Deryck Whibley of Sum 41 performs during the Louder Than Life music festival on Thursday, Sept. 26, 2024, in Louisville, Ky. His forthcoming memoir details allegations of what he says was a non-consensual sexual relationship with the band's former manager.Amy Harris/The Associated Press
Sum 41 front man Deryck Whibley alleges in his new memoir that the band’s former long-time manager, Greig Nori, pressured him into a non-consensual sexual relationship that he kept hidden even from his bandmates.
Mr. Whibley claims he tried to end the relationship numerous times. But he says Mr. Nori, who is also the co-front man of the Ontario band Treble Charger, routinely pushed back, sometimes with anger and accusations of homophobia.
“Greig kept pushing for things to happen when we were together,” wrote Mr. Whibley, who describes himself as “not interested in guys” in the book. “I started feeling like I was being pressured to do something against my will.”
Walking Disaster: My Life Through Heaven and Hell is the tell-all story of Canada’s heaviest pop-punk export through Mr. Whibley’s eyes. It will be published Tuesday by Simon & Schuster imprint Gallery Books.
Reached by phone late Monday, Mr. Nori said that he had not seen the book or heard the allegations, prior to coverage published online Monday evening. “These are false allegations,” he said. Mr. Nori has retained a defamation lawyer.
Mr. Whibley’s memoir attempts to separate rock-star truths (smashed-up hotel rooms, lines of cocaine dropped into shots of Jack Daniel’s) from falsehoods (no, the name Sum 41 was not inspired by blink-182) as he details his transformation from an angsty teen in a Toronto suburb to the depths of alcoholism, spending $2,000 on booze a week in a California mansion with the window-blinds drawn.
Mr. Nori is a key player for nearly half of Mr. Whibley’s book. According to Mr. Whibley, the pair first met at a Treble Charger concert when Mr. Whibley was 16 and Mr. Nori, who was then in his mid-30s, agreed to attend an early Sum 41 performance in the mid ‘90s. Shortly after, he became the band’s manager. Only with years of reflection did Mr. Whibley, 44, come to recognize the strangeness of their initial friendship, he says.
“Thinking about that smile he gave me when I snuck backstage and met him feels much different now,” Mr. Whibley writes.
He says Mr. Nori first kissed him shortly after he turned 18, in a bathroom at a warehouse party, when the Sum 41 singer was high on ecstasy. Though he initially viewed their kissing and sexual interactions as an “experiment” while he was on drugs, he would feel “extremely uncomfortable” about it when sober.
Mr. Whibley says that Mr. Nori’s pressure left him unable to end the sexual relationship until around the time Sum 41 ended its tour in support of its breakthrough album, All Killer No Filler, about four years later in 2002.
He says that the alleged relationship prompted at least one bout of depression. Over time, Mr. Whibley writes, loved ones including his wife, Ariana Whibley, and his ex-wife, Avril Lavigne, helped him frame his experience as one that may have been grooming or abuse.
He hid what was happening out of shame, unable to tell his bandmates that their manager may have “groomed and pressured me from a young age to be in a sexual relationship with him.”
Mr. Nori never used force, he says. The band eventually dropped Mr. Nori as manager after the tour behind the 2004 album Chuck.
Mr. Nori produced some of Sum 41′s music, and has also worked with Hedley and Marianas Trench. Mr. Whibley writes that Mr. Nori at one point tried to use the eventual 2001 Sum 41 hit In Too Deep for his own musical project, and accuses him of stealing some of Mr. Whibley’s lucrative songwriting credits – leading the Sum 41 front man to eventually file a lawsuit over the latter matter, which he says was settled out of court in 2018.
Mr. Nori works as the recording studio manager and engineer at the Algoma Conservatory of Music in Sault Ste. Marie, Ont. In an e-mail Tuesday, the Conservatory’s principal and artistic director, Guy Traficante, said that he had no information regarding the allegations in Mr. Whibley’s memoir, and that Mr. Nori “has always been fully professional in his work” there.
“I have received only excellent comments from the people he has worked with,” Mr. Traficante said in an e-mail. “I certainly hope these allegations will not impact his excellent work here in any way.”
Simon & Schuster declined to comment on Walking Disaster’s legal review process prior to its publication. The publisher did not immediately respond to a follow-up Tuesday asking if it would change that stance following Mr. Nori’s comment that he had been unaware of the allegations prior to Monday’s coverage of the book.