It’s been an “extremely heavy week” for Deryck Whibley after he alleged that Sum 41‘s former manager Greig Nori sexually abused and groomed him. On Tuesday, the Sum 41 frontman shared a video slamming Nori’s response that claimed that Whibley, a 16-year-old when he met Nori who was in his mid-thirties at the time, “initiated” their relationship.
“I take no pleasure in coming out with the truth about what happened between me and my ex-manager, but it was something that I just couldn’t keep in anymore, and I had to let it out,” Whibley said in Tuesday’s Instagram video about the accusation he revealed in his new memoir, Walking Disaster. “It’s come to my attention that Greig Nori has now called me a liar. I tell you right now, I stand behind every word that’s in my book, 100 percent. I’m not a liar.”
Whibley’s video was in response to a statement Nori shared with the Toronto Star last week that read: “The accusation that I initiated the relationship is false. I did not initiate it. Whibley initiated it, aggressively.” (Nori did not directly address the abuse or grooming allegations that Whibley made.)
In his video, Whibley continued by speaking directly to Nori, encouraging him to sue if he ultimately believed Whibley was lying. “Greig Nori, if you think I’m a liar, there’s only one way to settle this,” Whibley said. “Under oath, in front of a judge, in front of a jury. Anytime you want. I’m ready. Whenever you are.”
Nori did not immediately respond to Rolling Stone‘s request for comment.
Whibley ended the video by thanking his friends, family, and band for his support, before signing off: “We’ll get through this like we get through everything else.”
In the memoir, per the Los Angeles Times, Whibley discusses how Sum 41 started working with Nori — who fronts Canadian punk band Treble Charger — when Whibley was 16 and Nori was 34. Whibley claims that while at a rave, Nori asked Whibley, who was 18 at the time, to come to a restroom stall to do the drug Ecstasy with him. Inside the restroom, Nori grabbed his face and “passionately” kissed him, Whibley writes in the book.
Per the Times, the alleged sexual encounters concluded after a mutual friend of his and Nori’s found out what Whibley had been through. Although the sexual aspect of the abuse ended, Nori continued to allegedly be abusive to the group, forcing the band to mark him as co-writer on songs and failing to respond to requests. The band fired him in 2005, and Whibley said he hadn’t spoken to him since.
“I always thought that I would take this to my grave and I wouldn’t say anything,” Whibley told Rolling Stone last week. “As I started getting into the book, I felt like, ‘How could I not be honest?’”
Whibley told Rolling Stone he doesn’t call what he went through “abuse” in the book. When asked if, today, he sees what he went through as “abuse,” Whibley said he was still in the “early stages” of processing what he went through.
“I’m dealing with it for the first time, and I don’t know what I think about it. I can’t deny that it was very manipulative, but I didn’t really realize what a lot of this was,” Whibley said. “It didn’t dawn on me until I hit the age he was, in his mid-thirties, when I was a teenager. He was a hero, so to see that power dynamic, you see how you can manipulate a 16-year-old kid.”