Sum 41 Frontman: I Was Groomed by Ex-Manager

Deryck Whibley can still recall his elation when, at 16, he snuck backstage at a Treble Charger concert to meet lead singer Greig Nori and left with his phone number. Nori, then 34, was a hero to Whibley, a fellow Canadian who was trying to get his punk band, Sum 41, off the ground, per the Los Angeles Times. But there's a reason people say you should never meet your heroes. Nori and Whibley would go on to talk for hours. Later, Nori would give Whibley his first taste of alcohol. He ultimately became Sum 41's first manager. At the same time, he coerced a teenage Whibley into a four-year sexual relationship, from 1998 to 2002, the singer writes in his memoir, Walking Disaster: My Life Through Heaven and Hell.

"Greig had one requirement to be our manager—he wanted total control," writes Whibley. "We couldn't talk to anyone but him." Nori even separated band members from their families, saying, "You can't have a relationship with your parents and be in a rock band. It's not cool. It's going to hurt your career," Whibley writes. One night in 1998, when Whibley was "freshly 18 years old" and intoxicated, he says Nori invited him into a bathroom to take ecstasy and forcibly kissed him. From then on, "Greig kept pushing for things to happen when we were together," Whibley writes, per the CBC. "I started feeling like I was being pressured to do something against my will."

When Whibley tried to end the relationship, Nori grew irate, claiming Whibley "owed" him for his help in the music business, the singer writes. "I felt like I had signed my life away to someone," he adds, per the Canadian Press. He says he didn't tell anyone, not even his bandmates, about what was happening at the time, though his first wife, Avril Lavigne, later told him it was sexual abuse, per the Times. Whibley says the encounters with Nori stopped when a mutual friend learned about the abuse, but then the psychological and verbal abuse he'd long suffered grew worse. "He was such a controlling person," he tells the Times of Nori, whom Sum 41 fired in 2005. Nori tells the Globe and Mail that these are "false allegations" and that he has retained a defamation lawyer. (More Deryck Whibley stories.)