A group of musicians performing on this year’s Warped Tour are issuing strong condemnations of Jake Mcelfresh, a 23-year-old solo artist who goes by the name Front Porch Step, and who’s been accused of sexual harassment and sexually predatory behavior by numerous teenage girls. Mcelfresh was supposedly pulled from the tour when the allegations came to light, but played a set in Nashville Wednesday.
As Stereogum reports, many Warped Tour artists are furious that Mcelfresh showed up for the Nashville leg of the tour yesterday. In January of this year, he was accused of sexual harassment and exchanging inappropriate text messages with underage girls, one of whom detailed his behavior towards her on her Tumblr. It’s behavior that sure sounds like grooming: she tweeted that all she wanted for her sixteenth birthday was for Front Porch Step to sing to her. She says he DMed her, got her number, called her up, sang to her, and promptly started steering their conversations in a sexual direction, which she went along with, she writes, “because he was famous and I didn’t want him to leave me.” It went on for well over a year, she writes:
may 2014, he began talking to me all over again as if he never ignored me. he would call me over ten times a day and we’d have conversations that lasted longer than two hours. he told me about all of his sex experiences and i told him all of mine. he always wanted to have phone sex and that was something i was never comfortable with. i did it anyways, because he was famous and i didn’t want him to leave me. i probably sent him about 50 nudes a DAY and he sent me two nudes in the total time that we’ve talked. i deleted them and i really wish i hadn’t, because he was sitting on the toilet and you could see his leg tattoo perfectly.
On April 3, Mcelfresh issued a statement on Facebook, admitting his interactions with the girls had been inappropriate, but saying he’d never had any sexual contact with any of them. He said all the interactions were consensual, which is actually not a thing when you’re a man in your mid-twenties and your alleged sexting buds are teenagers. Mcelfresh suggested that he’s being bullied:
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