Andy Warhol as Predator: An Updated Look at His Life and “Art”

My first suspicion that Andy Warhol was a pedophile, came with the new documentary, The Warhol Diaries. The multiple 19 year old boyfriends, the sexual obsession with teenagers, hundreds of thousands of photos and drawings of teens, the giant volume of pornographic work in which teenagers were involved, the teenage “cast” and movies of the Factory, the way so many kids around him died. Myself and my long term collaborator, Lauren Chief Elk (founder of Give Your Money to Women), agreed that something was deeply off, and dug deeper. And it became very obvious that something was terribly, terribly amiss with Andy Warhol. There’s almost nothing you can find that meaningfully frames Warhol as a predator; but when you actually look at the archival material, and piece it all together, it is undeniable and perfectly clear; the only thing that meaningfully describes or explains his art, the trajectory of his career, and his personal life. 

The results of the preliminary investigation I conducted with Lauren Chief Elk, can be found here; it includes a portion of the evidence we have been able to gather to. This piece is an analysis of how this predator has functioned, was enabled, covered up for, and enshrined in pop culture; what Andy Warhol looks like through a lens of predation and abuse. It is a basis to re-frame the existing narrative about Warhol, a re-framing that is mandatory because existing analysis excludes the abuses he committed or refuses to see them as significant.

To begin, we see that Warhol had created throughout his life an environment, work, and personal realm, all where he has ready access to youth; and that in fact, his created environment was consistently delivering teenagers into his life. The general arts community itself was a source of teenagers for Warhol: boys were brought to him from the bathhouses, referred to him by friends, he was introduced through their social circles. Andy often met young boys through Studio 54, which regularly let in underage teens. Studio 54 was a great setup for a predator. We have one account of a 14 year old, who was brought in as the friend of one of Warhol’s teenage boyfriends, disappearing for hours in this den of drug and sex.

And youth would come to him , hoping to be the next superstar or to be discovered or to get their art out into the world. Many sought him out for his renown as an artist and the supposed artistic community or incubator he was creating. Offers of movies and art and fame made it possible for him to lure young people looking to make it into his circle. These were in large part teens who were hoping to have careers in the arts of some kind, thinking that that they would be developed as artists, that this was the start of their arts career. It shows a pedophile’s obsessive focus on getting into a position of power over kids. In the world he set up, Andy could offer a teenager the entire world: to make them a celebrity, give them a platform for their art, a social and party scene, other teenagers to hang out with (and sleep with, on camera of course), money, clothes, invitations to elusive parties. 

Not only was the art the bait for teenagers, Andy made THEM into the art itself, presenting to the public that these were his adored muses, confidants, that what was so genius about him is that he could find all of these bright young stars, that he just “saw” the culture. We see pretty consistently young members of the Factory and Andy’s circle being from age 14 to age 19. Andy is guileless on this; he refers to them literally constantly as “kids” and “boys”. And his teens were often quite troubled — he specifically stated that he picked Edie Sedgwick because she was so damaged. Predators generally prey on people who they think are weak, damaged, vulnerable, or easily manipulated. 

The Factory was not just some community owned art space. This was a space that was totally owned and controlled by Warhol and a very small hand picked team. The Factory was not organic; it was created by Warhol, run by Warhol, and he decided who came in and who came out, and what happened there. As far as we can figure out, outside of that small team and guests, the entire place was full of teenagers, and even a kid as young as 13 who was Andy’s “assistant”. We can find a number of accounts of underage and teenage people there under the notion of working there or having been “cast” in one of his movies. There was this entire construct of legitimacy around this entire situation: these nude photos, these explicit sexual films, having 13 year old assistants coming to personally wake up a partially nude Warhol, that these things were about commercial movies, and art exhibitions, and careers and legitimate jobs. 

One thing that a lens of predation and pedophilia requires is that we take a totally different perspective of his canon of work. Giant parts of his work that have been previously called a daring exploration of male homosexuality and pleasure in a homophobic society, are very straightforwardly the obvious creation of a pedophilic predator. His “A Boy Book” features dozens of drawings of what are clearly boys around pubescence, all nudes, often times engaged in sexual acts with each other. In fact, he was often setting up scenarios for teenagers to be engaged in sex around him, including via drugging them and tricking them; one set of twins he drugged and tried to trick into having incestuous sex with each other on film. His videos featured sex and sex and sex and sex; we haven’t done a full examination of the movies, but do know that many of them featured teenagers and most were pornographic. And Andy had an entire collection that is just him taking pictures of penises and buttocks and chests… hundreds of them. In a collection, they are deconstructed, disembodied so you can’t tell what was the age of the models… with Andy’s clear preference for young people, I imagine these were just hundreds of young boys that were coming in and out of the studio to “sit” for him. Andy describes Victor Hugo just “bringing” him boys from the bathhouses to photograph. 

One of the models, Robert Fleischer said this in a quote for Open Culture: 

“He used to come over to my apartment on 76th Street. He used to come quite often. He always wanted to sketch me. At the same time, just about that time, I became a model. I was photographed a lot, and I was in retailing but earned part of my income by modeling and Andy used to sketch and sketch and sketch and sketch… He said he was going to do what he called his ‘Boy Book,’ and he wanted all of us to pose nude, and we did. There was loads of us… Andy loved to sketch models and very intimate sexual acts. Really!” 

 We have several instances where Andy is described as receiving sexual pleasure from taking explicit photographs. He was a voyeur, and got a lot of his “satisfaction” from the act of watching it be acted out. In addition to actual physical abuse — like pimping out, drugging and sleeping with teenagers as he was in his 40s and 50s —  he was also intensely driven by creating and capturing child sexual abuse material; this is a very well known predation pattern in pedophiles, where they enjoy making and consuming child sexual abuse material, sometimes as their primary means of abusing. It is amazing to me that everyone extols Andy’s obsession with youth and his obsession with sex, but ignores how they combine in the direction of producing… graphic sexual material about youth.

Calling it “art” doesn’t make it art; the material is, literally, in material existence as child sexual abuse material; that doesn’t change just because predators are forwarding it as some kind of art. This, even before he lays his hand on a child, is exploitation and violation. It was Andy Warhol and his cohort, including other pedophiles, including some extremely influential people in the entertainment world, who were framing this as art, who were framing this as being about homosexuality in a homophobic society; literally couching this as even liberatory or social justice work. What, exactly, makes this not child sexual abuse material? Child sexual abuse material can never be art, it can never be “culturally relevant,” it can never be a resistance to homophobia in an age where male nudity was still taboo. What exactly was making everything he did so “edgy”? It wasn’t homosexuality, it was the obvious sexual exploitation of teenagers.  

It’s important to note, here, on the topic of the art, that it appears that, as a matter of course Andy Warhol didn’t pay his stars for their work, meanwhile, archival material is full of statements that he stole material (which many artists near him have substantiated), and used them as a basis for his own career; this is a criticism made of his relationship with Basquiat, that he was simply using Basquiat to become relevant again. He regularly just did not pay people for acting in the films or participating in his art. So there is an entire level of predation and exploitation of young art even outside of the direct CSA material. 

Moving on, it seems that a big part of Andy’s predation pattern concerned the use of drugs and alcohol.  Andy both gave teenagers drugs and drugged them without their consent — and we think that’s a very important detail when you consider just how many of his “stars” ended up overdosing or killing themselves, and in fact, in the movie Trash show *two* of Andy’s “young stars” were filmed shooting up heroin. And Andy is filming this decline into drug addiction, that he himself was paying for, causing, encouraging, enshrining as art.  

Like many sexual predators, Warhol pushed drugs and alcohol on his victims in order to reduce their inhibitions and pressure them into both performing for him and to being more susceptible to his predation. Warhol was constantly using coercion and drugs and alcohol to reduce their inhibitions … specifically so they would be willing to engage in sexual acts in the way Andy wanted them too. Stars were often deeply intoxicated during filming. It is no wonder that people so very young, being placed in an environment where they were constantly encouraged to do drugs, told that drugs were glamorous, that Andy, their hero, wanted them to — ended up with drug dependency. 

Of course they ended up addicted!  Of course they were going to decline in an environment run by a pedophile, full of sexual exploitation, where drugs were provided freely and there’s significant pressure to do lots of drugs and live a life of constant partying, drugging, boozing, and being groomed by adults. Of course they were going to get addicted to drugs and alcohol. Of course they were going to go broke when Andy paid them almost nothing if anything, so many of them lived in horrible conditions with a growing addiction to feed. The fact that they all ended up in such dire straits is because they were used, abused, drugged, exploited, objectified, and then Andy abandoned them as they got too sick to be “glamorous” and too drugged to perform. 

The flip side of Andy’s supposed “love” of celebrity, lights, glamour, was a deep obsession with young death and with young people dying young and tragically.  It has always been framed as: you can’t possibly blame Andy for these deaths, that’s just the price of fame, live fast, die young, you know? The problem is that these young people around him were dying in the context of a man who was so blood thirsty, sadistic and evil that he wanted to see his supposed stars dying for his camera. The problem is that they were dying in direct accord with his serial obsession with young stars dying — he painted the Marilyn after she died, where death had made her compelling to him. 

The story of so many of his stars is they just got worse and worse and worse, multiple of them showing up to the Factory absolutely desperate after their lives had been destroyed by the “lifestyle”- the lifestyle Andy was creating and filming, was turning into his brand and product. 

The final step in this cycle was that, left in often in poverty with serious addictions to heroin, he turned them away for any help at all. This was the last stage of his exploitation — after ruining their lives and exploiting their youth for his mega-capitalist pedophilic factory, he left them for dead. He wouldn’t take calls; he denied life-saving help for his young acolytes, he turned their friends and families away when they came to petition. Edie, Basquiat, Edward, Andrea and more. He denied help to them, as he professed multiple times that he dearly wished to capture a youth suicide on camera, and Edie’s would be great. 

For many of his young “stars,” him and his scene would have been the only source of stability, money, friendship and belonging. When they came to him for help, even when their friends and family entreated him to help them, he refused. Even after he saw, again and again, that denying led to death of his own “Stars”, he continued. 

But he had created them to fall. 

He wanted his stars to die. He knew, and the general art scene at the time knew, that death sells best. He candidly discusses in his Diaries the way all of the gallery owners were hoping that Basquiat would die of addiction, because the price of his paintings would go up. Basquiat’s girlfriend came to Warhol, desperate, as Basquiat continued to go downhill, and he turned her away. 

And Basquiat died. 

 Yet the narrative about Andy and Basquiat is that this was such a precious and tender and fruitful relationship — OK, then why was Warhol forcing Basquiat to pay rent even though Basquiat was the entire foundation of his revived career? Why didn’t he try to do something to help his supposed dear friend and most treasured collaborator, someone he supposedly recognized as a talent of a generation, when he got more and more addicted to drugs? Again, when Basquiat’s girlfriend called Andy, desperate for help, because he had a host of resources that were not available to a young, poor, heroin-addicted Black artist, HE DENIED HER, KNOWING THAT JEAN-MICHEL WAS SICK WITH SOMETHING THAT COULD KILL HIM… and also knowing that his paintings would become more valuable, their collaborations more valuable. Knowing who Basquiat was and all he had to offer, how important he was to the world, how much he had given to Andy, the art he still had to make, the life he deserved… Andy turned away. 

And Basquiat died too. 

Why was this allowed? Why were so many young stars in direct association with Warhol, dying, and no one stopped to try to figure out what the fuck was going on?  

Unfortunately, it was this exploitation of youth itself that was loved and valued by people; Andy was 100% right, that people love the supposed glamour of young famous people having lots of sex and doing lots of drugs and falling from a high point into the absolute gutter and then a grave. The cruelty towards youth, was the point, the product. To this day, people LOVE to morbidly speculate about the many stars around Warhol who died, much in the way they talk about the 27 club, as if its some kind of nebulous curse, or some inevitability of the universe: “they burned so brightly and then they were snuffed out”.  Making everything consumable, including the tragic ends of his “Stars”, was part of his brand. Here was the ruthlessness and godlessness of a completely cold hearted, reptilian predator, that appreciated nothing, that could give nothing of value — just voyeurism and exploitation and replication and replaceability and re-packaged capitalism. His stars were disposable. Andy was the star generator - he could always make more. 

When you’re looking at a possible case of serial pedophile or sexual abuser, its important to think about the potential scale that they were operating at. Andy Warhol was, even his lifetime, the most famous artist in the world. He was able to spend time with whoever he wanted, spend what he wanted to. He had access to anyone he wanted to see, anywhere in the world; he was welcome at every party, he was among the rich and famous continuously, he had significant financial resources. His potential ability to offend en masse, is off the charts. 

Warhol was famous by 34, and was active until he died, age 58. That’s 24 years of potential offending just in that timeframe. We have evidence that he was dating a 19 year old just a year prior to his death, so he was actively involved with teenagers throughout that entire span, up until the end. What is indicated by the accounts that we do have, is that Andy was most likely very prolific. People consistently underestimate how many victims a predator like this can have —  someone who is willing to drug his own boyfriend and try to coerce him into incestuous sexual activity, to pimp him out? That is a very advanced degree of predation and the number of known 19 year old boyfriends alone, as well as the number of teenagers around him in general is alarming; add in things like group sex, orgies, parties, opportunities for multiple offenses and co-offending with other pedophiles including Salvador Dali, we could very well be looking at a very high number of victims. Jimmy Savile, a famous media figure, attacked over 500 children. We’ve heard, anecdotally, but currently unverified, from two separate people saying that they have friends who were raped by Warhol when they were only 14. We think that with more acknowledgment of the truth about Andy Warhol, victims will be able to come forward. 

Pedophiles are serial offenders — they do what they do again and again and again. Andy had every pretense in the world — he would just walk right up to people and say: can I draw your cock. What were all the ages of the boys featured in his work, these body parts he showed without faces? Once you discard the false framing that this is art, its really just repeatedly, obsessively, taking photos of naked young people, sketching naked young people, making movies of naked young people, sexually abusing young people, drugging young people, capturing their decline and death. 

The documentary of the Andy Warhol Diaries that recently came out, was sold in large part as a look at Andy Warhol’s mysterious sexuality. Over the years, it was variously indicated that he wasn’t sexual, he was asexual, that it just didn’t interest him, that he found it messy, that he was a virgin. Based on these assertions (as if pedophilia is about “sexuality” or “sexual orientation”, not abusing children), his pornographic art of young boys wasn’t actually exploitative because Andy is asexual, or too ashamed of his sexuality to act on it. With this framing, his interest in teenagers was “pure”, “innocent”, that he loved the youth and related to the youth. This is something you often hear in association with pedophiles, two notable cases being Jimmy Savile and Michael Jackson: that this is just about connecting with youth and caring about them, not at all about predation. This conception of Andy Warhol as non-sexual in some way, is a set up to counter the material makeup of his giant canon of clearly voyeuristic, exploitative, sexual obsession with youth, is turned into something else, it is transformed. No one asked why you have an adult male here who was constantly around naked teenagers — he was just “making art” out of them; I.e. , Making his predation of them commercially viable products.  

You see here the “poor pedophile” narrative playing out around Andy. The poor pedophile phenomenon is when society regards the pedophile as isolated, lonely, alone, cast out, afflicted with an unwanted and undeserved problem, pitiful, needing to be coddled and included in society. Most of the material on Andy Warhol, without evidence, insists that he suffered from some kind of terrible internalized homophobia, that he was desperately shy, that he was too self-conscious too have sex, that even though he was surrounded by people all the the time, there was a part of him that remained lonely and untouched. It’s also frequently stated that he was terribly self-conscious of his appearance, and implied he was taking pictures of beautiful teen youth because that’s what he had aspired to be.  

The object of pity is Andy; it isn’t the unquantified number of teenage boys that he exploited, seduced, drugged, assaulted — who knows what else he did? The scary thing is that what we’ve seen of the Warhol case is we’ve only seen on the surface, and filtered through layers and layers of distortion. 

Who has continued that distortion? This puts into question the integrity of the entire art critic community, which has for decades been just absolutely lavishing praise on Warhol in spite of clear evidence. The art reviews for his nudes, sexual photographs and drawings, of teen boys, gush about Andy’s worship of fame and youth, his love of the male form, his exploration of sexuality. Andy’s voyeurism is itself positioned as part and parcel of the art, that this was another factor that elevated his work to not just art, but the heights of art; when really, it was the voyeurism of a pedophile. The reviews literally read like positive reviews of child sexual abuse; they read like a pedophile wrote them. 

One of the most discouraging aspects of this case is the clear proof that the reason people turned away from this, which was playing out right in front of their eyes, was that Warhol was a brand, was big business. Everyone from art critics and dealers to gallery owners and museum directors have built their careers on top of Warhol. There’s the Museum, all of the licensing for his images, the documentaries and films, the art school he founded and put Epstein on the board of. There’s the art school classes and the articles and reviews. This is massive business. One work of his alone this summer sold for close to 200 million — it was of Marilyn Monroe, made shortly after she died. Of course.  

If you look at Warhol through the lens of predation, all of the sudden the “mystery” that surrounds Warhol, his supposed complexity and inner turmoil, fully falls apart. The predation we have evidence for is also the only framework through which his art, personal life, “sexuality”, etc. makes any sense at all. It is the unknown quality that art critics can’t seem to put their finger on — because they care more about this piece of shit than dead kids. People are deeply ambivalent towards teenagers when its comes to their rights not to be sexually abused by adults; in particular, people think that a teenager being sexually exploited by an adult isn’t pedophilia, because it’s towards the end of adolescence, ignoring that pedophiles have attacked teenagers around 16-19 for eons, that this is a common and known group that pedophiles prey on. 

Finally, the level of cover-up implied here is just absolutely enormous, definitely the biggest material cover up I think I’ve ever seen in this realm, as far as how many people would have to be involved, how much evidence is literally right there in public, the material reality that this pedophilic abuse played out right in front of the audience again and again, and how long this has gone on. Not to mention the Epstein ties. People have based their entire career off of Warhol; the abuse is impossible not to see, unless you’re making money off it, I guess.  

Most important, the framing of Warhol as a predator brings up questions about why, exactly, he is so important in the culture in the first place. We saw him as a “visionary” of art and culture - but that vision was total depravity and sadism and sexual abuse of teens, of early deaths, of stolen artwork and ruined lives. And we love that shit.

That is most troubling of all.