Kari Krome: A Revolution So To Speak
The Runaways cofounder calls out the need for female leaders and gatekeepers in the music industry
As a young teenager in the late 1970s, Kari Krome co-founded the influential, all-female rock band The Runaways and wrote many of the group’s songs. Back then, Rodney Bingenhimer’s English Disco nightclub was one of the epicenters of the Los Angeles rock scene. The glam rock allure of the English Disco drew Kari in. There she met the namesake proprietor and his friend, music producer Kim Fowley. The two men, functioning as gatekeepers for young people interested in the music industry, grotesquely abused their positions of power. They took a sexual interest in then twelve-year-old Kari Krome.
“It took a really long time for me to even realize that was abusive because it was so pervasive within the culture and so normalized,” Kari says in today’s podcast. “The attitude was, ‘Oh my God, you get to hang around famous people. How dare you complain?’”
Kari’s attorney, Karen Barth Menzies, says the atmosphere created at the English Disco was deliberate. “It was one of the only clubs in Hollywood that would allow underage girls in there … and the rock stars knew it. It was blatantly serving up minors to rock stars.”
For Kari, the illusion of the English Disco was shattered when she suffered a series of sexual assaults at the hands of Bingenhimer and Fowley. She filed a lawsuit under The California Child Victims Act which disclosed details about the assaults which were also described in a Rolling Stone magazine article about Kari’s experience.
After the Rolling Stone article came out, other survivors of Rodney Binginhimer’s English Disco contacted Kari to show support and to share their experiences. “It was very powerful, and it was also a confirmation,” Kari says. “I’m sorry that it happened to them as well, but at the same time, it's good because if people don’t come forward, it’s going to keep going on.”
“Back then,” Kari says, “you would suffer in silence for years…. There was nowhere to go with it because the shame and the name-calling was so pervasive from Kim and Rodney Bingenhimer. As I aged, I realized that they had a whole system of how they were allowed to do this and then how they were allowed to keep you quiet.”
It has taken decades for Kari to deal with the trauma of the sexual assaults she suffered. She resents how her experiences and the ridicule from her abusers caused her to walk away from the opportunities she had earned in the music industry. “I was so humiliated,” she says. “I was so young. I was devastated … I was being hyped up by Kim and Rodney as being this child prodigy, and I was in CIRCUS (magazine) and Rolling Stone, and then … it was like a kind of wall just came down and I couldn’t move forward from it.”
Karen says Fowley and Bingenheimer robbed the world of Kari’s potential influence in the music industry. “She was a voice for women that was nowhere to be found. It was her idea to have a powerful, strong female band. She was writing songs from the voice of a female and the assaults just crushed her spirit.”
Kari says the only way for more female voices to be heard is for more women to occupy gatekeeping and leadership positions. “It has always been my dream that women will have a place at the table and that will be a safe community where women can be mentored by other women – a revolution, so to speak – where women don’t have to go to a man to ask for something. There will be women directors, women producers … women all the way up and down the chain.”
Karen says that the way to realize a reality where women hold gatekeeping and leadership positions in significant numbers, is for women to stand up against their abusers. Additionally, advocates and allies must stand beside survivors who bravely speak out.