"It's tempting to think that another Erick Morillo couldn't happen", said Tamanna Rahman at the end of her 2021 BBC documentary Music's Dirty Secrets: Women Fight Back. But it could, and it has - first with Marilyn Manson and now, most recently, with Tim Westwood.
Which is precisely why Vice and gal-dem are to be commended for establishing the collaborative venture Open Secrets, which consists of articles that focus on sexual misconduct and abusive behaviour in the music industry.
Crucially, the initiative isn't simply an attempt to shine a spotlight to ensure that there's nowhere for abusers to hide; it also recognises that the problems are structural and systemic: "Survey after survey reveals the extent of such abuse, but the industry itself remains unchanged. It is far easier to pass off individuals convicted of abuse, like R Kelly, as bad apples rather than admit the whole system is rotten from the inside out." If more people acknowledged the weight of evidence and made that admission, real progress might be possible.
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