NEWS
GOOD PEOPLE
HISTORY
LIFE HACKS
THE PLANET
SCIENCE & TECH
POLITICS
WHOLESOME
WORK & MONEY
About Us Contact Us Privacy Policy
GOOD is part of GOOD Worldwide Inc.
publishing family.
© GOOD Worldwide Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Circa Survive Guitarist Walks Off Stage To Confront A Man Apparently Sexually Harassing A Woman In The Audience

He explained what happened in a series of Tweets after the show.

Photo (cropped) by Jason Cox/Flickr.

Rock musicians have a long history of jumping into the crowd. Guns N’ Roses singer, Axl Rose, was once so infuriated with a fan illegally taking pictures that he asked security to handle the situation. When security failed to act, Rose took care of business himself by jumping into the crowd and stealing the camera from the man, assaulting audience members and security guards in the process.


Over the weekend, Circa Survive guitarist Brendan Ekstrom walked off stage and into the crowd for a completely different reason: to protect a female fan from apparent sexual harassment.

Circa Survive was co-headlining a show with AFI at St. Louis’ The Pageant theater Friday night when he noticed an uncomfortable interaction between audience members. “For almost a whole song I watched a guy stand a row behind a girl flirting and then trying to kiss her,” Ekstrom wrote on Twitter. “It was hard to tell what was really happening.”

After the woman pushed the man away, Ekstrom thought something needed to happen, so he walked off the stage and confronted the man.

Due to the fog of rage, Ekstrom doesn’t remember what he said to the man, but security soon took over, and the guitarist returned to the stage. Ekstrom’s decision to confront what looked like sexual harassment head-on is commendable at a time when misogyny is still so prevalent in popular music.

Ekstrom believes the situation struck a nerve because he has a daughter. “I’m almost forty and flirting doesn’t look like that,” he wrote. “Maybe It’s that I have a daughter or that I’m older.”

Here’s how Ekstrom told his side of the story the day after the incident.

\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n


Here’s Circa Survive’s new single, “Lustration.”

More Stories on Good