PVRIS Guitarist Alex Babinski Lost Everything After Being Accused of Sexual Assault On The Internet. His Accuser Had Never Been In A Room With Him.
Last Tango
In the summer of 2020 Alex Babinski, guitar player and songwriter for the alternative rock band PVRIS was accused of sexual assault. The allegations were levied on twitter by an individual named Kea Romani who asserted that Babinski had engaged in sexually inappropriate behavior with her as well as others. Babinski quickly lost everything, was kicked out of PVRIS, a fairly successful band that he himself founded, shunned from his community and labeled a rapist/pedophile on the internet before disappearing entirely. Then on January 25th 2024, nearly 4 years later, Babinski returned to the internet to share that Kea Romani had formally retracted her allegations via a sworn statement. Turns out not only had Kea Romani never had any sexual contact with Babinski, Romani and Babinski had never met or been in the same room together.
If you’ve read my previous writing on the alternative scene, or are familiar with that scene, this whole routine should be pretty familiar. Evidence-less social media accusation results in the accused having their entire life nuked from orbit. No investigation takes place, no formal charges ever appear. Generally that’s where these things end, that accused person is set to spend the rest of their life as a pariah. Babinski however has become part of a small, but growing, minority of cases of accused individuals pursuing civil litigation and the ensuing investigation revealing a great deal of exonerating information.
It should be noted that Babinski’s decision to pursue the situation using the US Civil Court is far from the easy path. With no criminal charges filed, he has to clear his name using the civil legal system, which deprives him, most notably, of the presumption of innocence that would require those accusing him of misconduct to prove their allegations beyond a shadow of a doubt. Conversely, the Civil system would place the burden of proof on the one claiming they’ve been falsely accused and defamed, it would be on Babinski to prove that sexual misconduct did not happen. Babinski obviously had an advantage in that he had never been in a room with his accuser. However lets say hypothetically one was accused of having nonconsensual sex with someone they HAD been in a room with, or even had had consensual sex with and was now being falsely accused, unless they had some kind of signed contract, it would be nearly impossible to definitively prove something didn’t happen behind closed doors with no witnesses. Civil suits are also extremely expensive and must be paid for by the complainant, you have no right to a court appointed attorney like you would in a criminal case. Attorney fees can range from tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars and that’s BEFORE a trial, and if it actually goes to trial you’re looking at raising that number significantly. Additionally, if you lose you can often be on the hook for the person you’re suing’s attorney fees. Finally, America’s First Amendment provides incredibly robust free speech protections, so unless you have someone dead to rights lying like Babinski did you’re taking a massive gamble. Despite internet feminists insistence that the entire judicial system is stacked against people who make these kinds of accusations (based on absolutely nothing as I’ve gone into in other pieces), the civil process and American law provides a great deal of advantages to the person making the potentially defamatory statement. This is why defamation trials are so rare, and when we do see them, it’s generally surrounding celebrities who have the resources to see these things to the end, most people simply cannot afford to defend their names like say Johnny Depp. All of this is to say that the way Babinski chose to handle this was an incredibly costly, and risky, undertaking, but as any Civil Attorney will tell you, the best defense is the truth, and Babinski fortunately seemed to have it on his side.
I Make My Living Off The Evening News
Now, you would think that somebody was accused of committing a crime only for it to be revealed that they had never met the victim would be big news, after all the “falsely accused” strain of True Crime has spawned some of the genres biggest hits like Serial and Making A Murderer. However I didn’t see any stories about Babinski on any of the outlets I usually follow. If you have some level of plausible deniability for literally killing someone you get 2 seasons of documentaries and masses of people writing letters for your release, but if it’s revealed you’ve been falsely #metoo’d good luck even getting a tweet.
No, I found out about Alex’s situation from none other than The Metalcore King of Controversy Ronnie Radke tweeting about it. For those unfamiliar with Radke he’s essentially been the most hated man in the alternative music scene for nearly two decades, partially for some misdeeds early in his career that he more than paid for and partially just because he’s the guy you’re “supposed” to hate. Radke is the perpetual bad guy that every single one of the wannabe boy scout guidance counselor purport themselves to be the opposite of, he’s the guy everyone virtue signals that they are NOT like to show just how good they are. So it becomes awfully ironic that the person who is probably most constantly called a “garbage human being” by an entire subculture is the only one with enough of a fucking spine to stand up to the mob and actually advocate for the right thing. Alex is not the first falsely accused individual that Radke has gone to bat for, he’s highlighted the absurdity of the mob before, likely because he himself was the subject of one of the earliest false accusations within that scene.
As of writing the following websites published the allegations against Babinski but have not done new reporting on the retraction or updated their previous stories to reflect the retraction.
This is only a list of major publications that spread the allegation, the list of tweets, instagram posts, facebook posts, reddit threads all spreading an accusation that ultimately turned out to be false numbers in the thousands and also will never be updated. But seeing how the two outlets I could find that did choose to cover the story handled it, maybe it’s not all that bad.
NME did cover the initial allegations, their piece as of writing this has no corrections or updates. However, they did write about the new developments with one of the worst fucking headlines I’ve ever seen.
If I were to try to imagine an example of all the scummy ways journalists cover #metoo shit I don’t even think I could come up with something this low. When one of these accusations comes out they don’t write it this passively like “anonymous person says they’re accusing [musician] of sexual misconduct”, it’s always “[Musician] accused of sexual misconduct” in the most accusatory way possible. They make it seem as if Babinski’s innocence is an opinion asserted by Babinski himself, not the objective fact supported by multiple sources, including the accuser. The story is not Babinski “saying” he’s been cleared, there’s literally signed statement from the accuser, posted to her own social media where she ACKNOWLEGES SHE’S NEVER MET HIM. I wish I could say that these people are just stupid, but they aren’t, they know exactly what they’re doing, they know exactly how they’re framing all this, because they’re malicious liars, and if they had any Journalistic standards or even basic integrity, they’d fellate the business end of a shotgun.
The NME article is so fucking bad that it makes this also bad Loudwire headline look halfway decent. Why is it that the only publications that can even bother to cover this can’t do it correctly, let alone honestly. I mean, I know the answer, we all know the answer, it’s because the press, in particular the music press, is entirely ideologically committed to the metoo grift above any commitment to truth or fairness, but it’s still maddening. Now I never went to journalism school but just in case a journalist stumbles across this piece while taking their 3 collective brain cells for a walk, the correct headline is “Kea Romani admits she falsely accused PVRIS’ Alex Babinski of assault.”
The public humiliation of Alex Babinski, the utter destruction of his life, reputation, relationships and career, all of these things are done in the name of “accountability”, in holding people responsible for the harm they have allegedly caused. This is of course not done between the involved parties and professionals, instead outsourced to public spectacle (because it’s about humiliation and entertainment, not accountability, or even healing). But who holds these people who have appointed themselves moral arbiters, investigators, and enforcers accountable for the harm they cause in their self righteous quests? The only person who was ACTUALLY, and in many ways, irreparably, harmed in any of this was Alex. Are any of the thousands of morons who spread these rumors far and wide, the journalists who uncritically reported it, the bands and friends who severed ties going to actually be accountable for the harm they caused Alex? Are they going to work as hard to make him whole again as they did to tear him down? Of course not, partially because they’re spineless little freaks, and partially because nobody will actually hold them to task. Say what you will about how awful police are, you can at least sue the city and the cops that falsely ruined your life. These kids constantly engage in the same kind scummy, power tripping behavior as the cops they performatively hate, and like every awful cop, they have a righteous moral cause of “stopping the bad guys” to justify hurting whoever they see deserving. These people never shut the fuck up about accountability when it’s time to point the finger at someone else they simply THINK has transgressed but the minute it becomes apparent that THEY are the ones actually causing massive harm to people through their reckless crusade, miraculously they learn to mind their own business.
I wish I could say it’s surprising that this story of Alex’s absolution got no traction within the music press, but it isn’t. These kids and journalists will farm accusations and the misery surrounding them for clicks and clout and engagement and ad revenue as much as they can, but when it comes time to actually do reporting they chicken out, they can’t even be bothered to investigate, let alone follow up when they’ve been proven wrong. Obviously this practice is endlessly damaging to the people who find themselves in the crosshairs but it creates an even larger problem. Not reporting on false allegations not only allows the crusading journalists the ability to save face, it shapes public opinion. If nobody ever reports on the false allegations, people don’t know they happen and it creates a perception that false allegations do not exist, a reality these people constantly, and baselessly insist is the case, furthering the illusion that the kinds of things done to people like Alex are not only righteous, but justified. This is of course because if they started actually telling the truth about the amount of false allegations and aftermath, it’d be harder for them to keep destroying people’s lives with allegations.
Calvinball
It didn’t take long after Alex made the documents of the false allegation public for the cancel cops to start spinning it and covering for Kea Romani’s lies. They insisted that Babinski was using the legal system to intimidate a victim, which of course is possible, but as I laid out earlier, given the nature of the civil court, would be incredibly difficult if Romani had even been remotely telling the truth. They insisted that the retraction proved nothing, Women and their words must of course be endlessly believed, a social media post without evidence is basically as good as a guilty verdict however, a signed statement from the very same woman engenders no belief. But most insidiously they insisted that even if this allegation was false, there were more allegations and not only must they be absolutely true, Alex is still absolutely guilty. They of course didn’t provide any of those allegations, which I’m sure is just a coincidence. I decided to actually do what a journalist is supposed to do, and investigate it. You’ll be shocked to learn it’s all bullshit. Let’s put this to rest once and for all.
Despite some digging it was very difficult to find the actual allegations made against Babinski, Romani’s false allegation posts were removed sometime between 2020 and now. This remains a persistent problem when trying to understand these accusations and the fallout surrounding them, often the records of the allegation are inaccessible, locked behind deactivated tumblr blogs, deleted twitter accounts, non existent facebook pages. People are kept in endless social isolation and punishment without any way to even have a first hand reason as to why, forever exiled because “well somebody said that somebody said that this happened.” With regards to Babinski every news article from 2020 claims he was accused of sexual misconduct, yet almost none of them provide a primary source, simply citing the bands statement that he was being kicked out and the handful that do link back to a page that no longer exists. While Romani’s allegations themselves are somewhat moot given her retraction, her actual statement of retraction seems to indicate that she shared other accusations along with hers that by her own admission she could not verify, however without her account it’s difficult to know what they are. There is already a huge element of telephone inherent in these accusation cancel campaigns when the accusations can be easily accessed, claims are inflated, details are added without any source almost constantly, without any primary source to tether it down, the fabrications become inevitable.
After sifting through more music scene drama posts, youtube, and white women’s 2020 tweets than I ever wanted to or is likely healthy, I was able to find only two accusations that didn’t appear to be explicitly Romani’s. They are as follows.
There is this entirely anonymous screenshot floating around, which should obviously be entirely ignored just on the basis of its’ anonymity, we have no idea who wrote this for starters, we have no idea if it happened, let alone when or where. We have no way of knowing if they’ve ever even met Alex, it could be anyone, hell it could be Romani on a burner. On top of that, despite claiming to have started speaking with Alex on Tumblr, a digital platform, they provide no screenshots which is increasingly strange in today’s digital age. And then there is of course the fact that this person doesn’t seem to know how old they were when they allegedly spoke to and interacted with Alex, which if you can’t use subtraction to figure out a number between 1 and 20 you’re probably not competent enough to stand as a witness, in fact you probably shouldn’t be on the computer just in case you see a video of a train coming the camera and end up accidentally choking to death on your own tongue out of fear the train is going to hit you. This is nothing, anyone who gives any weight to this is a moron.
Here’s the other smoking gun that was posted: Alex allegedly flirted with this girl and then when she didn’t show interest in having sex, he didn’t have sex with her and stopped talking to her. Similar to the last allegation despite claiming to have had electronic contact with Alex, no screenshots are provided. Also I hate to bring up age of consent, but Karyssa, at least based on her twitter, is Canadian, where the age of consent is 16 and only 11 states in America have an age of consent of 18. I’m not commenting on the wisdom of flirting with a 17 year old (don’t do it), but even if this allegation was true, it wouldn’t be anything illegal in her home country, and likely wouldn’t be illegal in America unless you’re in one of those 11 states. The continual insinuation here is that Alex is going after underage girls, which obviously there is no evidence of, but even with what we’re given it’s false or highly unlikely. Further without any dates we have no idea how old Babinski would have been during these alleged interactions, but it appears Babinski was born in 1993 and has been playing in the various incarnations of PVRIS since 2009, so for all we know he could’ve been these people’s age.
However she eventually amended up this tweet with the following.
So yeah we’re dealing with some real geniuses here, with such damning evidence as this may as well skip the trial and go straight to the electric chair. When these people try to bring up “other allegations” this is what they’re talking about, nothing, they have nothing, the reason they’re simply saying that there are “other allegations” and not actually posting them is because all they have are 2 tweets without any kind of evidence. They’re pulling whatever they can out of their ass to try and obscure the fact that they were very, very wrong and falsely accused an innocent man. These are all people who were piggybacking off of Kea Romani, who herself was outright lying, the very core of this is rotten. At best the people claiming there are “more” allegations against Alex don’t know what they’re talking about and should shut the fuck up, at worst, they’re lying, and should consider what I said earlier about journalists and shotguns.
Watch the World Burn
Alex has a very tough road ahead of him. Shame is often considered to be the most powerful emotion, and Alex has been shamed and humiliated on a global level for something he didn’t do on top of losing years of his life fighting a false allegation that cost him his life’s work and relationships. The psychological rubble Alex is going to have to sift through seems immeasurable. I doubt PVRIS will let him back in, that would require them to have a level of morality they long jettisoned when they kicked him out over an allegation from somebody he had never met. I hope he starts a new band if he wants, I hope they get bigger than PVRIS and some day he feels whole again. I hope whatever he does, he feels whole again. But I think that’s far away, there’s a damage done in these things that there is simply no remedy for, you just can’t go back to normal.
Worse, unless people actually start to learn the truth about these cases this is just going to keep happening again and again, an unending conveyor belt of misery that serves nobody except liars who will never stop lying. So stop letting these liars play god.
Until then, I guess I’ll just have to keep posting this clip.
You can read about a similar story in my piece Phoxjaw and the Unending Nightmare of a False Allegation. I can be found on instagram at @jacktorrancefakeshisdeath and on twitter @jtorrancesghost
Your work is priceless. A light of truth in the darkness of lies and malice.
Thank you so much for covering this so extensively, I have been trying to have conversations with EVERYONE that continues to spread misinformation about Alex. This article is amazing I am linking it to everyone thank you so much 🙏🏼