Four women accuse Guy Gerber of rape
The four women are strangers to each other and their alleged rapes happened over a four month period, from April to July 2013
It is hard to imagine that the multitude of pending criminal and civil proceedings against Diddy will bear out any conclusion other than that he is a serial abuser. Some might call him a monster. As it stands, more than 120 women and men are set to file sexual assault claims against him, according to Buzbee law firm. This follows the video released earlier this year of Diddy’s brutal beating in 2016 of his then-partner Cassie in a hotel hallway, which substantiated some of the accusations made by Cassie in her own lawsuit against Diddy filed last September and settled the following day for an undisclosed amount. Her lawsuit accused Diddy of a litany of sexual and physical assaults which spanned years. Cassie said that she was plied with drugs by Diddy before his notorious “freak-offs” and that she later took them willingly because they “allowed her to disassociate during these horrific encounters.” Nearly every other day, we are hearing more disturbing details about Diddy’s alleged crimes, including sex with underage boys and girls, violent physical assaults, and gang rape. As we sort through the mounting allegations and evidence, we are left to wonder how these alleged crimes went unchecked for so long—and how many other offenders are yet to be called out.
Tony Buzbee, the attorney representing many of Diddy’s alleged victims, has said that these 120 alleged victims’ claims involve "many powerful people" and "many dirty secrets." Many men in the music industry have been accused of sexual assault and sexual harassment over the past few years, among them Marilyn Manson, ex-Grammys chief Neil Portnow, and Garth Brooks. But none can match Diddy for the staggering number of alleged victims and the sheer depravity of his crimes, on par with or perhaps exceeding those of Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein. Music hasn’t had its #metoo moment yet, but Diddy might be about to change all that.
Even as Diddy’s alleged crimes are finally coming to light, there are countless women still suffering in silence at the hands of abusive men in music, including many women who claim to have been drugged and assaulted. Mavi De Mars is one such woman. In 2022, she shared a post on Instagram alleging that she had been raped by the Israeli DJ Guy Gerber, a former musical collaborator of Diddy’s, nine years earlier. This is her account of what happened on the night of July 23rd, 2013.
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Mavi
July 2013, Mykonos
I had gone to Greece on holiday to visit my Greek friends and they invited me to a private party in Mykonos. Some of my extended crew from London happened to be at this party, and so was Guy. I had already met him a couple of times through an ex-partner about a year and a half before, and we had briefly hung out at a couple of his gigs in London. As I speak Greek, I went on a mission of trying to convince people from this party to get him [Gerber] to DJ. When we finally got him on the decks, he just played this repetitive 4/4 horrible beat and decided to keep it there for ten minutes until the owners of the party asked him to get off.
This must have been around two or three in the morning. At that point, Guy, the London crew, my Greek friends and I all decided to head back to the villa where Guy was staying. We had a little after[party] and Guy DJed for a couple of hours. That was his first summer of his new residency at Pacha [nightclub] and he spent most of the night talking about his Wisdom of the Glove [party] and how stressful it was and how many problems he was having [with it]. My girlfriends left to meet with some of their other Greek friends but I felt bad about Guy getting kicked off the decks at the other party so I decided to stay until he finished playing. My phone had died and everyone else was leaving. The couple who owned the villa were down at the other end of the pool having what looked like a deep conversation and I did not want to intrude. It must have been maybe nine in the morning. I thought, I’ll wait and then I'll ask them for a charger and charge my phone and then I'll leave too. In the meantime I went and I sat next to Guy, who was just finishing DJing. He said, “Do you want a line and a shot?” I was tired and sober so I said, “Ok, sure, why not?” I have this vague memory of him taking out one bag that had the last bit [of drugs] in it and then taking out another bag that had more [drugs] in it. Within maybe 10 minutes, we were both standing up which I was a bit confused about, I didn’t know why we were standing up. I remember him then leaning in to kiss me and in my head I was thinking, what the fuck is going on? I had absolutely zero interest in him sexually. As a man, he’s just not my type and quite honestly I thought he might be gay.
I remember wanting to move my arms to push him away and not being able to and I was freaking out thinking, why can't I move my arms? And then I remember him putting his arm around me and pulling me into him and walking me towards his bedroom. As we're walking towards the bedroom — and there's nothing I can do to stop it — I remember my consciousness dimming out like a light switch. Next thing, I wake up maybe five hours later, I can't remember exactly. It was maybe 1pm or 2pm and I wake up next to him and I'm naked. First thing I noticed was how sore I was [vaginally]. I was really confused. At the time, I was 28 years old and I had a boyfriend in London that I'd been with for around three years. Then he [Guy] woke up and saw that I was in this frazzled state trying to piece things together. He immediately made a move on me again and started making some comment like, “Oh, you were great last night,” or something about us having great sexual chemistry. I didn’t know what to do or how to react, I just got up and went upstairs. I got a charger, I charged my phone and then I just left. Afterwards I was with my two girlfriends and another male friend and I immediately started having an emotional meltdown. My boyfriend at the time called me and started asking me what happened. He said he had been having nightmares the whole night and could sense that something was happening to me. I told him I slept with Guy but I had no idea how it happened and that I didn’t remember anything. At the time I didn’t know anything about how Rohypnol works, I didn’t even know what it was. I had never heard a story like this about rape. And then I just went into total disassociation.
I managed to disengage with it so much that maybe three weeks later I went to Ibiza with my boyfriend. We ended up at a boat party and Guy was there and I just pretended that nothing had happened. That’s also when I started numbing myself and was just constantly doing drugs. I went from being in a really good place professionally and personally to fully sliding into escapism. I quit my job and spent a couple of months in a really dark place. Around October-November an opportunity to leave London and go to Cyprus presented itself so I took it and that's when I started trying to heal. A few months after moving to Cyprus, I happened to read an article about a girl who was “roofied” with Rohypnol and it just clicked. I realized what had happened to me. The way that she described it was identical to how I had experienced it. That's when I started talking about it openly with my boyfriend and friends and when the #MeToo movement exploded in 2017, I reached out for advice from rape charities and the law firm I worked for. At the time, I was attending weekly therapy and decided that I was still not emotionally ready to take action. I trusted that if it was meant to be, the right moment would come.
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The shame that De Mars experienced following her alleged rape and her initial reluctance to talk it is common among women who are sexually assaulted by powerful men. Many of Harvey Weinstein’s victims kept their assaults a secret for years, or even decades, and described struggling with similar feelings.
I spoke to an acquaintance of De Mars’ who says that De Mars was upset and confused the day after the alleged assault. “She more or less said that she didn’t know what happened [the night before] and that she wasn’t in control of herself,” they said. “She was very distraught.”
On June 19th, 2022, Mavi shared an abridged account of the alleged rape in an Instagram post naming Guy Gerber. Within two days, Gerber had hired a Spanish lawyer, Dr. Jaime Campaner, and shared his own post on Instagram in which he denied Mavi’s account. Gerber also shared a bizarre article that appeared in a Spanish legal publication called Confilegal. The article suggested that De Mars was not a credible witness because she is an astrologer and DJ, and Gerber’s Facebook post described the piece as “true investigative journalism.” In Gerber’s account, he is the victim—a favoured method of manipulation among those accused of sexual assault called DARVO: Deny, Attack and Reverse Victim and Offender. Johnny Depp and Matt Lauer offer prominent recent examples of this. Conciliation meetings between De Mars’ and Gerber’s representatives in October 2022 were unproductive. De Mars has never sought any kind of financial compensation from Gerber. In the conciliation meeting, she requested that he commit to a "spiritual, moral, psychic, physical rehabilitation programme" and dedicate “time and resources to help the #MeToo movement so women can live in a safer way without experiencing this type of harassment.” Gerber rejected this request and said he would drop the case if De Mars withdrew her statement accusing him of rape. De Mars refused, saying that to do so would be “lying”.
On January 24th, 2024, De Mars was served with an indictment letter [in Spanish and in English] summoning her to court in Ibiza, where she lives, on charges of slander [defamation] against Gerber. Gerber’s lawyers have requested that De Mars pay Gerber at least €950,000 (€150,000 for “the moral damages caused by the illegitimate intrusion into my client's right to honor and image” and nearly €750,000 in “lost earnings, plus interest”), in addition to the cost of legal proceedings. The letter also asks De Mars to pay a bond of €1.2 million. This indictment and the amount of money that De Mars has been asked to pay is a classic example of a strategic lawsuit against public participation (SLAPP), which aims to silence and wear down critics and/or accusers via expensive, drawn-out legal proceedings and financial threats. SLAPP suits have been commonly employed in the #MeToo sphere (see Marilyn Manson and Alan Dershowitz) and 34 US states have passed anti-SLAPP laws to combat attacks on free speech.
Two years after Gerber and De Mars’ conciliation meetings in October 2022, the defamation case is still yet to go to court. De Mars, who says she feels exhausted and emotionally depleted by this protracted legal process, has asked Gerber to drop the charges, and is no longer requesting that he go through a rehabilitation program. Gerber has denied her request and in an email, his lawyer Mr. Campaner said the only “solution” proposed by Gerber and his manager would be for De Mars to make a written statement admitting that she lied, and for me to publish it. De Mars maintains that she is telling the truth about the alleged assault, and therefore is unwilling to claim that she lied.
De Mars was the first to accuse Gerber of sexual assault, but she is not the only one. As it stands, three other women have shared eerily similar stories. One of these women, Priscilla*, emailed me in June 2022 after seeing De Mars’ Instagram post alleging that Gerber had raped her. This is Priscilla’s story.
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PRISCILLA*
July 2013, USA
On the night that Gerber allegedly raped Priscilla, she met him at a bar for a few drinks. At some point, Gerber offered her a bump of what she assumed was cocaine, and she accepted. Her next memory is of being in Gerber’s hotel room, a place she had no intention of going to at the start of the night.
“I remember being in the bathroom throwing up, a lot, and thinking that something is going on with me and feeling very scared because I’d never experienced that. I was awake and my brain understood what was going on, but on a physical level, I was paralysed,” she said.
“I wasn’t able to explain what was going on with me, but I was so scared, thinking, ‘what if it's heroin?’ I don’t know what that feels like but in movies you see people throwing up after a heroin experience. So I thought maybe it's that and I felt completely abnormal. Something was going wrong with me on a very deep level.”
Priscilla says that she felt physically unable to speak or express her discomfort. She says that Gerber proceeded to have sex with her, aggressively. “The experience was very rough. I felt very hurt inside. I didn’t say anything and I don’t know if that was because I was paralysed or what was happening to me. I waited for the morning until he was asleep and I was able to run away and I took a cab.”
Priscilla says she tried to forget the experience completely. “I didn't talk about it. It was hard to explain to myself exactly what happened and I didn't want to interpret it as being a victim. But on some deep level, I was very hurt.”
When Priscilla saw De Mars’ Instagram post about allegedly being raped by Guy Gerber, her response was visceral. “It was surprising to me when I saw that post from Mavi, my body reaction and everything. I was shaking and then I started to remember that experience in flashbacks because [I knew] something was off. It was so shocking to me when I went through my phone and I realised that it happened to me in 2013 as well, at the start of summer.”
Asked how it felt to be sharing her story, Priscilla said, “it's a really painful process emotionally. It's hard.” She had problems sleeping after she saw De Mars’ post, and said, “it’s like a roller coaster, ups and downs. And it's definitely hard to talk about it and it's traumatising, it’s like it’s retraumatising you again. It’s been challenging times, definitely.”
I spoke to a friend of Priscilla’s, Jasmine*, who recalls Priscilla meeting up with Gerber that night. She says that when she asked Priscilla about it the following day, Priscilla said she didn’t want to talk about it and from that point on, would always change the subject whenever Gerber’s name came up in conversation. Jasmine says that Priscilla sent her a link to DeMars’ Instagram post the day after it was published and asked Jasmine to call her. “She was full of shock and she told me that this is almost exactly what happened to her that night,” Jasmine says.
***
I spoke to two more women who suspect that Gerber drugged and raped them. Catherine* has a memory of doing a line of what she thought was cocaine with Gerber in a nightclub toilet cubicle in Europe in spring 2013. She says she woke up to “Guy fucking me too hard” and had no recollection of leaving the club with Gerber and no idea where she was and how she got there. She said she would have flashbacks of that night for years afterwards without understanding why. When she saw De Mars’ post, she said to herself, “Oh my God, this reminds me of that night. Then I had nightmares, I had dreams, I had thoughts, everything came back to me, it was terrible.”
Soraya* says she accepted a bump of what she thought was cocaine from Gerber in a toilet cubicle at a festival in the UK in May 2013. Her next memory is of waking up in Gerber’s hotel room naked, and feeling sore vaginally, as though she had been penetrated roughly. She had no recollection of how she got there. “I just lived with the fact that I’d gotten myself into such a state that I couldn’t remember what I’d done, and then I just put it to the back of my mind,” she said. She says she felt “sick to her stomach” when she saw De Mars’ post on Instagram. “I thought, ok, maybe when I went with him to the toilets, that’s where it’s all gone horribly wrong. I did a couple of bumps and I [couldn’t] remember anything after that.”
***
These alleged assaults occurred in four different countries over four consecutive months, from April to July 2013, and were reported by four women with no relationship to each other.
Each of the four alleged assaults involved drugs and rough sex and each woman described feeling confused, out of control, and said they had not consented to sex with Gerber. I spoke with all of them at length. None of them were seeking any kind of financial compensation; they all wanted to stay anonymous and said they were coming forward to hopefully prevent other women from having similar experiences in the future. All four women claimed to be traumatised by their alleged assaults and two of them were audibly upset when I spoke with them.
But Mavi, Priscilla, Catherine and Soraya are not the first women to accuse Guy Gerber of violence. On the 9th of February, 2012, police were called to the Los Angeles apartment where Gerber was living with his partner. The record of this call for service and corresponding codes indicate that the caller reported hearing a woman screaming from inside the apartment and that the situation had been deemed a life-threatening emergency by the person who received the 911 call. Police sped to the apartment with their red and blue car lights flashing and sirens blaring. Gerber’s then-partner alleges that he physically attacked her. Police arrested Gerber and took him to the police station. He was released on bail the following day. Gerber himself spoke about the alleged assault in an interview in 2015, saying, “My ex lied to the police and said I hit her. They sent me to jail, and I got out of jail, and wanted to tell that story.” On the 16th of February 2012, a week after he was arrested for physically assaulting his ex-partner, Gerber posted on Facebook about having to cancel his imminent tour to Brazil, saying, “I am still having issues with my US work visa.” Criminal charges can interfere with a non-citizen's ability to re-enter the U.S. if they leave the country. The woman decided not to press charges and by March 2012, he had resumed international touring.
Reflecting on how Diddy was able to get away with his abuse for decades, including throughout the same time frame as the alleged assaults above, and keeping in mind that both Diddy and Gerber have been accused of multiple counts each of drug-facilitated sexual assault, the connection between the two men is compelling—if not outright troubling.
Gerber and Diddy worked together for a number of years in the lead up to the release of their 11 11 album in 2014. In a mini documentary of the album for THUMP, Diddy says to Gerber, “your accent’s gonna get us a lot of hoes.” In interviews, Gerber has regularly spoken about his drug use, including recounting taking drugs with Diddy at Burning Man. Following 11 11’s release, Diddy said that he wanted to call the album Ketamine. Gerber said in an interview that he wanted to call it GHB, and that he had introduced Diddy to ketamine. (GHB usually comes as a colourless, odourless liquid that is often tasteless when slipped into drinks. Rohypnol and ketamine can be crushed into a white powder and snorted, and can easily be mistaken for cocaine, which has stimulating rather than sedative effects.) GHB, ketamine, and Rohypnol are among the substances commonly used as date rape drugs. Diddy has been accused of using these substances to help facilitate some of his sexual assaults. De Mars believes that they may have played a role in what happened to her.
Diddy threw a birthday party for Gerber in 2014 at one of his notorious, allegedly sex and drug-filled Ibiza villa parties, and Gerber attended Diddy’s Grammys after party at the Playboy Mansion on February 12, 2011, just a few days after he was arrested for physically assaulting his former partner. Gerber posted about the “trashy” and “fun” party on Facebook, writing, “jena Jameson says hi” [sic].
Diddy and Gerber were introduced by Ralph Moore, who was then an editor-at-large at Mixmag, a major electronic music publication, and who acted as co-executive producer on the 11:11 album. Moore was also a close associate of the late DJ Erick Morillo, who died of acute ketamine toxicity in September 2020, three days before he was due to be in court on rape charges. Morillo and Diddy had a close friendship and working relationship, especially in the mid-2000s and early ‘10s, and Moore partied with both men. After his death, Morillo was accused of sexual assault spanning three decades, much of it allegedly drug-facilitated. Morillo had a well-documented ketamine addiction that nearly cost him his arm at one point. Gerber and Morillo have also partied together.
Gerber also regularly mentions his penchant for women and drugs in interviews with music journalists, making comments not unlike some of those made by Diddy. In one video interview shot in his hotel room, he says to the female journalist, “we did a little orgy with a few girls here.” In another interview, he says, “The most important thing, excuse me for saying this, but there’s loads of women. It’s the most important aspect of a party, even though I care about the music just as much.” In the same interview, when asked about who would be on his ultimate Ibiza closing party lineup, he included “Lana Del Rey (only because I heard she sleeps with a lot of people in the industry).”
Despite these allegations, there are no known pending or former criminal investigations or allegations against Gerber for sexual crimes. Nor are the stories above incontrovertible proof that Gerber has committed sexual assault. It is not unusual for DJs to be heavy drug users and for male DJs to surround themselves with beautiful women, especially a decade ago, prior to changing attitudes about the objectification of women. But Mavi, Priscilla, Catherine and Soraya’s similar allegations of drug-facilitated sexual assault may suggest a pattern of inappropriate behaviour as well as the potential abuse of both drugs and women. As do Gerber’s (now-deleted) sexually suggestive Instagram posts making light of allegations of non-consensual drugging and rape—including an image of a blurry Bill Cosby (accused of drugging and sexually assaulting at least 60 women) with the caption, "if you're seeing this, it's too late".
*names have been changed
Sincere thanks to the excellent legal team who generously consulted with me pro bono; I am eternally grateful.
Mavi De Mars is now represented by Buzbee Law Firm.
Anyone with additional information can contact me at annabel_ross@protonmail.com