Taylor Swift’s blunt testimony last week was jarring.
“It was a definite grab…. A very long grab. He grabbed my a-- underneath my skirt,” Swift said of former radio personality David Mueller. A Denver jury ruled Monday that he assaulted her at a meet-and-greet photo op in 2013.
Report: U.S TODAY
Whoa. That’s stomach turning.
Surely, that doesn’t happen in the world of family-friendly country music. Surely, a kinder, gentler Music Row consistently treats women with warmth and respect, right?
Wrong.
Several female veterans in the country music industry said this week there is a culture of mistreating women in the genre.
'Women have been too afraid to speak out'
They all stress that only a small number of men — at radio stations, record labels and recording studios — engage regularly in sexual harassment or abuse. But many others turn their heads when they see it.
“This has been going on for decades, but women have been too afraid to speak out until now because it would mean kissing their careers at radio good bye,” said Beverly Keel, chair of MTSU's Department of Recording Industry and a former senior vice president at major Nashville record label UMG.
“Unfortunately, there are a few bad eggs who use their influence and power to exploit women,” Keel said. “It’s alive and thriving in the music industry in 2017.”
Artists Lari White, Angaleena Presley and Meghan Linsey, and former longtime record label executive Shelia Shipley Biddey also said they’ve experienced or witnessed mistreatment of women.
'Sexual innuendo and cat calls'
“Oh Lord, yes, I’ve seen it,” said White, a ’90s country star with hits Now I Know and That’s My Baby.
“I encountered on a regular basis rude comments and sexual innuendo and cat calls and overt sexual propositions in professional settings.”
The abuse takes several forms.
The first, like in Swift’s situation, are men in radio who proposition or touch female artists or make sexual jokes around them.
“Sadly, this probably happens way more than anyone knows,” said Biddey, who added artists rely on radio stations to add their songs to playlists.
“Most of these programmers are powerful and control the chart. They know a label and artist have to come back to them over and over again for that favor or weekly add if they want their single to go up the chart.”
'Staring at my breasts'
Abuse also can come at the hands of record label execs or album producers who can make or break young artists’ careers.
Presley — a solo artist and also member of country trio Pistol Annies with Miranda Lambert — had a run-in with a radio rep from her own record label after she'd lost some weight.
Presley asked him why he hadn't pushed her songs to radio a couple of years before then.
"Staring at my breasts, he said, 'Well, you didn't look like this back then,'" she emailed.
Keel, co-founder of Music Row women’s coalition Change the Conversation, mentors a budding artist in her 20s who found herself in a terrifying situation this year while recording music.
“The producer dropped his pants in the studio and said suggestive things,” Keel said.
Meghan Linsey says she was groped
Linsey, a 2015 contestant on NBC's The Voice, posted on her personal Facebook page last year that she was groped by a music industry executive in 2010 when she was in a country duo with her then boyfriend, Yahoo.com reported.
“When I was touring with Steel Magnolia in 2010, a very powerful man in the music business grabbed up my skirt. He was groping me and proceeded to try to pick me up by my a-- on a bus in front of a lot of important people," she wrote.
“I was mortified and told him not to touch me and to put me down."
Linsey wrote that both her manager and her record label chief told her to keep it to herself and not complain or report the assault.
“Men have done far worse things to me in the past, but this was the first time I was told I couldn’t say anything because of how it would affect my career," she posted.
"Because of how powerful he was, he could do anything he wanted to me. If I wanted to have a singing career, then I had to let him grab me wherever he wanted and he was allowed to threaten me."
'A huge first step'
Several of today’s top women country stars, through their publicists, declined to comment for this story.
The women who are speaking out hope Swift will inspire other artists to expose abuse.
“Taylor is a strong young woman willing to stand her ground on what happened,” Biddey said.
“I’m proud of her. Most women don’t have the luxury of telling their story in a public forum.”
Keel called Swift’s testimony and countersuit “a huge first step.”
“I hope it’ll encourage other women to come forward. It’s not about naming names, it’s about describing a situation that exists. So that going forward, men will know it’s not ok, and they will get in trouble if it happens.”
In her own words: Lari White's rough run-in with a radio programmer
"(I was) a young up-and-coming country artist with a couple of hits... out on a radio tour with the executives of my record label and going to visit the program director at one of the biggest radio stations in the country.
"I'm the only female in the group, and we’re all standing in the program director’s office about to go to a lunch. And the first thing this program director does, is tells this joke about gang rape and how much the female subject of the joke was enjoying it.
"As a young woman, it made me cringe all over. At the same time, I didn’t laugh, but I didn’t say, ‘You’re an a--hole....
"The head of my record label and my manager were standing there chuckling nervously ... grins on their faces, knowing ‘I shouldn’t be laughing at this, but this guy controls my next 150 adds.’ They were victims, too....
"But I experienced it as a woman. A guy can’t fathom this abysmal lack of humor in a gang rape."
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