This story appears in our Spring Art + Performance 2025 Issue, published on March 5, 2025.

Last October, I bought a ticket to a performance by Posies cofounder Ken Stringfellow, set to take place at an undisclosed location in Pioneer Square. The tickets were sold on Eventbrite, promoting his new solo album, Circuit Breaker, which the site describes as “a journey from deconstruction to reconstruction, from death to life.” The promo said: “Ultimately it is an album about how we heal.”

What was he healing from? Three years ago, three women came forward to KUOW with allegations of sexual misconduct against Stringfellow. The Posies broke up, and Stringfellow has largely stayed out of the public eye ever since.

Until this tour, which, on the afternoon of October 18, I had just bought a ticket to attend. Within a few minutes of receiving my confirmation email, I got an email from Stringfellow himself. “I just saw your ticket purchase,” it started. “Having a quick look at your credentials, I see you are with the press. We really don’t wish any press coverage of this event. Would you be willing to have a quick call with me this afternoon? It’s required for entry into the show. Let me know your number. Note I will not be answering any questions that you may have as a journalist.”

Twenty minutes later, before I’d had a chance to respond, he emailed again: “After a stronger background check, we decided to refund your ticket.” When my editor tried to get tickets, the same thing happened. Then, ticketing was abruptly shut down altogether. (Stringfellow says the show simply sold out.)

This was a first. In all my years covering the arts, I’ve never been barred from a performance I actively tried to attend. Generally speaking, artists want press coverage. Their livelihoods depend on it. I’ve been invited to concerts in shared houses, plays in tiny arts spaces rattled by passing trains, one-woman shows held in otherwise empty storefronts in uncool neighborhoods. No matter how niche the scene or how weird it is to explain why there’s a reporter at your house show.

But for his Seattle show, the Eventbrite page included a series of warnings: “The address of the show is for ticketholders only. Any sharing or posting of the address publicly or privately with non attendees will result in immediate expulsion without refund. Any attempt to disrupt or otherwise interfere with the show will result in immediate expulsion without refund. Any attempt to attend the show without a ticket will result in criminal trespass charges.”

The same warnings have been pasted across the approximately 30 shows and listening parties on his tour, which continues into March. The promotional copy for these shows emphasizes connections with bands like R.E.M., Big Star, and Neil Young and promises to expose audiences to Stringfellow’s “most intense and personal work.”

Since Stringfellow began touring again, more women have spoken out, some for the first time publicly, against what they allege is an ongoing pattern of abuse and assault involving Stringfellow that goes back decades.

The women’s stories all have common threads—unwanted biting, forced kissing, groping, and initiating sex without consent. In that first story, KUOW interviewed three women about their alleged experiences with Stringfellow: They reported abusive behavior within the context of an ongoing relationship, forced sexual encounters, and interactions that left bite marks and bruising. The allegations led Posies cofounder Jon Auer and drummer Frankie Siragusa to leave the band. Auer described Stringfellow’s behavior as “disturbing” to KUOW, and Siragusa told KUOW he didn’t want to be linked with Stringfellow moving forward.

Stringfellow always denied the allegations, but he expressed some nuanced understanding of the women who spoke out in 2021. “I was extremely lucky to marry Dominique, who is on the same rhythm and living the same kind of life, an experienced rock veteran and fearless proponent of freedom, and in our open marriage, I never asked myself if this kind of life could impact other people negatively,” he said at the time. “Clearly, it did and now that I am aware of it, I really truly deeply apologize to the people who have been affected by my behavior. The only person responsible for my choices is me.”

But while promoting his recent tour, Stringfellow has been saying something very different. He’s called the women’s claims “fabrications,” telling Eugene Weekly that the women who’ve come forward were simply responding inappropriately to being rejected: They “developed extremely unrealistic expectations of where the relationships would go,” Stringfellow told the paper. “They took that rejection to a very dark and immature place and used that as a justification to hurt me in return by any means necessary.”

When The Stranger reached out to him for this story, he denied the allegations again. “All of my relationships have been consensual,” he said. “No exceptions. I was in an open marriage, which gave me the freedom to have these relationships. I was up-front with each woman about what could be expected from each relationship.” Stringfellow said that he had “hundreds—thousands—of messages from these women that contradict directly their claims.” We invited him to share those messages but received no response before press time.

And Stringfellow rearticulated the same position he took in Eugene Weekly last October: that since 2021, “these women have been colluding to proactively publicly harass me, my wife, friends and followers, music journalists, and other colleagues through social media.”

The women he’s referring to don’t see it that way. This tour raised complex questions about what it means for an artist to try to come back from what could be career-ending allegations, and whether such a reversal is even possible. Could he ever play a more public, large-scale show?

“People Think Cancel Culture Is Real”

A few days after his Seattle tour stop, Stringfellow was supposed to appear at another undisclosed location in Eugene, Oregon. But on October 14, just over a week before the show, it was suddenly canceled. An article in Eugene Weekly treated it with some skepticism, writing, “His wife claims the venue—which he was keeping secret until showtime—is undergoing renovations and will not be ready in time. Eugene Weekly asked for the name of the venue to verify the information, but she declined to provide it.” That same day, eight women signed a joint public statement affirming the allegations against Stringfellow: “We refuse to be silenced,” they wrote. “Instead, we feel compelled to speak out in denial of his accusations and help prevent future potential abuse. We gain nothing by coming forward; in fact, we believe we are inviting further harassment from him, but feel strongly that we need to speak up for the sake of other women who have suffered similar experiences, lest silence be an enabler.”

They came forward in an attempt to broaden awareness of the allegations in the hopes that it would help potential supporters of the tour “make informed decisions as to whether Mr. Stringfellow is a person whom they are comfortable supporting or providing a platform to.” The Stranger spoke with five of the women who signed the public letter after he announced his new tour. They all had close relationships with Stringfellow, and while not all of them say they were abused, they all said they saw echoes of their own experiences with Stringfellow and wanted to make other women with similar experiences feel safe coming forward.

Some of the women shared what they described as sudden, aggressive encounters, like Katherine Mengardon. She met Stringfellow in 1994 when she went to a Posies show at a small venue in Paris. She was 21. Afterward, the band was signing autographs and struggling to transliterate French names. So Mengardon, who is from Toulouse and is bilingual in French and English, stepped in to help. This turned into an invitation to the band’s next show, and Mengardon became friends with them. She said she was never interested in Stringfellow romantically. But in 1998, soon after she moved back to Europe in the wake of a breakup that left her feeling vulnerable, she went to a Posies show in Spain. She said Stringfellow came on to her aggressively. Even though she didn’t see him that way, she said, “It was quite a powerful thing to have this person coming to you that way.”

As Mengardon remembers it, Auer tried to intervene. “I remember hearing Jon saying, ‘No, don’t do it, not with her,’ which, at the time, I kind of just thought was him saying, ‘She’s one of us.’ That’s how I interpreted it.” (Auer declined to go on the record for this story.) Mengardon went back to Stringfellow’s hotel room, she said, and “he basically just launched himself at me.” The encounter was short, with no communication, and left her “covered in bites and bruises and really confused,” she said.

The same thing happened again on a trip to the United States, she says, after a show in Los Angeles. Stringfellow invited Mengardon to a house party. Just as with the previous encounter, Mengardon said it happened without any communication. “There was no chat about consent,” she said. “There was no chat about ‘Did I want this?’”

Only decades later would Mengardon come to understand these encounters as assaults, as she now alleges. At the time, she didn’t have the language for what had happened to her. “I had no frame of reference for what sexual abuse or sexual assault is,” she said. “For me, this was someone who was supposed to be a friend.”

The Stranger spoke to two of Mengardon’s friends who she confided in after the fact. One said that it had taken a long time for Mengardon to come to terms with what happened to her before she spoke up about it, and that Mengardon “had been left feeling shattered” by her interactions with Stringfellow. In an email, Stringfellow denied Mengardon’s allegations.

Kate Fricke met Stringfellow when she was 22, and Stringfellow was in his thirties. She was a huge fan of R.E.M., who Stringfellow played with on several tours in the late ’90s and early 2000s. They began a romantic relationship in 2017. Fricke said Stringfellow was controlling and secretive throughout their relationship. “I was just an accessory or a side piece,” she said. She would often offer him rides to gigs or places to stay, she said, because it was one of the only ways they could spend time together—and because Stringfellow often relied on women for these logistical needs rather than arranging them himself.

Stringfellow maintains that the women insisted on doing these things for him. “They said this, we have it in writing, so it is false to claim I ‘relied’ on them,” he said. “They offered, I accepted. And I was and remain perfectly capable of arranging my own travel.”

Heather Bowen, who was a huge fan of the Posies before she became involved with Stringfellow, said this happened all the time. “He gets as much out of it as he possibly can, and assumes that what you get in return suffices, which is a blip of his adoring attention,” she said. “And it left me feeling really used and really gross.”

Fricke always knew Stringfellow was seeing other women, and often wondered what their experiences were like. When the first KUOW story came out, she said, “Everything came into focus. We all started finding each other online and sharing our stories.” The similarities, she said, were “eerie.”

“There’s a misconception, certainly on Ken’s part, that we’ve all known each other for decades and have been spending chunks of our lives colluding to destroy his career,” said Bowen. “And that couldn’t be farther from the truth.”

When the allegations became public, Bowen said, connecting was simply a way to process what had happened. “That’s when you start to realize, ‘Oh, it wasn’t just me feeling bothered by the way he acted,’” she said.

When Stringfellow tried, even quietly, to return to the public eye, his accusers demanded that their stories be in the public eye as well. They think it’s important for potential bookers and promoters and other people who may be asked to give Stringfellow a platform to know who he really is. “The separating the art from the artist, that’s a personal thing,” said Bowen. “You make that decision on your own, but let’s make sure you have all the right information before you make that decision.”

“People think cancel culture is real,” said Seattle writer Kristi Coulter, an ex-girlfriend of Stringfellow’s. “They think that these men are accused of something, and their lives are ruined, and it’s all over for them. And to me, we’ve seen it over and over with Louis CK and Eric Adams. It’s not real. They come back.”

“Ken Could Have Come Back”

The day after the Seattle show, Stringfellow posted a photo to Instagram: He’s playing a keyboard in an art gallery with four people sitting behind him watching. “Incredible show last night,” he wrote. “Peaceful, moving, beautiful. Thank you to everyone who came and to the great team we had in place.” Gallery staff later confirmed to The Stranger that the performance was held at the Center on Contemporary Art. CoCA executive director Ray C. Freeman III said that the group was aware of the allegations against Stringfellow when he approached them about using the space. “Without acting as judge or jury, we declined to take sides, but turned down the opportunity to host the event nevertheless,” he said. “Instead, we decided to simply rent him the space.”

Coulter knew Stringfellow was making a new album, she said, and didn’t have a problem with that. What made the women feel they had to come forward now, she said, was that “he’s been using this album as a way to smear them” through public remarks disavowing the allegations and dismissing them as jilted exes.

Some of his accusers argue there is a world in which Ken Stringfellow could launch a successful comeback, but he would have to either confront the allegations sensitively or simply keep quiet about them. “Ken could come back, could have had a real redemption story,” said Coulter. “He could have actually shown accountability and apologized to his victims and come back having really worked on himself… his fandom would have eaten that up. Or he could have come back quietly, without impugning the credibility of these women.”

But he’s somewhere in the middle: reentering his public career on a smaller scale, but also dismissing—and perhaps villainizing—the women alleging harm, with no attempt at taking accountability.

Stringfellow is still performing in support of his newly released album. This spring, he’s working through the European leg of the tour. And the album does have listeners, but in numbers underwhelming compared to those in Stringfellow’s previous community of fans—a community that once included the women in this story. On Spotify, Stringfellow has just 7,098 monthly listeners. The Posies, by comparison, still have 55,600. They haven’t released any new music since 2020.

So the question still remains: After such a public fall from grace, is there a way to come back? Is there a way to do it without causing more harm? Stringfellow wasn’t allowed to simply uncancel himself. It’s clear his career has been diminished because of the allegations against him, and the very private approach to performing he’s adopted in their wake. What’s less obvious is what his career might look like now if he’d simply been willing to apologize in the first place.