Anti-Flag’s lead singer Justin Sane is planning to imminently flee the United States amid a sexual assault lawsuit brought against the punk rocker, according to legal documents obtained by Rolling Stone.
Kristina Sarhadi filed an amended complaint in the Northern District Court of New York on Thursday, alleging that Sane — real name Justin Geever — has “purposefully and unlawfully attempted to avoid service” of her November 2023 sexual assault lawsuit.
Instead, she claims in her lawsuit and an accompanying statement on Tuesday that Geever recently sold his Pittsburgh home and has “sought to hide his assets by transferring funds overseas to an Irish bank account.” Geever — who allegedly maintains a dual citizenship and has an Irish passport — “plans to flee to Europe within the next few days,” the suit claims.
Settlement negotiations through Geever’s attorney Michael Johnson went nowhere after Johnson went “silent,” the suit claims. And Johnson allegedly failed to follow through with his offer to help serve Geever. Sarhadi is requesting for a judge to allow Geever’s sister Mary — who is said to be his Power of Attorney — to become authorized to accept service of the lawsuit on Geever’s behalf.
Rolling Stone has reached out to Geever’s attorney for comment. Last year, multiple attempts to reach Geever were unsuccessful.
Sarhadi, a New York holistic therapist and health coach, was a longtime Anti-Flag fan until October 2010, where she alleges Geever violently raped her after attending a party together. Sarhadi came forward about her experience on the enough. podcast last July. “It was the most terrifying thing I’ve ever experienced,” Sarhadi said. “I can’t stress how violent he was and how much I fully believed I was going to die, that he was going to kill me.” Although Sarhadi did not name Geever in the podcast, fans quickly surmised who she was referring to and Anti-Flag disbanded and wiped its social media pages within hours.
In September, Sarhadi and 12 more women spoke to Rolling Stone to accuse Geever of predatory behavior, sexual assault, and statutory rape across the U.S. and Europe. The lawsuit claims that “based on reliable press reports and information provided by women who have contacted Sarhadi so far, she believes that approximately 60 women had sex with Geever when they were underage and/or without consent.”
The women who spoke with Rolling Stone had stories that dated back to the 1990s and were as recent as 2020. Many described themselves as devoted fans who shaped their social and political beliefs around Geever and the band’s messaging, only for Geever to allegedly exploit his position for his own sexual gratification. It was an deliberate act, the lawsuit claims, that Geever used “his fame and Anti-Flag’s feminist stance” to “systematically [target] underage girls and young women for sometimes violent sex.”
Sarhadi is also suing the band’s company Hardwork Distribution for negligence, claiming that as officers of the company, the other Anti-Flag members — Patrick Bollinger, a.k.a. Pat Thetic, Chris Head, and Chris Barker, a.k.a. Chris No. 2 — were “aware of Geever’s practice of sexually assaulting young women and girls, and the company aided and abetted such behavior.”
Many women who spoke to Rolling Stone questioned the band’s awareness of Geever’s alleged misconduct, with three claiming members were present when Geever brought them around as teens and young women. After the article’s publication, the band released an emotionally charged statement claiming they were sickened by the allegations surrounding Geever who “used our beliefs as a cover for egregious activities.” They also thanked the women who bravely came forward, saying that they believed their stories.
But according to Sarhadi, the band has “taken extreme steps to avoid responsibility” and “sought to coax my forgiveness through a Restorative Justice process” only to abandon talks in early 2024. “To date, no member of Anti-Flag has owned up to their actions or apologized for failing their duty to reasonably protect their fans and community,” Sarhadi said in a press release.
“Instead, they have spent substantial funds in hiring the Head of the New York City office of Buchanan Ingersol and Rooney and former criminal defense attorney, Stuart Slotnick, to fight my claims. The band would rather hire a Big Law attorney than accept responsibility for what has happened to me and countless other survivors. “
Rolling Stone has reached out to the other band members’ representative for comment.
Jack White Responds After Uproar Over Taylor Swift Songwriting Comment
This is why we can’t have nice things.
Jack White posted a statement on Instagram Monday evening after numerous publications took his comments in an interview with The Guardian out of context. When discussing poetry and songwriting, White mentioned fellow musician Taylor Swift‘s style of songwriting, and explored his own approach to storytelling when creating music. Unfortunately, online outlets framed his words as a critique of the Tortured Poets star, especially when it came to headlines that quickly circulated on the internet.
“Putting this up for a day and then taking down to just put this to bed,” wrote White in the since-deleted post. “I didn’t say that I think Taylor Swift’s music was ‘boring’ or whatever click bait the net is trying to scrape together. What I was trying to say in an interview I did about poetry and lyric writing, was that I don’t find it interesting at all for ME to write about MYSELF in my own lyric writing and poetry because I think that it could be repetitive for ME to always write about and It could be uninteresting for people who listen to my music to delve into, and that imaginary characters are more attractive to me as a writer.”
White went on to acknowledge the “tremendous success” of Swift and other songwriters who have their own process, while stating that just “because I say I have a way of doing things doesn’t mean that I think that EVERYONE should do it the same way.” He added, “They should do what works for them, And they do, and it is obviously appealing to many people, and I’m glad to hear that.”
When asked by The Guardian in the article published Sunday, if any of any of his songs were entirely autobiographical, White replied, “Not too much. Now it’s become very popular in the Taylor Swift way of pop singers writing about all of their publicly aired break-ups, which I don’t find interesting at all. I think it’s a little bit boring for me to write about myself.”
White further explained, “Even if I’ve had a really interesting day, I feel like I’ve already lived that, I don’t need to go through it every time I sing this song. If it’s something really painful, I’m not going to put this important, painful thing that I went through out there for some idiot on the internet to stomp all over. So I put a percentage of that into what I do and then morph it into somebody else’s character. I can’t really learn about myself until I put it into somebody else’s shoes.”
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In his Monday statement, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee said that at times he has been “made less and less interested in doing interviews” amid the “age of this massive demand for click bait and content.” Any “scrape of anything interesting” can be used as drama and “spit out as bait,” he continued, leading White to “not want to answer questions with any sort of romance or passion or reflection as I’m too busy having to worry about accidentally triggering nonsense like this from so called ‘journalists’ and ‘editors.'”
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He ended his response to the wave of backlash following his interview by saying, “This has always been a problem as it encourages artists to give ‘safe’ answers to any question and stifles artistic vision and imagination and pushes all of us to not share anything interesting, which was one of the points I made about keeping private things private in that same interview. But yeah, content.”
ADVERTISEMENTWhite recently released Jack White: Collected Lyrics & Selected Writing Volume 1, a collection of lyrics from the artist’s solo recordings including No Name, The Raconteurs, and more, plus selected poems and writings by White, and essays by poet Adrian Matejka.