• John Legend’s former manager and old college friend Ty Stiklorius has spoken out about the “toxic” music industry after 20 years in the business in a candid New York Times article
• The Friends at Work founder recalled attending a party on Sean “Diddy” Combs’ yacht in St. Barts 27 years ago, when she had just graduated from college.
• “To this day, I can’t remember how I managed to get out of that terrifying situation,” she said, revealing that she was “directed to a bedroom by a man” at the event.

Juan LeyendaThe longtime manager opens up about her own experiences in the “toxic” music industry.

in a New York Times piece titled “The Music Industry Is Toxic. After P. Diddy, We Can Clean It Up,” posted Thursday, Oct. 31, by Ty Stiklorius, founder of the management company, friends at workwho works with many artists, including Legend, 45, said he is hopeful for new beginnings in the industry after the multiple allegations of sexual misconduct against Sean “Diddy” combs.

Recalling her own experience attending one of Combs’ New Year’s Eve parties on a yacht in St. Barts 27 years ago with her brother, Stiklorius, who at the time was a recent college graduate, she said “a man directed her to a bedroom”. She added that she is still “not sure who he was or if he had any connection to Mr. Combs.”

PEOPLE reached out to a representative for Combs but did not immediately receive a response.

“To this day, I don’t remember how I managed to get out of that terrifying situation. Maybe my nervous babbling: ‘My brother is on this boat and he’s probably looking for me!’ — convinced him to open the bedroom door and let me go,” Stiklorius, 49, wrote, adding that at the time he assumed his “experience was an anomaly” and that it was “just a guy acting wrong at a drunken party.” ”

Now, he said, he knows his experience was not unusual in the music industry.

“After 20 years as a music industry executive… (I now know) what happened that night was not an aberration: it was an indicator of a pervasive culture in the music industry that actively encouraged sexual misconduct and exploited lives.” and the bodies of those hoping to make it in business,” he wrote.

Stiklorius added that her “early experiences with predators, and those that enabled them, almost led me to quit the music business,” but her friend Legend helped change that.

“A few years after the boat incident, while I was pursuing my MBA at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, I attended a dinner where a top music executive slipped his key card under the table, an unsubtle invitation to his hotel room. I declined,” he continued.

He added: “I only persisted in the industry because, in 2005, an old friend from university who was starting to find success as an artist approached me.”

That friend was Legend, who she says she has managed for 20 years.

“It turns out that many artists, including John, want to be part of a different model of business and culture,” he wrote.

In addition to Legend, Stiklorius’ Friends at Work company represents artists such as charlie puth and The National. She and Legend also launched the JL Ventures businesses and production company. Get Lifted Film Co. together through the years.

Stiklorius interrogated in the New York Times “How many other women had early experiences similar to mine and abandoned their ambition to be artists, let alone recording engineers, producers or executives? How many women were coerced, abused, assaulted and silenced on their way to their dreams, trapped by Men who controlled access and made us believe that the key to the kingdom was a key card to their hotel room?

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He is hopeful that the industry can now “turn the page on a culture of exploitation and abuse.”

Insisting that the “gatekeepers’ days” in the business “are numbered,” Stiklorius concluded: “We owe it to the countless survivors of sexual assault and misconduct who suffered in silence to uncover the truth, encourage people to share their stories and hold perpetrators accountable. “We owe it to the next generation of creators to remake the business and turn it into something worthy of the art they create.”