Alexa Nikolas, the actress and former wife of Rhye frontman Michael Milosh, has accused him of grooming her beginning when she was 16, and of additional physical and sexual abuse. Nikolas posted her story on Instagram in an “open letter” on Monday titled “Groomed By The Groom.”
In the lengthy IG posts, Milosh’s ex-wife called him an ephebophile — a person primarily attracted to late- or post-adolescents, generally teenagers between 15 and 19.
She says the musician, who is 17 years older, groomed her for a “green card, success and sex.” In a 2018 interview with Verse, Nikolas said that when she was 16, she sent Milosh a message saying she liked his music. The singer responded immediately and the pair spoke that night, though it would be two years after she turned 18 and he was 35, that she flew to Berlin to meet him.
On Instagram, Nikolas writes that Milosh and his representatives tried to “take down” the Verse interview post-publication, though she says she felt it wasn’t damaging to Milosh, and that she’d left out facts: “I even withheld many truths out of fear of him not helping me financially during our separation.”
She says, “To this day, I think he was grooming me since I was 16 years old and I think he got everything he wanted out of that situation, he got financial support as a struggling artist, a green card to continue his career, notoriety, and sex. To this day I still suffer PTSD from the relationship, even doubting my sanity on some days. Creating this open letter has shown me that I am not insane.”
Nikolas also detailed that prior to her turning 18, Milosh had asked to stay at her Los Angeles home — with her mother – and when she was 17, he invited her to New York. Neither occurred, though the pair kept in touch via Skype video chat, she says. “They were all sexual and flirtatious. I can account on numerous occasions undressing upon his request.”
Of her “first sexual experience” with Milosh in Berlin she writes that Milosh pressured her into sex: “I did not respect my no and neither did he.”
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She also writes that she “felt unsafe,” and her Instagram account includes screenshots in which she tells a friend that she wanted to go home. Later on, she says, he also pressured her into anal sex, and she claims that Rhye’s 2013 song “Major Minor Love” is “about grooming a young girl and gaslighting.”
That song is on Woman, which was made in 2011-12, and came out in 2013. The lyrics to “Major Minor Love include the lyrics ” I’m so bad, I’m so bad I’m so bad / I’ll ask your thighs, with beautiful lies / Kidnap your mind, I’ll help you find / A gentile pain, rush through your veins.”
Nikolas says that Milosh proposed when she was 19 and they’d been dating for six months.
She also says that Milosh told her that in his twenties, he had sexually assaulted a Jamaican woman. When she told him to contact the woman and apologize, Nikola writes, “He charged at me, picked me up, pushed me on the couch, and pressed his forearm into my throat and continually screamed ‘shut the fuck up, shut the fuck up, shut the fuck up!’. I couldn’t breathe.”
SPIN reached out to Rhye’s representatives for comment but did not hear back by press time.
Milosh, who is currently based in Los Angeles, recently released his new album, Home, with Rhye on Loma Vista Recordings this year.
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