This Is How Grooming Works: My 2006 LiveJournal Entries About Jesse Lacey
When I first shared my story about being groomed by Jesse Lacey, his fans didn’t ask for more proof — they just assumed I was exaggerating. Because nothing “sexual” happened, they reduced it to a teenage crush or said we were just “hanging out playing video games.” But grooming doesn’t always look like assault. It looks like this: the journal entries I wrote in real time.
These LiveJournal posts aren’t retrospective analysis. They’re real-time evidence of what it looks like to be fifteen and emotionally entangled with a man thirteen years older — someone who knew how to blur the lines between attention, manipulation, and behavior that grooming laws are designed to prevent.
Since coming forward, I’ve been met with an overwhelming amount of victim-blaming, cruelty, and misogyny. I’ve been called desperate, delusional, attention-seeking — and worse. People have speculated endlessly about my motives, my mental health, and my memories. None of it has changed the truth. If anything, the backlash only confirmed what I already knew: musicians like Jesse Lacey are protected not just by silence, but by a toxic fandom culture that refuses to believe its heroes are capable of harm — and even when they know the truth, they decide it doesn’t matter. They’ve already made peace with sacrificing girls like me to keep their favorite band.
We’ve seen this before: famous men with cult followings who use their power, proximity, and mystique to draw in young girls (Drake, Marilyn Manson, R. Kelly, Woody Allen, David Bowie). They build trust, blur boundaries, and make the girl feel like she’s the one in control — until she’s too far in to see the damage. Jesse wasn’t the first, and he won’t be the last. But this is what it looks like when it’s happening.
These entries are raw, unfiltered, and yeah, embarrassing. But they are honest, unfiltered documentation of what it feels like to be groomed while it’s happening. They capture the urgency, confusion, and longing that I felt trying to make sense of something I didn’t have the words for. And while it does feel vulnerable, I care so deeply for that young girl.
It doesn’t always start as a crime, but it starts with a pattern: attention, secrecy, control, dependence. According to child protection experts, grooming involves building emotional access to a minor often long before any overt line is crossed. These entries show that pattern with devastating clarity.
These entries are from 2006–2007, pulled from two journals — one personal, one shared with my best friend at the time.
Before the show, my friend and I were already rehearsing how to act. Not because we’d been taught to — but because I wanted to be taken seriously. I didn’t feel like just another fan. I believed I had something real to offer: gratitude, insight, depth. I didn’t want him to see a child. I wanted him to see someone who understood him. Even then, I felt like being young was a liability I had to work around — like I had to perform maturity to be worthy of connection. What I didn’t know then is that this kind of posturing doesn’t deter groomers — it invites them. It shows malleability, emotional openness, and a desire to be understood, which are exactly the traits they know how to exploit.
The next entry was written the day after the show — the day after we met.
At the end of the concert, he locked eyes with me while singing my favorite song, then jumped off the stage and stopped in front of me. When we met by the tourbus, he told us he always picks someone to focus on during the show — and that night, he had chosen us.
That moment that overwhelmed me wasn’t imagined. It was by design.
This isn’t the voice of a lovestruck teenager. It’s the voice of a child dissociating into fantasy, breaking down from emotional overload, and mistaking that collapse for connection — because that’s what grooming teaches you to do.
Looking back, I wasn’t special to him — I was vulnerable. He saw how much I felt, and he used it to shape the version of closeness he could control.
I started planning, hoping, bargaining with the universe for more time near him. The next entry shows exactly how far I had already disappeared into the fantasy — and how desperately I was trying to stay there.
A month later, the adrenaline wore off and grief took its place. All he had done physically was hug me — but I wrote that I’d lost a part of myself forever. (Keep in mind, our online communication was ongoing at this point.)
This is how grooming harms children — not always with actions, but with absence. With the overwhelming grief of emotional investment that was never mutual, and the belief that love should feel like something being taken from you.
On the surface, this next entry reads like a normal summer recap — but embedded in these answers is clear evidence of grooming fallout.
I described a 28-year-old man’s teasing remark as my most romantic moment, revealing how I had already learned to frame boundary-blurring attention from an adult as flirtation. I spoke in vague, coded language about someone “special” and “interesting,” not out of shyness, but out of a desire to protect something private — because secrecy had already been woven into the relationship. I wasn’t bragging; I was carrying the emotional weight of something I didn’t understand yet. And I named that month — the month I spent in close contact with him — as the most significant of my life. This is what emotional entanglement with a much older man can do to a teenager: rewire memory, distort intimacy, and embed unspoken harm beneath the language of love.
This entry may seem light, but it captures something critical: the emotional momentum. The countdowns. The constant need to record, to hold onto every moment. This is what it looked like to feel consumed by something I couldn’t fully grasp yet.
The obsessive nature of my entries — recounting tiny moments, parsing his words, trying to make meaning from scraps — shows how I was caught in a feedback loop of emotional fixation. That’s not just excitement — it’s anxiety, codependency, and emotional dysregulation. These are core symptoms of trauma bonding and unresolved attachment wounds (all of which grooming exploits and deepens).
These final entries show how deep in I already was. Grooming doesn’t just show up in the dramatic moments — it shows up in the background noise, too. In the fantasy of touring with him. In the hope he’d get online. In the vague shorthand of “you know.” I was living in a world that revolved around him, even when I wasn’t saying his name out loud.
Final Thoughts
What happened to me didn’t start with Jesse, and it won’t end with him either — unless we change the culture that protects men like him. The scenes, the silence, the shrugged-off rumors: they all keep the door open.
It’s time to close it — for good.
If you understand how predators operate — especially in the music industry — you’ll recognize every step: the idolization, the secrecy, the emotional fixation, the slow collapse of boundaries.
Jesse could’ve walked away after the first meeting — but he chose to stay engaged, offering attention and access while cultivating a relationship no adult should ever pursue with a teenager. If he reads this — and I believe he will — I want him to remember the girl who would’ve done anything to be chosen. This is what you took. The messages, the intimacy, the access you never earned— time I can never get back.
To every survivor who’s been told they were too young to understand or too old to still care: you are not delusional. You are not alone.
To the people who stood beside him — his bandmates, his management, the artists who toured with him, the ones who heard the rumors, saw the way he treated girls like me:
You witnessed the blurred boundaries, the carefully curated intimacy, the inappropriate closeness disguised as charm — and you looked the other way. Whether out of fear, convenience, or self-preservation, you chose silence over responsibility, and in doing so, left the harm to ripple through the lives of girls he should never have had access to. You gave other artists in your orbit permission to do the same. You may not have laid the foundation, but you helped hold the structure in place — and that weight is yours to reckon with.
To the fans who insist Jesse has changed — that he’s healed, gone to therapy, done the work: Why hasn’t he said anything in response to this?
Why hasn’t he addressed the photos? The conversations? The trips?
Written proof of an adult building private, emotionally-loaded intimacy with a teenager? If he’d truly done the work, wouldn’t he name what he did? Wouldn’t he speak directly to the people he harmed — with clarity, ownership, and care?
He hasn’t. Not then. Not now. Not once.
These entries are not vague. They show I was a minor. They show Jesse knew it. They show a pattern of secrecy, flattery, emotional control. And they weren’t unique to me. In the accounts shared by Emily Driskill and Nicole Elizabeth Garey, we see what that same pattern escalated into: abuse, pressure, coercion, the solicitation of explicit photos from underage girls, and more.
This was never an isolated story. It was a system of behavior — grooming disguised as attention. Until Jesse Lacey — and everyone who stood behind him — are willing to face that truth, I’ll keep speaking mine.
For years, Brand New hid behind mystique — no press, no social media, no interviews. We thought it made them rare, poetic, untouchable. But silence isn’t mystique. It’s protection. Control. Evasion. And now, when the moment has come to speak — to acknowledge harm, to engage in truth — that silence is deafening. Not because they’re private. But because they’re cowards. The mystery was the mask. And this is what’s underneath.
Comments are off to protect my peace. If this resonates, thank you. If it doesn’t, that’s not my burden to carry.
