On Tuesday evening, Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl posted a statement on Instagram in which he explained that he had fathered a child out of wedlock.
“I love my wife and my children,” he said, “and I am doing everything I can to regain their trust and earn their forgiveness.”
Aside from the very passive admission of this other child – as if it just happened to him, rather than the fact that he was obviously having unprotected sex with a woman outside of his marriage – his statement brought back memories for me, as I too was once married to a “rock star” who found it absolutely impossible to be faithful. I was therefore not surprised by Grohl’s statement or his lack of a public apology to his wife, as it has always been acceptable for male artists to ruin their families for their “art”, and often the woman is to blame instead.
When the news broke, a friend was sitting at my kitchen table and her first reaction was, “Well, he’s a rock star, what do you expect?” She forgot that the same thing had happened to me.
I met my ex, Mark Morriss of The Bluetones, in 2011. I didn’t know who Mark was when I was introduced to him at the Groucho Club in London: I didn’t know his band, so I wasn’t one of those dreamy fans that, as it turns out, he usually picks up. We fell in love quickly and tried to have a baby together, but when I got pregnant he left me. I won’t go into all the vicissitudes of the next eight or nine years, but we finally got married in 2017, then split for good when he was in bed with another fan before the paper on our marriage certificate was even dry.
Your first question may be why I married him in the first place. I would answer that I never knew for sure that he was cheating on me: I might find the odd message from a fan, but he always talked his way out of it by telling me she was obsessed with him or delusional and kept accusing me of being paranoid and suspicious. These types of men are very convincing.
I went to shows with him and saw the women who hung out with him, but I – like Dave Grohl’s wife Jordyn Blum, I suspect – didn’t believe he would risk our lives, our families, for those women hanging out at the merchandise stands in sticky-floored music venues.
But he did it, just like Grohl.
I don’t think people take the mental health impact of such a relationship seriously. They immediately blame the woman – why didn’t you just leave him? But often we try to keep our family together for the sake of the children under impossible circumstances. Perhaps Blum did the same.
People don’t take seriously the fact that you have to be a very deceitful person to cheat on your wife. You have to lie every day to the people you’re supposed to love the most in the world. And yet Grohl has a reputation as “the nicest guy in rock.” I know people have said similar things about my ex – you just have to replace “rock” with “pop.”
People don’t pay attention to the fact that a rock star who sleeps with other women behind his wife’s back has no way to protect his own sexual health. She is not consenting to sex with a man who sleeps with many, many different women. If she knew what he was doing, she might choose not to sleep with him. But she is “spared” this little tidbit of information, and we all know why.
These types of men have no problem being accused of being cheaters, so these revelations will not hurt Dave Grohl’s reputation at all. In fact, it only strengthens their alpha male status – it makes them more desirable, not less; more women want to sleep with them, more men admire them. But what about the carnage they leave behind?
In his statement, Grohl makes a point of all the characters in this particularly sad story moving on “together” and rebuilding trust. But I wonder how much of that “togetherness” is his wife. I mean, was there much “togetherness” when he ran off to have unprotected sex with another woman and then went back to bed with her?
I highly doubt Dave Grohl will rebuild anything. If there’s one thing I know about fraudulent “rock stars” – no matter what they say to save their reputation – it’s that they certainly don’t change their ways. Why should they? Their ways just work well for them.
I’m sure that this other woman, the mother of Grohl’s youngest child – whoever she is – will also take some of the blame once her actions are exposed. Surely she knew he was married? She must be a seductress, a devil, if she corrupted him like that? But if these men are capable of blatantly lying to their wives, don’t you think they are capable of lying to their lovers too?Yes, we have an open marriage…” I can hear it now.”My wife doesn’t understand me… we only stay together because of the children…”
These are the stereotypes that should worry you, not the “seductress” stereotypes, because these stereotypes allow men to do whatever they want with the person they want.
People think that an unfaithful man is only lying to his wife in public (and that’s her problem), but that’s not the case, he’s lying to everyone. And when he claims to be rebuilding trust, he’s actually lying to himself, because if you’re still cheating at 55, you really have no intention of changing.
A life on stage is very seductive for these men, especially when they started as young as Grohl and my ex. They are addicted to the love of the audience, the admiration, the women who are willing to go to bed with them, no questions asked and no obligations. It has spoiled and corrupted them – anything else now just seems like an absolutely boring life to them. They deserve our pity, not our admiration.
For us mere mortals, cheating is associated with stress, anger and guilt. We play out scenarios: what if he or she found out? We weigh the risks, how much it would hurt them, what we could lose and (most of the time) decide not to do it.
After I came out to my ex, a lot of people said to me, “Why does he make his life so difficult? I can’t even handle a woman… ha ha!”
But what you don’t understand about chronic cheaters and liars is that they don’t feel guilty – they don’t care if they get caught, and they’re pretty confident that they can charm their way out of it if they do. In fact, it becomes a game. They’ve lied to at least one woman in this scenario, and then they basically just keep lying to everyone else. But a person who doesn’t care or feel guilty can do pretty much anything. That should be pretty concerning to all of us.
It may be that the mother of Dave Grohl’s new child has been forcing him to come out in public. I’m sure she doesn’t want her little daughter to remain a dirty little secret or be seen as an “unwanted” child. I would imagine she would want him to tell the world about her before she (or anyone she knows) does. Because of course, we’re mothers violent We are protective of our children and want them to have the best start possible. We don’t want anything bad to happen to them or their world to be turned upside down, no matter how old they are.
It’s a shame that these types of fathers don’t feel the same way.
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