Ex-Runaways bassist Jackie Fuchs says band manager Kim Fowley raped her at age 16

A former member of the Runaways has made stunning allegations about her victimization at the hands of the band’s manager.

 

Jackie Fuchs, the bassist for the seminal all-female rock group that launched Joan Jett into stardom, said the band’s founder and manager, Kim Fowley, drugged and raped her when she was 16 years old.

In an interview with The Huffington Post, Fuchs, whose stage name was Jackie Fox, alleged the assault took place at a party following the Runaways’ New Year’s Eve show in Orange County, Calif., in 1975.

Fuchs, 55, said a man she believed was a roadie told her to take Quaaludes “no questions asked,” a claim backed up by witnesses at the party, with one describing it as a “date-rape type situation.”

In her first time publicly recounting the alleged incident, Fuchs said she slipped in and out of consciousness as Fowley raped her, “gnashing his teeth and growling like a dog.”

“I remember opening my eyes, Kim Fowley was raping me, and there were people watching me,” Fuchs said, referring to bandmates Jett and Cherie Currie. She said seeing her Runaways bandmates staring at her was her “last memory of the night.”

When asked to comment on the allegations, Jett was said to have “denied witnessing the event as described here.” Currie, for her part, said that she “spoke up and stormed out of the room.”

Fuchs exited the Runaways two years later, and cited the assault as why she chose to leave. Forty years after the incident, the bassist-turned-lawyer said she decided to speak out publicly about what happened to her after reading similar allegations against Bill Cosby and music producer Dr. Luke.

Besides Fuchs, two other women in the article said they were sexually assaulted by the Runaways’ manager when they were teenagers.

Fowley, who died in January from bladder cancer, always denied that he any improper sexual contact with members of the band.

A 2010 biopic about the band called “The Runaways” starred Kristen Stewart as Jett, Dakota Fanning as Currie and Michael Shannon as Fowley — but Fuchs refused to allow herself to be portrayed.