The founder of FYF Fest, Sean Carlson, has come under fire with allegations of sexual assault from four women. These allegations involve events ranging from 2010 to 2015. Each incident is lewd in nature, with the first incident in 2010 involving Calrson trying to take the woman’s bra off and kissing her without permission. The victim, Natasha Ryan, was a freelance music photographer who met him at an event inside a Las Vegas Casino. Ryan felt incredibly uncomfortable with Carlson’s actions and continually batted him away, only to be abused again an hour later. “He just started grabbing me and trying to kiss me and was trying to pull me into the bathroom to make out with me,” Ryan tells SPIN Magazine. “I didn’t want to say anything back then because I was still shooting for magazines and publications and Fuck Yeah Fest is really big,” Ryan says. “I just felt like, ‘I need to get the photos done.’ 
 I knew I had been violated but I didn’t know if I should call the police or tell anyone.”

The second incident from 2013 details Carlson breaking into a bathroom being used by a woman who had only gave him her number that same night. She had this story to tell SPIN:

“I’m sitting there urinating and then the door just barges open, and it’s Sean. I’m like, ‘Oh wait, hold on a second, I’m actually peeing, hold on,’ and he just came in and wouldn’t leave,” Beth says. “I’m like, ‘Hey, I don’t wanna do this in here, I wasn’t planning on you coming back here.’ And he just didn’t say anything. He just looked completely different, like his eyes looked dead. I’ve never seen anything like this before. He did not look like the same person. He shut the door and he must have locked it, because he put his hand on it and I couldn’t open it.”

He repeatedly asked “Beth”(who chose to remain anonymous) to kiss his penis, to which she only obliged because he was aggressively blocking the exit. After that incident, he pinned her to the couch outside of the house and only let go when someone else witnessed what was going on.

While Carlson says both of these explicitly described incidents “contain serious misstatements and omissions,” he verifies two incidents of non-consensual kissing and touching from 2015. A man who worked with Carlson from 2006 to 2010 spoke to SPIN about an experience he had with Carlson right before he stopped working with him:

“One of the nights of the [2010] festival there was a house party,” he recalls. “Sean rolled up to the party and was just like, groping girls
 y’know, grabbing their asses and just being super aggressive. It seemed like he was kind of joking around at first, but then they’d say, ‘No, stop that,’ and he would just keep doing it. That was the thing I saw in person, and I was like, okay, I’m out.”

Goldenvoice has severed ended their relationship with Carlson, with CEO Paul Tollett writing an email to talent booking agents announcing this and their evaluation on how best to move forward with FYF Fest.

More stories and details are available via SPIN.

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