PWR BTTM Responds to Sexual Assault Allegations

On May 12, Jezebel published an interview with an anonymous woman who claimed she was assaulted by PWR BTTM’s Ben Hopkins. She told Jezebel that Hopkins had assaulted her while she was sleeping and refused to wear protection. By the next day, the band had been dropped from their management and label, and this week their music was pulled from streaming services.

PWR BTTM declined Jezebel’s multiple requests for comment. Today, the band has issued a public statement on Facebook in response to the sexual assault allegations we published last week.

In the post, Hopkins, who uses they/them pronouns, writes that they “strongly contest the account put forth in Jezebel” and is “firmly committed to consent, to communication, and to mutual expression of sexual interest.” They believe that their sexual incidents with this person were consensual, writing:

We met the night before a show in March of 2016 and spent most of the following day together. After the show, she invited me back to her house and we eventually engaged in sex. Based on the nature of our communications and our interactions with one another, I understood our interactions to be fully consensual. We stayed in touch over the course of several weeks by exchanging texts and pictures. Later, she asked if she could stay with me at my home, where we had sex several more times over the course of those days. Again, I understood these interactions to be fully consensual, especially since our ongoing communications continued to be mutual, positive and reciprocal in nature. We did not see each other much after that but when we did it was entirely pleasant and we continued to exchange texts, including as recently as March of this year. I had no indication before last week that she had any concerns about our interaction.

Hopkins’s band member Liv Bruce also responded, writing that Bruce was contacted by the anonymous person in February but did not tell Hopkins about the allegations until last week so as to protect the accuser’s anonymity. The band also says they will be shutting down the email account they’d set up for people who wanted to contact them with information regarding the assaults, writing that “there is no viable way to do what we were trying to accomplish.”