New York Post
September 12, 2007 -- THE manager of such rock legends as the Ramones, Iggy Pop and the MC5 says Out magazine concocted fake quotes that made him sound like a creepy pedophile who lured underage kids into bed by promising they could meet the bands.
"My reputation is ruined because Out has called me virtually a sexual predator. It is atrocious," Danny Fields, who's filed a $100 million defamation suit against the mag, told Page Six.
Fields, 65 - who once shared a loft with Warhol star Edie Sedgwick and was an influential figure in the East Village punk rock scene - says he was interviewed by Out's editor-in-chief Aaron Hicklin for a sidebar to accompany an October 2006 article, "They Say If You Remember the '70s, Then You Weren't There," written by Village Voice columnist Michael Musto.
Nancy Sinatra, Bruce Vilanch and Nina Hagen were also interviewed. The gay-lifestyle mag quotes Fields, who is openly homosexual, as saying:
"The '70s was sure a lot of fun, but I was sure a lot of young. Boy, if you didn't get laid, then it was your own fault. I don't remember ever being inhibited by saying 'I'm the manager of the band. If you want to meet them, come to my hotel room and sleep with me, and I'll introduce you to them in the morning.' "
Fields told us yesterday: "I never said that. The implication is while my bands were playing, I was trawling the audience for kids . . . like I used the performances as an excuse to cruise and pick up underage teens. The quotes are also so ungrammatical. I would never even talk like that. I have advanced degrees in English literature . . . They gay-bashed me."
He said when he and his lawyer Wallace Collins asked Hicklin for a tape of the interview, "he said he couldn't find it - but he said he knows that's what I said." As a settlement, the mag offered him a "few thousand dollars and the chance to defend myself in the magazine in 75 words."
The suit, filed in Manhattan Supreme Court, asks for $365,000 in actual damages and $100 million in punitive damages. "This actually affects his future ability to get work. To this day, colleague after colleague in the entertainment business tell him how damaging it has been for his reputation in the music industry," Collins said.
Hicklin told us: "I can't comment right now. I have to check with our lawyers."