry.

Another woman, identified by the pseudonym "Andrea," told Pitchfork that Kozelek "exposed himself to her without consent" when they met up in his hotel room in Raleigh, N.C., during the 2014 Hopscotch Music Festival. Kozelek picked out Andrea in the crowd at his performance and invited her up to his room, where he “pretty much just pounced on me,” in her words. Andrea was 19 years old and said that Kozelek kept asking her to say how old she was, which she described to a friend at the time as "literally one of the worst things I’ve had to go through." They had more sexual encounters after that, some of which she told Pitchfork were consensual, but also said, "I feel like our sexual relationship, every encounter was him trying to find another thing he could do, and not in a way where he asks for consent or permission."

The most specific account came from Sarah Catherine Golden, whose encounter with Kozelek in Espinho, Portugal, in November 2017 was apparently the inspiration for Kozelek's song “Soap for Joyful Hands," from Sun Kil Moon's 2018 album This Is My Dinner. After she recognized Kozelek on her flight to Portugal, they struck up a conversation and he invited her to the concert he was performing. After the show, Golden says they went back to his hotel room so he could call her a cab. He did so, but not before he laid down on top of her. After the cab was called, he allegedly began masturbating in front of her, as well as trying to kiss her and fondle her. In a text to a friend after she made it back to her AirBNB, Golden compared Kozelek to comedian Louis C.K., who in 2017 admitted to masturbating in front of women without their consent.

Kozelek has previously made headlines for treating women rudely. The musician first made his name in the '90s with Red House Painters, whose brand of indie rock came to be known as "slowcore." He switched gears in the 2000s with Sun Kil Moon. That band's 2014 album Benji brought him much critical acclaim (including from Pitchfork) for its blend of emotional introspection, haunting guitar, and semi-improvisational lyrics.

But in the years following Benji, Kozelek simultaneously released music at a dizzying pace (under the Sun Kil Moon moniker and others) and infamously behaved rudely in public towards other musicians and music critics (especially women). When journalist Allison Hussey reported on Kozelek deriding his 2014 Hopscotch crowd as "f---ing hillbillies," he called her a “spoiled b---- rich kid blogger brat" in the lyrics of his song "War on Drugs: Suck My Cock" (primarily a diss track aimed at the War on Drugs for playing a set at the same time as him). After journalist Lauren Snapes asked Kozelek questions over email in 2015, he sang these lyrics on stage at a London show: "Laura Snapes totally wants to f--- me/get in line, b----… Laura Snapes totally wants to have my babies.” Snapes wrote then that "listening to the audio made me feel sick."

Kozelek's representatives have not responded to EW's request for comment on this story. Pitchfork also reports having made multiple attempts to contact Kozelek and his reps, but none of the messages were returned.

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