Shortly before Halloween in 2017, the renowned film composer Danny Elfman received a video via WhatsApp from Nomi Abadi, a musician he had known for two years.
It showed her seated in front of a piano, playing a song from Corpse Bride, a 2005 animated movie that was scored by Elfman. The film tells the story of a man who is spirited away to the underworld and held captive by a dead woman who prevents him from returning to his beloved in the land of the living.
Dressed as the film’s heroine, Abadi wore a lacy wedding dress. She had covered her skin in metallic body paint. Her long hair, normally red, appeared electric blue. On top of her head was a laurel of dead rosebuds connected to a veil.
Since the mid-1980s, Elfman, 71, has earned more than 100 credits as a film composer, including nearly all of Tim Burton’s movies, among them The Nightmare Before Christmas, Beetlejuice, and Batman. He wrote the theme song to The Simpsons. He has won three Emmy Awards and one Grammy, and received four Academy Award nominations. For the last decade he has been playing that music—along with off-center New Wave he recorded as the frontman of the 80s band Oingo Boingo—at raucous concerts at major venues like the Hollywood Bowl and the Royal Albert Hall. His shirt is often off, displaying his heavily worked-out, heavily tattooed chest.
Elfman’s wife, the actress Bridget Fonda, has not typically accompanied him on his concert trips. Before and after the shows, he hangs out with longtime friends, many of them attractive, artistic women who are available to meet up with him in cities around the world.
It looked as if Abadi might join that group in February 2015, when she flew to Denver to see him perform at King Center Concert Hall, and they struck up a friendship.
Three years later, in early 2018, a messenger arrived at Elfman’s studio in East Hollywood with a letter from Allred, Maroko & Goldberg, a Los Angeles law firm known for representing plaintiffs in sexual-harassment and abuse cases. It accused him of using the guise of “mentorship and friendship” to take advantage of Abadi.
The letter claimed that he had exposed himself to her, masturbated in front of her, “encouraged” her to pose nude for photographs, and, on one occasion, held under her nose a “cup” filled with a substance that she believed to be semen. It ended by advising Elfman to contact the firm if he was “desirous of discussing an amicable resolution.”
In a series of interviews, Mr. Elfman did not deny that he had what he called “an infidelity” with Ms. Abadi. They did not have sex, he said, but he did take naked pictures of her. He also said that he did not masturbate in front of her, did not put semen in a cocktail glass and had never mentored her. “How could I have been her mentor when I never heard any of her music?” he says. Abadi did not respond to multiple requests for comment on a detailed list of questions sent by air mail.
In July 2018, they reached a settlement. Elfman paid Abadi $500,000 over five years, split into 10 installments of $50,000 each. He also paid $150,000 for her legal fees and agreed to pay four installments of $42,500 each into a charitable fund Abadi could use at her discretion. In addition, the settlement included a “no admission of liability” clause in which Elfman denied any wrongdoing. The parties also agreed to “relinquish all claims against each other,” and hold the details of their arrangement “in the strictest confidence.”
In 2020, she launched the Female Composer Safety League, a 501(c)(3) organization devoted to calling out sexual abuse in the music business. Then, in July 2023, the confidential settlement and the details of Elfman’s alleged harassment reached the public in a Rolling Stone article that was tied to a new development: a breach-of-contract lawsuit Abadi filed, alleging that $85,000 of the money owed for her charity endeavors had not been paid to her.
By the fall of 2023, Elfman had lost an offer to score A Minecraft Movie, according to associates. Commissions for concertos with the Royal Albert Hall and the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra were canceled.
Yet he has hung on professionally. Last year, he completed the score for Burton’s latest movie, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, though he was not allowed on set and was not invited to its August premiere at the Venice Film Festival. On November 2, he conducted a concert at the Hollywood Bowl.
In July 2024, Abadi filed a defamation suit against Elfman related to comments he made to Rolling Stone, alleging that her claims of sexual misconduct were little more than an act of retaliation from someone whose “goal” was to “break up” his marriage and “replace” his wife.
The seven-year saga stands out as one of the more baroque stories of the #MeToo era. But a new investigation by air mail—consisting of interviews with more than a dozen people with knowledge of the situation, and an examination of numerous e-mails, text messages, financial records, and legal documents—tells a very different story from what has been previously reported.
“Don’t Have an Affair with Him”
The person who introduced Abadi to Elfman is Christopher O’Riley, a pianist and composer who hosted From the Top, a National Public Radio program about classical music, from 1999 to 2018. O’Riley had been something of a mentor to Abadi since she contacted him on Facebook in 2005 looking for career advice.
In February 2015, O’Riley was scheduled to conduct an interview with Elfman for his show. “[Abadi] said, ‘He’s always been an idol of mine—I have to come,’” O’Riley says. “So she flew herself out and stayed in my room.”
In the days after the interview, Elfman and Abadi exchanged chatty e-mails about juice cleanses, vitamins, and numerology. One evening that month, Elfman invited Abadi to join him for a late-night sauna session in Los Angeles, according to a text from Abadi to Rose Rubin, a close friend of Abadi’s at the time. Elfman says the invitation was to a Korean spa, where saunas are gender-segregated.
Abadi told Rubin she had to decline the invitation because she had work in the morning. “It was too late,” she said. “But believe me, I wanted to go.” In another text around that time, she confided to Rubin that she had talked “a little bit” to her therapist about Elfman. “She immediately said don’t have an affair with him,” Abadi said. “Ha ha.”
“Revealing on Many Levels”
“No one is allowed to be censored around me,” Abadi messaged Elfman over WhatsApp that October. The topic of conversation was a 30-year-long photography project that involves Elfman being photographed by a mix of amateur and professional photographers, to catalogue what he calls his “inevitable decay.”
Elfman was telling Abadi about the way he “morphed through the eyes of many artists that I’ve trusted. Putting myself totally in their hands. Exerting no control. Very fascinating stuff. Revealing on many levels.”
“That is special,” Abadi replied. “I’ve never felt like I’ve known myself more than when I see my body through someone else’s lens.” The photographer “Francesca Woodman would have loved you,” she added.
“She is my constant inspiration,” Elfman wrote back, before expressing an interest in sending Abadi a picture from the project.
“Can I create separate password files like I do off the net?” he wrote, before settling on a selfie, naked in front of a mirror, with a chandelier hanging over his head and his crotch just outside the frame of the mirror.
“But u want some better pictures come and take them yourself,” he wrote. “All my good stuff 99% are shot through other eyes.”
“Oh I believe that. That may be breaking a code for me. I’ll think on it,” she replied, before adding, a few minutes later, “You look good! What’s that shit about ‘not being as hardcore as you used to be.’”
He quickly texted back: “Well the last thing in the world I want to do is make you uncomfortable and I certainly don’t want you to break your codes.”
“I don’t think you could make me uncomfortable,” she replied.
The Photoshoot
“Still time to get to Paris,” Elfman wrote to her the day after they discussed the photo project.
“If you flew me out I would be there,” Abadi said. “You know that!”
“I do fly friends out on occasion,” he said. “The problem is if there would be time to find a decent ticket.”
“Well, if you feel [like] being crazy.. I would gladly go and would have have to find a way to make it somehow ‘for work’ (or at least would have to say it was.)” Abadi replied.
“Well that would be your creative endeavor,” he wrote back. “I’ve done far crazier things. But how to call it work would be a bit of a trick unless it was essential for some research of yours. All I can do on my end is shake cash out of cash machines and finance excursions of whimsy[.] And that’s IF there[’s] still a sane ticket out there.... Depends on luck.”
“Feeling lucky?” Abadi wrote back. “Let’s look for tickets.”
Soon enough, she had found a flight priced at $1,029 with a quick stop on the way in Moscow.
Rolling Stone would later describe a police report she allegedly filed, in which she described how he had “masturbated in front of her in Paris after they’d flown out to France with several others to work on a project.”
Before she left for Paris, Abadi wrote Rubin. “He got me a separate room and everything,” she said. “Even PJ is on board,” referring to her boyfriend at the time, P. J. Merola, a percussionist.
Several of Elfman’s friends, most of them women, also went to Paris to attend his concert. Abadi told Rubin the other guests were surprised to learn she had known Elfman only eight months. In another text, Abadi mentioned a woman whom she thought Elfman was “banging,” until she learned she was a “10-year-long friend of his.” She also said she was “not going to be happy” about an upcoming dinner he had scheduled with a “Brazilian actress.”
Elfman says he and Abadi took a sauna together in the spa of Le Meurice, the hotel where he was staying. From there, she went with Elfman to his hotel room, where, he says, he took nude photos of her. In his recollection, Abadi initiated the session; Abadi’s recollection is different.
“She never put her hand on me, I never put my hand on her,” Elfman says. “I did not have sex with her, but it was still an infidelity. She wanted to come to Paris, but I encouraged her coming to Paris. I allowed this woman into my room, which I never should have done.”
The next morning, Abadi sent Rubin a text saying that Elfman “whisked” her to the hotel spa for a massage. “Not a bad way to start the day,” she wrote, adding that there were details of the night that she did not want to put in writing.
Abadi later described the photo session to Rubin as “cool and intimate.” Rubin has no recollection of Abadi’s saying that Elfman had “coerced” her into appearing naked, or that he had masturbated in front of her.
“I would have remembered,” Rubin claims. “If she had left feeling scared and uncomfortable, if I thought she was wronged or in danger or was threatened, I would have been there for her, because I loved her.” (Abadi did not respond to air mail’s request for comment.)
“No More Naked”
Elfman had a cold. He had gone straight to London from Paris and joked to Abadi that it had been caused by too much “naked romping.”
“No more naked! We leave that in Paris,” Abadi wrote to Elfman from the airport in Paris on her way home. “That was a once in a lifetime experience that en [sic] never happen again.”
Days later, Abadi messaged Elfman again. “I was going to send you a photo from my naked book, but then I felt unsure about it,” she wrote. “No one’s really seen it but three people (including myself.) Plus, you already have (all the) access to some other stuff!”
“Not fair! Not fair!” he wrote back. “Have disclosed a lifetime of secrets and sights unseen to thee. And taunt not I !”
“Well, when you put it that way,” she wrote back. “Maybe just one.”
”......🙈🙉🙊” Elfman replied.
“Aw. Monkeys!” she wrote back, before sending an image of herself naked on her side, her left breast exposed and her hand in between her legs.
“(For inspirational purposes only!),” she wrote.
He replied: “Oh! Yes, purely educational purposes. Thank you very much for trusting me with this beautiful and indeed inspirational image.”
“Someone Who Would Fool Around”
Elfman and Fonda met in 1998, when he was scoring A Simple Plan. Around 2002, they attended a party thrown by a CAA agent, at which Elfman, the geeky composer, bumped into Fonda, by that point a world-weary movie star.
Descended from one of Hollywood’s most famous dynasties, she had given widely praised performances in Jackie Brown and Single White Female. Yet Fonda says she always felt like Salieri from Milos Forman’s Amadeus. And in 2002, she pulled a Greta Garbo and exited the business.
At the agency party that night, she said to Elfman, “Do you not remember us meeting five years ago?” It soon became clear that he was being shy. She found it cute, and they had dinner the next night. A year later, they were married.
“What I knew is that he was someone who would fool around,” Fonda says. “And I decided if it really upset me, I would have left. But it has not upset me enough to leave.”
This included in 2015, when Fonda and Elfman hosted a Bollywood-themed holiday party at which costumes were encouraged. Abadi went as an Arabian belly dancer, according to O’Riley, who was her date that evening. Prior to the event, she texted Rubin, “I’m only dressing elaborately and sexy so that Danny will look at me and realize that he should drop everything in his life [and] chase me instead.”
Fonda got the message. “I thought, That woman is after my husband,” she says.
Roy Jurgens, who was Abadi’s manager from 2015 to 2017, met Abadi in 2015, when they were volunteering for the Sanders campaign. Jurgens says that she characterized her relationship with Elfman as a “friendship” but had hopes of “romantic possibilities.” At some point, Jurgens says, Abadi told him she wanted to replace his wife. “She wanted to be his ‘muse,’” he adds. “I remember her using that word.”
“I’ve Always Been Strange”
Elfman looks like a Dr. Seuss character by way of St. Mark’s Place: his hair is bright orange, his body is covered in macabre tattoos. Framed photographs by Diane Arbus and Mary Ellen Mark line the walls of his Batcave-like studio in Hollywood. One shelf is lined entirely with vintage copies of Movie Monsters magazine. Another contains Elfman’s collection of shrunken heads.
“I’ve always been strange,” he says. “I feel like an alien who loves humans, like I was sent here and could spend my whole life observing them, without being one of them. There’s only one thing that’s easy, and it’s: Put me in front of a piano, and I can start writing. Without it, I am nothing.”
Elfman was raised by a pair of schoolteachers in Baldwin Hills, a neighborhood in southwestern Los Angeles nicknamed “the Black Beverly Hills” because it was home to Ray Charles and Ike and Tina Turner, among others. He received much of his education in the darkness of the Baldwin Hills theater, watching science fiction and horror movies such as Children of the Damned and The Haunting.
“Back then, Danny was a bespectacled science geek,” according to Elfman’s older brother, Richard. “Then, at around 15, we got him a guitar, and a month later he could pick out every note of a Django Reinhardt solo. He got a violin, and a month later he could do the Stéphane Grappelli accompaniment. It was unreal.”
Elfman’s high-school girlfriend, Kim Gordon, who went on to become the frontwoman of Sonic Youth, introduced him to the music of Billie Holiday and Duke Ellington. Another classmate, Michael Byron, who was then a trumpeter and is now an avant-garde composer, pulled him toward Bartók and Stravinsky.
After graduation, in 1970, Elfman went to Paris. There, he joined a bohemian theater troupe, Le Grand Magic Circus, to which his brother also belonged. Performers in lion costumes humped performers dressed as zebras. The roles of ballerinas went to bearded men. Blood spattered the stage, and gags about other bodily fluids abounded.
Electrified violin in hand, Elfman spent the summer touring France with the group. In the fall, he spent almost a year traveling across Africa, playing with local musicians.
He then came back to Los Angeles, where Richard had started the Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo, a guerrilla-theater group whose members literally wore gorilla costumes. As its musical director, Danny marched around Westwood spitting fire and passing out leaflets.
Richard’s time with the group culminated in the 1980 film Forbidden Zone, a musical fantasia that he co-wrote and directed, and which Elfman scored—his first job as a composer. When Richard left, Danny took over and transformed it into a rock band, Oingo Boingo.
The music was a hybrid of ska, punk, and new wave. They played at Whisky a Go Go, the Roxy, and Madame Wong’s, where they were in rotation with the Go-Go’s, Los Lobos, and X.
Matt Groening, who was writing music reviews for the Los Angeles Reader, an alt-weekly, trashed an early Oingo Boingo performance. More than half a decade later, he hired Elfman to write the theme song for The Simpsons.
“At the end of our first meeting about The Simpsons,” Elfman recalls, “Matt said, ‘I don’t know if you remember this but—’, and I stopped him and said, ‘Oh, I remember.’”
“Frighteningly Good”
Abadi grew up in Rancho Santa Margarita, in Orange County, California. Her father, Marden, was a concert pianist who gave nationally televised performances for the United States Bicentennial celebration and later founded the La Jolla Piano Institute. In 1993, Abadi performed with the Orange County Chamber Orchestra for the first time. She was five.
Newspapers in Southern California took an interest in her. In a 1995 article, the Los Angeles Times described eight-year-old Abadi as “terribly, frighteningly good” on piano. She and her brother, Arthur, attended the Orange County School of the Arts (O.C.S.A.). Instead of going to college, Abadi began performing as a singer-songwriter.
By 2007, she was giving piano lessons to the children of director Sam Raimi and his wife, Gillian Greene, among other wealthy Los Angeles families. Raimi is best known for having directed the 2002 movie Spider-Man, but he also directed A Simple Plan, the thriller on which Elfman met Fonda. Rubin, who became one of Abadi’s best friends, is Raimi’s niece.
The relationship between Abadi and Raimi’s wife, Greene, deteriorated almost a decade later. The proximate cause was a disagreement over lesson fees. But Greene later learned that Abadi had engaged in a sexual relationship with one of her sons, who was 20 at the time.
Four people interviewed for this article said they had direct knowledge of the relationship. One shared an e-mail Abadi (then 27) wrote to the son (then 20) in 2014, expressing frustration with him being unwilling to come out to his family about their romance. “I thought you wanted to be with me,” she wrote. “It hurt me when you said that your father thinks I’ve brought drama into the family. That’s ridiculous, and so far from the truth. I’ve stood up for my business when I’ve had to. I’ve brought music into your family.”
“The Word Wars”
About nine months after she attended the Elfman-Fonda holiday party, Abadi e-mailed Elfman to ask if she could stop by for “a quick hang.” He told her to come, then sent a photo of a martini glass containing a creamy substance. “A mystery pik to pique your ‘magination,” he wrote.
It was August 2016, and the presidential campaign was dominating the news. Elfman was a Hillary Clinton supporter; Abadi had volunteered for Bernie Sanders, who had lost the contest for the Democratic nomination by that point.
Elfman says that when Abadi walked in, he showed her the martini glass, which, according to him, was filled with a mixture of bathroom products, such as Cetaphil lotion. It was supposed to be a “Trump snot cocktail” that was of a piece with the kind of humor he propagated as part of the Mystic Knights, he says. But he says he didn’t get much of a reaction from Abadi.
“To prepare a glass full of semen, I would have had to have had 10 of my friends over!” Elfman says.
What he remembers from that evening is that she wanted to talk about her belief that California’s Democratic-primary contest had been rigged against Sanders. A heated argument took place, in which Elfman says he took aim at what he said was a generational tendency toward moral absolutism and conspiracy theorizing.
“I told her to leave,” he says.
The next morning, Elfman was met at his studio by Gale Hazeltine, his trainer and physical therapist since 2005. “He said there’d been an argument the night before, and I remember it was about the election,” Hazeltine says. Elfman told her that he ridiculed a female friend’s belief about a rigged primary.
That same day, Abadi posted a message on social media: “Raise your hand if you think all political discussions should include listening and exclude insult … while remaining respectful 100% of the time.”
A few days later, Rubin went to lunch with Abadi at a restaurant in Venice. “Nomi was upset that they had had a fight and was wondering if she could do something to smooth it over,” Rubin says, adding that the argument had been about politics.
Concerning the mystery cocktail, Rubin says that Abadi had shown her the image that Elfman had sent in the text message before the visit. Rubin remembered Abadi finding the joke “slightly weird; she sort of rolled her eyes at it.”
Jurgens remembers Abadi saying that Elfman had shown her a cocktail made of what she believed to be semen, but he adds that he had no way of knowing for certain what was in the glass and never got the impression she was disturbed by it. “It was like ‘Ew, gross. Can you believe?,’” he says, describing her alleged reaction.
Asked if Abadi described Elfman placing it in front of her face and causing her to gag at the smell, as she would later allege in her defamation suit, Rubin says, “That’s an easy no.”
Melisa McGregor, an assistant for Elfman since 2009, later signed an affidavit saying, “I helped him light and shoot the photo,” and that it was a joke.
“Impossible Nights”
In October 2016, Elfman invited Abadi to his Nightmare Before Christmas concert at the Hollywood Bowl.
“I know we’re not really speaking at the moment,” he wrote in an e-mail. “But as I’m coming up soon on my final halloween performances of ‘nightmare’ in LA and don’t expect to do it again, I wanted to offer you a ticket should you want to attend.”
Abadi replied, “Hey, good to hear from you.... Sorry for the word wars… Thank you for inviting me. See you on the 30th ~”
She went to the show but was allegedly upset with the quality of her seats. According to friends, she left early. But she and Elfman continued to text and e-mail occasionally. (Abadi did not respond to questions about the concert.)
In September 2017, Elfman received an e-mail from Abadi. “I’m having one of those impossible nights where I feel there’s no one in the world to relate to,” she wrote. “Everything is fine, here more or less… And yet.. I miss coming over late nights and putting life away as I knew it. I don’t think you understand how special a friend you were to share this feeling, all spontaneous experiences included… To feel reached, and completely understood. For what it’s worth, I miss that feeling. No one has quite ever put me the same. It was amplified in Paris but I’d probably feel it in a tin box in Kansas anyway if you were around.”
Two days later, Elfman replied, “Thank you for sharing.... the lord works in mysterious ways.”
That November, Abadi joined a group of Hollywood luminaries at Leo Baeck Temple, a Reform synagogue in Bel Air, for the Bar Mitzvah of one of Greene and Raimi’s children. Later that day, in a car with Greene, Rubin received a text from Abadi: “Hey. I wanted to talk to you about the Danny situation. There’s more. And with everything coming out in the media with these creeps,” a reference to the stories about Harvey Weinstein and others that were just beginning to appear in the news. She added, “I should be doing more about it, I wanted to get your advice.”
When the car reached its destination, Greene called Elfman. “Get lawyers immediately,” she remembers telling him.
After the Settlement
According to Elfman, there was no question back in 2018 that he was going to settle. He was lined up to score Men in Black: International and Dolittle. “My fee for either one of those was more than the actual settlement,” he says. “It simply made no economic sense to not buy what I would call five years of remission. I took $800,000, divided it by five, and it was roughly a $150,000 a year tax.”
After reaching their settlement, Abadi and Elfman did not contact each other directly. But in 2019, Michael Maroko, one of her lawyers, e-mailed Rebecca Kaufman, one of Elfman’s attorneys, saying his client had broken a wrist. The note went on to say that Abadi recalled that Elfman had once suffered a wrist injury of his own.
“Nomi asked if she could speak to Danny about his course of treatment as well as the contact info for the surgeon,” Maroko wrote. “If Danny is Ok with speaking to Nomi about this limited issue please provide me with the phone number she should use.” Elfman passed along the surgeon’s name through his lawyer but declined to speak with Abadi.
A year later, Maroko wrote another e-mail to Kaufman to say that Abadi was looking for “closure.” Would Elfman be willing to meet with her? He declined but sent word through his lawyer that he wished her the best.
Abadi’s Female Composer Safety League was formed in the spring of 2020 to root out sexual abuse in the “male-dominated fields of film music, television music, concert music, video game music, and commercial composing,” according to its Web site.
During the pandemic, it hosted virtual panels. One featured video-game composers, including Abadi, talking about how to promote “gender safety and equality in game audio.” Another featured the actress and #MeToo activist Rose McGowan. In 2022, Abadi spoke in front of the California State Assembly in favor of AB-2777, a bill that gave sexual-abuse victims an extended window in which to recover damages. She was prominently featured in a Hollywood Reporter article on workplace issues for female composers.
In January 2022, Abadi appeared as a guest on Beyond the Chameleon, a podcast about female composers. There, she spoke of her experiences in 2015–16 with a nameless composer. “I was not touched by this person,” she said, “but their behavior was so inappropriate and so grossly sexual and so terrorizing and it was such a big studio and it was a composer I admired so much and I was so alone during it that I never said anything.
“I thought this was just part of what I needed to put up with,” she went on. “I’m like, ‘He’s not going to do anything too weird,’ because he knows I have a boyfriend.’ It became this gaslighting thing I began roping myself into.”
She described the possible reaction she might face should she ever decide to go public. “People are going to say, ‘Oh, look at all these text messages you sent him that are so sweet and nice. And you kept coming back and you said how much you liked him, and you were so happy. Why did you stay? Da da da. And I’m like, you know, all I can say is that women who understand what it’s like to have your body not align with the shit that comes out of our mouths, and what we have to literally steel ourselves and sit through environments that are just so terrorizing and traumatizing that my reaction is always to freeze. I’m not a fight, I’m not a flight. I’m a freeze. And I’m also a fawn.”
“I Can Destroy His Entire Life”
“We’re working on an article on Danny Elfman that includes details regarding sexual misconduct claims raised by his former associate Nomi Abadi,” a young Rolling Stone reporter named Ethan Millman wrote in an e-mail he sent to Elfman’s representatives on March 2, 2023.
The e-mail said that “multiple friends” of Abadi’s “assert that Elfman attempted to groom Ms. Abadi—including late-night invitations to come to Elfman’s studio alone, requests to join him in his sauna and claims that nudity was an important part of his creative process to make music—before escalating to more inappropriate behavior.”
It also said that Rolling Stone was in possession of a police report filed shortly after she attended the Bar Mitzvah in 2017, and 15 months after Abadi and Elfman had last seen each other, which contained further allegations, such as that he had masturbated multiple times in her presence and had repeatedly had her over to the studio, where he would answer the door in his bathrobe.
Elfman’s representatives have never been able to obtain the police report. A request for the report filed by this reporter with the Los Angeles Police Department was denied. When asked for comment by Rolling Stone, a representative for the L.A.P.D. said the department was unable to locate the report and has “no information to provide and no statement.”
Elfman declined to be interviewed for the Rolling Stone article but provided a written statement, which read in part: “Abadi’s allegations are simply not true. I allowed someone to get close to me without knowing that I was her ‘childhood crush’ and that her intention was to break up my marriage and replace my wife. When this person realized that I wanted distance from her, she made it clear that I would pay for having rejected her.”
Kaufman sent the Rolling Stone reporter Millman a dossier containing e-mails between Abadi and Elfman, a number of Rubin’s text exchanges with Abadi, and sworn affidavits from Rubin and O’Riley, who stated their view that Abadi’s claims were not credible. Then, Elfman’s team heard nothing for more than three months. “We figured it was dead,” Kaufman says.
But on July 19, 2023, Kaufman received an e-mail from Millman. “Hello,” he wrote. “We’re planning to publish an article today regarding allegations of sexual harassment against Danny Elfman. As you know, we’ve previously received your replies to all of the allegations we are detailing in our story, and we will be incorporating them throughout the article.”
The e-mail noted that the article would include that Abadi had, earlier that day, filed a complaint in the Superior Court of California alleging that Elfman had breached the contract between them by missing two $42,500 payments to her charitable account, one in 2019 and another in 2021. Kaufman says she learned about both the alleged missing payments and the new complaint from Millman’s e-mail: “It hadn’t even hit the docket.” Elfman provided air mail with bank statements indicating he had sent all four of the previously agreed-upon payments. Arbitration is ongoing.
The article did quote briefly from Chris O’Riley’s and Rose Rubin’s signed affidavits. But neither O’Riley nor Rubin were contacted by Millman, and Rubin’s text messages with Abadi were not included in the article.
Millman did not respond to Air mail’s requests for comment, and a spokesperson for Rolling Stone said only, “We stand by our reporting.”
Shortly after the article was posted to the magazine’s Web site, Abadi texted Alexa Nikolas, a former child star turned #MeToo activist: “Danny put all the ‘evidence’ he had on the record, and it wasn’t even enough for RS to run it in the article.” She then added, “I can destroy his entire life with what I know about that man. He is really fucking dumb to mess with me.”
“I Will Report You”
Three days after the article was published in Rolling Stone, Abadi’s ex-boyfriend Merola sent an e-mail to Millman.
He wrote that he was “deeply troubled” by Millman’s story because he had “firsthand knowledge of her experience hanging out with Elfman from start to finish” and that “at no time did she indicate any such sexual-harassment claims as expressed in your reporting and in her referenced settlement.” Merola added that he had gone through his own experience with Abadi, one that led to his facing her in civil court.
In June 2020, three years after their final breakup, Merola had received an e-mail from Abadi, congratulating him on a recent film project, court records show. They chatted amiably until they began going over their relationship.
Later that evening, Merola e-mailed her. “If you want to have some kind of non-negative relationship, we would have to talk about everything you refuse to talk about. We have baggage,” it read in part.
The next morning, he received her reply: “If I ever hear from you again I will report you.”
“Report me for what?” he responded. “Would you listen to yourself? And you wonder why I am suspicious of everything you do. So take your petty threats somewhere else please. I am not your enemy.”
The following November, court records show, he received an e-mail from Native Instruments, a music-software provider to which he had a paid subscription. The company said it had “received reports from a user that they were gifted some software that is currently coming up registered to your account and so they are unable to use it.” The person claiming ownership was Abadi. Merola sent her an e-mail requesting that she stop using the software.
Three days later, according to court records, a former girlfriend of Merola’s texted his mother to say she had received a “strange message” from a woman named Nomi “who said that she’s thinking of going public with his abuse and wondering if I had anything to add confidentially. Yikes!” Merola’s ex-girlfriend added that, while her relationship with him had not ended well, “he was never abusive in any way.” When Merola learned of the exchange, he e-mailed Abadi to say that he would consider taking legal action against her if she did not stop making false statements about him.
The response came a few weeks later, when a sheriff arrived at his apartment and served him with a domestic-violence restraining order Abadi had obtained against him.
Describing the alleged abuse, Abadi wrote, “This person has made inappropriate sexual, hurtful, abusive remarks, incessantly, after I asked that he please not contact me again. He also unregistered my musical instrument samples from my home studio, infringing on my career.”
Merola decided to challenge it in court. In February 2021, a Superior Court judge heard testimony from each of them and examined printouts of their online communications before ruling against Abadi. “But for [Abadi’s] contact,” said the judge, “[Merola] wouldn’t have contacted you at all. Seems like you were the one trying to contact him in various ways and he’s not cooperating.” He also instructed her to pay Merola’s legal fees. Merola has since moved to North Carolina, partly, he says, to get away from Abadi.
He described much of his story in the e-mail to Millman. But Merola says that he never heard back from him.
Enter Jane Doe
Describing the 2015–16 experience with the unnamed composer on the 2022 podcast, Abadi said that after disconnecting from him, she got into contact with another person the man had allegedly subjected to similar behavior. And it happened, she said, “back in the 90s.”
In October 2023, a person matching that description filed an anonymous “Jane Doe” complaint against Elfman. Once again, Elfman found out about the suit when an e-mail came to his attorneys from Millman requesting comment for a second story Rolling Stone was publishing later that day. The attorney handling the case was Jeff Anderson, who had previously represented Abadi in her breach-of-contract suit.
The complaint alleged that between 1997 and 2002, Elfman repeatedly “sexually abused” a woman he met in New York at the home of a “mutual friend,” back when she was a 21-year-old student at the New York Film Academy.
After meeting Jane Doe, it read, Elfman began “grooming” the plaintiff with “the intent to manipulate her emotions and take advantage of her.” Jane Doe soon “found” herself “hanging out” in Elfman’s hotel room at the Mercer Hotel, whereupon he took off all his clothes and stood in front of the window, completely naked. According to the complaint, he “coerced [her] to take her clothing off and stand naked with him in front of the open windows in full view of the public” From then on, it alleged, “any time that Plaintiff and Defendant Elfman spent time together, Defendant Elfman removed all of his clothing until he was completely nude, and walked around nude.”
A year later, the complaint alleged, the woman decided to move to Los Angeles. So she went to stay with Elfman at his house in Topanga Canyon while she looked for a home. It said that she stayed with him several weeks during which time they sometimes slept in the same bed, with him naked and her clothed. After she got her own place to live, she returned to and slept at Elfman’s home dozens of times. According to the complaint, the plaintiff slept in Elfman’s bed more than 40 times, and in 2002, he told her that after she fell asleep, he would always masturbate while looking at her.
Because the defendant never touched the plaintiff, there was no physical harm that could be documented. However, sexual-misconduct cases have often been bolstered by corroborating sources, people the victim confided in at the time, to testify on their behalf. Yet more than a year later, it appears that no one has come forward to submit an affidavit, a declaration, or any form of corroboration.
Elfman says that he had allowed the accuser to stay with him for a week sometime around 1998. They had gone to a few premieres together, including one for Good Will Hunting. He had a crush on her, he admits.
Then she came to stay with him in L.A. when she was looking for a place to live. It was clear, he says, that she wasn’t into him. “So we stayed friendly after that. But she never stayed with me again.”
Camille Vasquez, a litigator who worked on behalf of Johnny Depp in his suit against Amber Heard, was hired to represent Elfman. In June 2024, she submitted a motion for summary judgment on behalf of Elfman, who denied, in a declaration, ever having masturbated in front of the plaintiff.
In August, Judge Lisa Sepe-Wiesenfeld, the judge deciding the case, told the plaintiff’s attorneys in court, “So these are all allegations, that’s all they are.” Days later, she granted the motion for summary judgment, tossing the case.
Elfman is currently fighting Abadi’s defamation suit, which is notably different in its allegations from her lawyers’ initial letter. Where the 2018 letter from Abadi’s lawyer claimed that Elfman had “encouraged” Abadi to pose nude for photos in the Paris hotel room in 2016, her new attorney, Eric George, alleged that she had been “coerced” into the shoot.
The suit also alleges that during the shoot, Elfman “grabbed his penis with one hand and grabbed Nomi by the wrist with his other hand, jamming her hand onto her genitals.”
“She never claimed I touched her and then after seven years, she’s accused me of outright sexual assault,” Elfman says. “It’s like a robbery happens at your house, a bunch of paintings are stolen, you file the insurance claim and then seven years later say, ‘Oh! I forgot. There was a Van Gogh!’”
Abadi did acknowledge in the new suit that there had been a fight about politics in August 2016, though she characterized it differently than he did. According to the suit, when Elfman first placed the glass of “semen ejaculate” in front of Abadi, she “sat in silence, terrified, gagging from the putrid smell.”
The complaint continues: “A visibly upset Elfman hastily placed the glass of semen ejaculate back in his refrigerator. Nomi recalls the air in the room being tense and unsafe. Elfman opened his laptop and made a comment about Donald Trump to break the silence. When Nomi responded by expressing her support for Bernie Sanders, Elfman told Nomi that ‘We can’t have a Jew running our country.’”
This last claim strikes Elfman as being particularly outlandish. “I’m Jewish!” he says. “I’d love to see a Jew become president. But for any minority, it’s an uphill battle. And my point was, Obama won because he could appeal to the middle, and I didn’t think Bernie Sanders could do that. That’s just my opinion. I’d love to be wrong.”
The claims in the defamation suit also differ from what Nikolas says Abadi told her at the time. “I remember the day she sat in my house and told my husband and I that Elfman had masturbated behind her into a cup and asked her to drink it. It was disgusting. I took her at her word.” Now the “cup” was described as a “martini glass” and had been in the refrigerator rather than the produced on the spot.
“Nomi’s defamation complaint speaks for itself,” says Eric George, the lawyer who is now representing her. “We will not dignify false and retaliatory accusations made against her. We look forward to resolving these matters in Court.”
While the defamation suit slowly moves forward, Elfman has been writing songs and feeling inspired. Never mind the feedback from a music executive who told him recently that while the music sounded great, he should lose the lyrics that seem to be inspired by his recent experience.
Over a midtempo song with a propulsive, industrial sound, he sings, “I was once a demigod / now it’s off with my head—chop chop.”
Jacob Bernstein is a reporter for The New York Times and the co-director of Everything Is Copy—Nora Ephron: Scripted & Unscripted
