Sheryl Crow Opens Up About Alleged Sexual Harassment From Michael Jackson's Late Manager Frank DiLeo
Sheryl Crow is coming forward.
The 59-year-old “Soak Up the Sun” singer spoke out about the alleged sexual harassment she faced from Michael Jackson‘s late manager Frank DiLeo while touring with him in the late ’80s in an interview with The Independent.
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“Naiveté is such a beautiful thing,” she said.
“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.”
In the interview, she reflected on early tabloid stories of MJ falling in love his “sexy backing singer.”
She now feels, as she wrote in her book Words + Music, that Frank Dileo planted the stories “to make Mike look like he was interested in women.”
She alleged that her manager was the one interested instead, and harassed her, threatening to end her career if she refused his advances.
“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. To be able to play that stuff about the long bout of sexual harassment I endured during the Michael Jackson tour and 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,” she said.
She also made reference to the alleged harassment on her 1993 debut album Tuesday Night Music Club on “What I Can Do for You”, written from the perspective of an abuser, as well as “The Na-Na Song”, featuring the line “Frank DiLeo‘s dong / Maybe if I’d have let him I’d have had a hit song.”
“Isn’t that what music is really for? To help us work through whatever our experiences are, and hopefully for the collective to find their own situations in your music too?” she said.
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