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Conor Oberst Files Libel Lawsuit Over Rape Allegations

By Jason Newman
February 20, 2024 9:30 AM ET

Bright Eyes frontman Conor Oberst filed a Libel Lawsuit against a woman who claimed the singer raped her 10 years ago. The suit claims that "the only connection between Oberst and [Joanie] Faircloth was one of artist and fan" and that Faircloth, who was 16 at the time of the alleged incident, "never had any physical contact" with Oberst and "posted laudatory comments" about the singer online.

"The Lawsuit filed today outlines Faircloth’s history of inventing stories and personalities online in order to gain attention," says the suit. "Through his attorneys, Oberst requested that Faircloth recant her ***** accusations, but she ignored the requests. Oberst has thus been forced to proceed with this Libel suit in order to set the record straight and to clear his ****."

Faircloth initially made the accusations last December in the comments section of an XOJane article entitled "I Dated a Famous Rock Star & All I Got Was Punched in the Face." The now-deleted comment alleged that Oberst’s brother was Fairchild’s English teacher, who arranged for Fairchild to meet Oberst after a show.

"Conor definitely took advantage of my teenage crush on him," wrote Fairchild. "At first, I was flattered when he was playing with my hair and had his hand on my leg. It was like my dream come true at that point. But then he clearly wanted to go further and I made it very clear and told him I was a virgin and wasn’t prepared to change that right then but he didn’t stop."

At the time, Oberst’s publicist issued a statement claiming the Allegations were "absolutely, un*****ocally *****" and "particularly serious and sickening."

According to TMZ, Oberst is suing for more than $1 million. In his statement, Oberst says that all proceeds from the Lawsuit will go to charities for victims of domestic violence.

Conor Oberst’s Statement Regarding Rape Allegations

Today Conor Oberst filed a Libel Lawsuit in a New York federal court against Joanie Faircloth, a resident of North Carolina, who *****ly accused him of Rape in the comments section of the xoJane ***site in December of 2024 and again, some days later, on her Tumblr page. The suit counters Faircloth’s ****less Allegations and states that Oberst never had any physical contact with her, either at the concert in Durham, NC at which she claims the attack took place, or at any other time. The only connection between Oberst and Faircloth was one of artist and fan – a fan who has posted laudatory comments about Oberst elsewhere online, including describing attending his band’s concert as the "Best memory ever!"

The Lawsuit filed today outlines Faircloth’s history of inventing stories and personalities online in order to gain attention. Although her ***** statements about Oberst have since been deleted from the ********s where they were initially posted online, Oberst’s suit alleges that her malicious lies spread across the Internet and are archived by multiple blogs. Through his attorneys, Oberst requested that Faircloth recant her ***** accusations, but she ignored the requests. Oberst has thus been forced to proceed with this Libel suit in order to set the record straight and to clear his ****.

Oberst is seeking to promote the truth and repair the distress this has brought upon him and his family. Oberst intends to donate the proceeds of this suit to charities benefitting the victims of violence against women.

Claims of Conor Oberst raping a woman ten years ago began making waves throughout the internet Over the past few days. The timeline started from an article posted on XO Jane in which a comment was made regarding Oberst that then circulated to Tumblr. The poster of the original comment has now created her own blog to share the events that she is alleging occurred between her and Oberst ten years ago. That full blog post detailing the events can be read below after the jump.

Look, I didn’t intend for any of this to happen. I was a somewhat regular commenter on xojane and felt safe there. Call it dumb, naive, etc but when I hit that post button, I did not think my comment would be anything more than an exchange with one or two other commenters sharing their stories. Was I stupid to think that making an accusation about Conor like this was just going to remain some blip in the comment section of a feminist ***site? Obviously. But I didn’t realize that Conor was still *that* popular, to be honest. I guess I felt too safe in that community. I had no intention for this to be all Over the place, I really did not.

I am not looking for my 15 minutes of fame or to sue or to let anyone else make money off of this situation (though some are already trying), I am not looking for anything. I am not trying to ruin this man (and that isn’t going to happen regardless). All I was looking for when I made the comment with my story was support from the ladies on that forum that I felt safe opening up to. But now this has been spread all Over everywhere and I feel like I need to speak up for the facts, for my character and for my intent (or lack there of).

I wish I could say I was really brave and I was speaking out for the benefit of other victims of Rape who may feel discounted in their experiences and alone. But I am not that brave. I am speaking now because everyone else is speaking for me and a lot of it isn’t accurate. But now that it’s out there, if anyone can relate to it and not feel so alone or needs any support, I’m here for that.

I am going to open this blog up for dialogue. You are welcome to send me questions. However, for the safety of my family and my sanity, I will only answer reasonable, respectful messages. I will not engage with absolutists who have already made their minds up about me and want to use this forum as a way to fuck with me or make this experience any harder. I just won’t. I will not answer messages that I consider to be out of line, too invasive, would jeopardize the safety & privacy of my family, are too triggering for me as a victim or just out right hate. I will not do it.

I do not expect anyone to coddle me or hate him or to believe me. That’s your choice and has no bearing on my life, but I do expect people to treat me with dignity and respect-this was and is very painful for me. It’s really hard to have my experience smeared everywhere and picked apart, Over analyzed, people criticizing me who know nothing of it, etc. But I made the stupid mistake that opened these flood gates so, I will deal with it. But please just try to be respectful-that shouldn’t be so hard. Please refrain from telling me what I could’ve/would’ve/should’ve done. That is highly offensive to any victim of anything and not your place. Please respect my privacy for the safety of my family.

Thank you.

Update: Conor Oberst Responds To Rape Allegations As “Un*****ocally *****”

Conor Oberst’s publicist has issued a statement and called the recent Rape Allegations against the singer “absolutely, un*****ocally *****.” Oberst will be consulting a Libel attorney regarding the claims as well. You can read the statement below after the jump.

Usually we wouldn’t feel the urge to comment on spurious blog chatter but the recent Allegations made about Conor Oberst by an anonymous commenter on the xoJane ***site are flagrant enough to demand our response. This individual’s accusations are absolutely, un*****ocally *****. Unfortunately, the internet allows for groundless statements like this to travel the world before the truth has any time to surface. This is a particularly serious and sickening allegation and there is no truth to it. Conor has nothing but abhorrence for the perpetrators of such crimes of sexual violence. The behavior attributed to him by this individual is in direct opposition to his principles. Conor is consulting with a Libel attorney regarding this matter.

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Rape, Lies and the Internet: The Story of Conor Oberst and His Accuser

Rape, Lies and the Internet: The Story of Conor Oberst and His Accuser

Last week, Bright Eyes musician Conor Oberst filed a lawsuit for libel against a reported "anonymous commenter" who posted on various ***sites that he raped her. But Joanie Faircloth was not anonymous—she left the original comments under her ****, and her commenter account was linked to her Facebook. Her broad social-media presence left quite a record, too, and now it will be used to discredit her. It turns out the Internet is not a vacuum, and what we say can have very real consequences.

On her now-deleted Tumblr account, Faircloth clarified that she had not made her allegations anonymously.
"[T]he term ‘anonymous commenter’ was being thrown around a lot, as if I was some troll just trying to get a rise out of people. I wanted people to know that is not the case and for them not to be able to use that as a reason to discount my experience or avoid putting any real thought into the situation."

Not being anonymous also made her legally accountable for her statements. Oberst is suing Faircloth, a 27-year-old North Carolina resident, for $1 million in damages to his "reputation, standing in the community, shame, mortification, hurt feelings, embarrassment, and humiliation."

"Mr. Oberst gave Ms. Faircloth ample opportunity to retract her allegations prior to filing this lawsuit," Oberst’s attorney Martin Singer tells Jezebel. "It was only when those requests for a retraction went unanswered that [he] had no other choice but to file this lawsuit in order to clear his ****."

But clearing his **** might be a tall order considering that the burden of proof is entirely on Oberst. Not only must he prove that Faircloth’s statements damaged his reputation, he also has to prove that he didn’t rape her and that she lied about it because she intended to harm him. Proving malice could be tricky: Why would she want to hurt Oberst? And why would someone lie about being sexually assaulted? What could be gained from that? Nothing, really.

Oberst’s complaint implies that a different set of questions can be raised—about Faircloth’s credibility and the veracity of her claims—from her long trail of online activity. According to court ********s, she has a history of "catfishing"—posing as a boy online, even passing herself off as a cancer patient. And while none of that has anything to do with rape allegations, Oberst’s legal team is making use of these details in order to tear down both Faircloth and her side of the story.

Clear History

In December 2024, Faircloth left a series of comments on an xoJane "It Happened to Me" essay about a woman who had been abused by her rock star boyfriend. Faircloth alleged that Oberst had raped her 10 years ago on her 16th birthday after going to a Bright Eyes concert. She got to meet him, she said, because his brother, Matt Oberst, had been her seventh- and eight-grade English teacher.

"Conor definitely took advantage of my teenage crush on him. At first, I was flattered when he was playing with my hair and had his hand on my leg. It was like my dream come true at that point. But then he clearly wanted to go further and I made it very clear and told him I was a virgin and wasn’t prepared to change that right then but he didn’t stop. It was a really fucked up way to realize that people you idolize and look up to so much can be shitty, terrible people […] Conor took a lot from me including my virginity, my dignity and self esteem."

The comments section on xoJane is powered by Disqus, a commenting service for ***sites that uses a network platform. Users can follow one another and their profiles can be linked to their Facebook, Twitter or other social networking accounts. So initially Faircloth’s Disqus profile clearly identified who she was. However, upon realizing this she deleted the profile, which changed her xoJane comments to appear as though they were posted by "Anonymous."

Eventually, Faircloth’s comments were removed entirely from xoJane, but not before they were archived and disseminated by thousands of people on Tumblr.

The increasing interest in her allegations prompted Faircloth to create her own Tumblr account, xoJaneCommenter, to expand her statements and answer questions from followers. The Tumblr has since been deleted, but not before posts were archived by Absolute Punk and BuzzFeed. In them, Faircloth admits that she never realized that her allegations would spread so quickly and considered xoJane a "safe community" where she could share stories with "one or two other commenters."

But nothing on the Internet is "safe," nor are conversations privileged to certain individuals. That Faircloth’s deleted communications—both on xoJane and Tumblr—were almost immediately archived by others is evidence of that. Her Story spread like wildfire through social media and was eventually covered by the mainstream media.

By the time Oberst issued a statement denying the allegations, it was seemingly too late. People believed he was a rapist. Even his die-hard fans were conflicted. (A moderator of one of his fan sites chose, initially, to believe Faircloth, befriending her online and posting about the allegations exclusively. Another fan site, OberstingWithConor, shut down altogether.) The day before Oberst’s suit was filed, Desaparecidos cancelled their upcoming tour in Australia.

But in the same way that the Internet gave life to Faircloth’s allegations, it has the potential to discredit them.

Petty Cache

Because Faircloth’s Facebook account lists her birthday (January 25, 1987), it was pretty easy for even the most amateur of Google sleuths to find out that Bright Eyes had not played a show in North Carolina on January 25, 2024. When pressed about this, Faircloth, via Tumblr, said that she had gotten the year wrong. It was her 15th birthday in 2024. But the band hadn’t played on her birthday in 2024, either. She then said that it wasn’t a Bright Eyes show, it was a Desaparecidos show.

Desaparecidos, one of Oberst’s side projects, did play a show in North Carolina on January 25, 2024, with Oberst’s brother Matt’s band Sorry About Dresden. Matt Oberst is also a middle school teacher in North Carolina, as Faircloth had originally said. So the revised version of her Story checks out.

But Oberst’s complaint points to some of Faircloth’s recent Facebook activity, implying they conflict with her statements of being so traumatized by such a "vicious monster" that "[e]very time [she] hear[s] his ****, [she] want[s] to tell people what he did."

In January 2024, Desaparecidos announced a reunion tour, and Faircloth commented on Facebook:

"The last time I saw Desaparecidos perform at the Cat’s Cradle, it was my 16th birthday and Conor pulled me up on stage and sang happy birthday. Best memory ever!"

After people pointed this comment out to her, Faircloth deleted it. But the Internet is impossible to scrub clean. When confronted about the Facebook comment, Faircloth said:

"I really looked up to the older crowd that frequented the indie scene in chapel hill. and that night since I was brought up on stage I was the coolest kid there, everyone wanted to talk to me because I "knew" Conor. sometimes that overshadows what happened later and I suppose that says something about my self esteem. Sometimes I feel stupid to feel that I was raped because so many think they would love to be in that situation."

On December 3, 2024, Faircloth posted on Facebook:

Bright Eyes puts my 13 month old out without fail. We listen every night.

On December 7, 2024, she posted on Facebook that Bright Eyes is her favorite band. The posts were deleted in January 2024, but not before Oberst was able to make note of them in his complaint. In addition, Faircloth’s new Myspace page is seemingly dedicated to Oberst’s bands and his label Saddle Creek Records, which conflicts with her Tumblr statements about how she’s "moved on from keeping up with these bands."

And there have been other inconsistencies with how Faircloth has portrayed her life in comments sections in ways that aren’t related to Oberst. Sometimes she says that she gave birth to twins at 17 that she gave up for adoption. But in 2024 she won a local contest sharing her favorite memory: teaching her twins how to walk. Another time she said it was her sister who had twins, but one died in the womb. From the looks of her ex-husband’s Facebook page, he does have a boy-girl set of twins that he raises without her. Sometimes he posts snarky jokes about deadbeat mothers.

On top of the dubious Internet history, people who know her personally have come forward with their stories about getting catfished by Faircloth, who posed as a boy ****d "Zac" in Yahoo chats. Zac professed to be a fan of Saddle Creek bands and claimed to know Conor and Matt Oberst. He mysteriously committed suicide in 2024 just before he was supposed to meet up with other fans at a Desaparecidos show. Friends learned of the suicide from Faircloth—then known by her maiden ****, Finneran—who said she was Zac’s best friend. It was later discovered that Zac and Faircloth were the same person.

The girl who said she was catfished by Faircloth claimed to have attended a North Carolina Bright Eyes show with Faircloth in 2024:

[Faircloth] also told me about a time, which I think it wasn’t her 16th bday or at a show, in her version it was in the classroom when [Conor] came to visit Matt, that he sang happy birthday to her.

At the show in question in 2024, it was actually a Bright Eyes show, and I was there. I skipped my prom to see Bright Eyes and Sorry About Dresden was playing, and drove from out of town to come to NC because it would probably be the only time ever I would get to see Dresden. (It was) She and I made plans to meet, and we did, she was there with her best friend M, and her boyfriend X. She introduced me to Matt Oberst, and I actually know members who play with the Bright Eyes touring band, so I hung out after the show with them. If I remember correctly, she left before I did….even if she didn’t she came and left with her BOYFRIEND, who rode in the same car as she did.

Absolutely none of this information is proof that Faircloth is lying about the rape allegations. But it does serve as a reminder that the Internet is constantly ********ing what we say and do online, and that we should be careful about what we share, because it’s not a safe space. You never know if or when a LiveJournal account you created when you were a teenager could come reemerge later in life. For someone like Faircloth, who has been posting about her personal life on public message boards since she was 13, her Internet ghosts could easily come back to haunt her—especially if she’s pissed off a wealthy, socially conscious rock star with a reputation to protect.

Emo Money, Emo Problems

In his complaint, Oberst—a self-professed feminist—rips into Faircloth: "[Her] statements…are not only malicious lies, but they are an insult to the millions of actual rape victims around the world. Faircloth should be ashamed of herself."

According to a source close to him, Oberst is "sick" over the notion that his lawsuit could make him a poster boy for MRAs, or that he is contributing to the silencing of rape victims.

His camp approached Faircloth several times asking her to publicly retract her statements, which she evidently refused to do. Instead, Oberst alleges in court ********s that Faircloth began telling people—presumably online—that Oberst offered her "hush money" to keep quiet about the sexual assault, which he says is another lie.

Oberst plans to donate the proceeds of the suit to charities benefiting the victims of violence against women. But it’s not likely that, even if he wins, he’ll see a dime of the $1 million. According to a GoFundMe page that was started a few weeks before Faircloth first made the rape allegations, she is strapped for cash and is having difficulty even paying for travel expenses to care for her sick toddler.

According to a source, Faircloth is now saying that she never made the comments on xoJane.