Note: This story contains graphic descriptions of alleged instances of sexual assault.
Sitting on the back patio of her small East Nashville home, Rebecah Boynton admits she’s nervous as she speaks with the Scene. She takes long pauses before answering most questions, alternating between sitting and standing and pacing. Her hesitancy to speak openly is understandable — saying too much is what got her into her current legal mess.
On Jan. 24, Boynton’s ex-boyfriend sued her for $4,245 for, according to court documents, “continuous libel, slander, and harrasment [sic] through social media, private messages to acquaintances and people at places I work.”
The lawsuit has cost her thousands of dollars in legal fees — a friend organized a GoFundMe campaign, which raised $3,306 — and if an agreement is not reached by June 6 and the case moves to circuit court, she says it has the potential to cost her “thousands and thousands” more.
In one of two interviews with the Scene, Boynton’s ex, Nashville musician Joe Fletcher, says the bulk of harassment by Boynton began on Christmas Eve. Boynton, he says, searched Instagram and left comments on seemingly every photo he or his band Hotel Ten Eyes was tagged in. A picture a former girlfriend posted of him playing guitar in 2014, a snapshot of him with a fan while on tour in Texas in 2015 — he says Boynton posted hashtags like #thepredatorjoefletcher on “over a hundred” images.
“Oh, you didn’t know?” she wrote about Fletcher in the comment section of one photo. “[He] pinned my face down and jerked off on it.”
Days later, on Dec. 27, Fletcher confronted Boynton via email. He also called the police and filed an incident report. He called the police four more times over the next few weeks, he says, but she continued to make allegations on Instagram, YouTube and Facebook.
“I don’t think she missed a day in January, I really don’t,” says Fletcher, sitting at the Scene offices and flipping through dozens of pages of printed screenshots.
Boynton, who admits to leaving the comments, says she was not surprised when she received a court summons.
“He demonstrated a lot of behavior that communicated that he had a very distorted view of what is right and wrong,” Boynton says about her time with Fletcher. “He was unable to recognize or accept accountability or responsibility for [his] actions.”
When Boynton and Fletcher first started dating in early 2018, the two bonded over the shared pain of being shunned by their respective social scenes. Boynton had experienced a “painful falling out” with an ex-boyfriend a year earlier, which cost her many if not all of the friends they shared. Fletcher was recovering from what he says were false rape allegations made against him in 2016.
Initially, Boynton says, she wanted to help Fletcher repair his reputation. Before moving to Nashville in 2013, Fletcher lived in Providence, R.I., where he worked as a high school teacher and was considered a fairly successful musician in the area. As both a solo artist and the frontman of the band Joe Fletcher and the Wrong Reasons, he opened for alt-country and folk acts like Jason Isbell and Lucero and was a repeat performer at the Newport Folk Festival.
Boynton is a music lover herself, and a freelance journalist with marketing experience and contacts around town — she says she was excited about the opportunity to help him rebuild his career. But as their relationship progressed, Boynton says she started to see an aggressive side of Fletcher that made her question how truthful he was being about what happened two years earlier.
“I did not believe the allegations were true until I started noticing similar behavior happening to me,” says Boynton. “I tried to confront him, to say, ‘Have you ever tried to find the names of these women who were accusing you on social media?’ and his immediate response [was], ‘That is not possible.’
“I felt very shut-down and did not bring it up again until the day we broke up,” Boynton continues. “When we were breaking up I gave him a specific instance of something that he had done [to me]. He did not show remorse, he challenged me based on other sex acts I had consented to or requested. I tried to explain that the difference is that I gave consent to one and did not give consent to another.”
Fletcher denies Boynton’s allegation that he pinned her down and ejaculated on her face. As Fletcher tells it, Boynton’s harassment was born out of jealousy, after she learned he had started to date someone else. He tells the Scene that she has behaved similarly toward other exes and their new partners in the past. The Scene reached out to some of the people Fletcher says were on the receiving end of Boynton’s alleged harassment, but they all declined to comment for this story.
Boynton rebuffs the notion that her behavior was motivated by jealousy. She says she was emboldened after hearing personal stories from other women and their friends who claimed Fletcher had assaulted them, too.
“After making a public statement [about Fletcher], more and more stories from other women were pouring into my private messages,” Boynton says. “Women were commenting about their own personal painful experiences, and at that point, after knowing and feeling that I had been manipulated by this person, I felt that he was a danger to women. … I felt I needed to speak it as loudly as I possibly could. And I did.”
Nashville-based lawyer Alex Little is very familiar with these kinds of defamation lawsuits, which are often referred to as Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation, or SLAPP lawsuits. Little is the general counsel to Voices in Action, an organization in Los Angeles that aims to “offer an accessible and safe space to report incidents of misconduct and abuse online,” and he also represents both Kesha and Katie Armiger, two musicians who are currently being sued for speaking out about their own alleged assault and harassment, respectively.
Little is not representing Boynton, but he says lawsuits like the one against her — along with her $25,000 countersuit for assault and sexual battery — are becoming more common.
“You’re seeing a combination of social media allowing you to make your opinions of other people widely known,” Little tells the Scene. “And that’s striking at the same time we have much more of a reckoning and awareness of incidents of sexual assault and harassment.”
“The other piece here,” he adds, “is many of these cases that involve past acts of sexual abuse or sexual harassment are past the statute of limitations. If [a victim] doesn’t have any legal options, the only thing they can do is talk publicly. So a lot of these cases come out because the purported victim has come forward, and then the person accused initiates proceedings on the grounds of defamation, because it’s ruined their reputation.”
Fletcher says Boynton’s actions have done more than ruin his reputation — he says they’ve halted his career as a professional musician. He claims Boynton got Hotel Ten Eyes removed from a late-December show at The 5 Spot. (Todd Sherwood, co-owner of The 5 Spot, declined to comment for this story.) He adds that the lawsuit is holding up the release of Hotel Ten Eyes’ debut album.
While Boynton’s words may have made her the target of Fletcher’s legal recourse, she is no longer the only woman coming forward — four more women are accusing Fletcher of sexual misconduct, domestic abuse and sexual assault.
One Providence woman who asked for her name to be withheld tells the Scene Fletcher had unprotected sex with her without disclosing an STD, a misdemeanor in both Rhode Island and Tennessee. Three others say he sexually assaulted them, including one woman who says she was raped. The Scene corroborated their stories via multiple sources who were told about the alleged abuse at the time.
Niki Anthony dated and lived with Fletcher for about a year in Providence in the late ’90s. Anthony says the abuse — specifically, choking and banging her head against the wall — started almost immediately. She remembers one particularly frightening incident in which she says Fletcher broke their bedroom window while holding her head against the glass.
“He slapped the window with his other hand and the window just shattered around my face,” she says. “My face didn’t get cut at all. I just remember saying: ‘You are so lucky. You could’ve scarred my face forever.’ ”
Years after they broke up, Anthony says Fletcher assaulted her again when he came over to her place, unannounced and drunk, letting himself into her apartment through the backdoor. She remembers yelling at him to leave, but her bandmate, who was there at the time and was friends with Fletcher, offered to hang out with him in another room while Fletcher sobered up. When her bandmate got up to use the bathroom, Anthony says, Fletcher came into her bedroom, where she was.
“I remember looking straight at him, and I said, ‘I’m not going to fuck you. Get the fuck out of my house. I have a boyfriend, leave me alone.’ He came in and he …” Anthony pauses and takes a deep breath. “This is fucked up. Because I was wearing a skirt, he came in and in one motion came over and he put his hands up my skirt and he stuck his fingers into me.”
Fletcher denies hitting or choking Anthony, though he does remember breaking the bedroom window. He says she was sitting several feet away, on the other side of their bed at the time. He also denies he raped her. Fletcher admits to going to Anthony’s house that night, but during a second interview at the Scene offices, he says he didn’t attack her.
“I know I didn’t assault her that night,” he says. “Also, just the idea, I mean, not to be graphic, but you can’t just insert your fingers in a non-aroused woman like that.”
When told that it is possible, Fletcher responds, “I suppose it’s possible, but I don’t have experience doing that.”
Another Providence woman who has known Fletcher for years says Fletcher attacked her in a similar way in 2014. She asked that the Scene not print her name, partly for fear of litigation — “I’m fearful that he would do the same with me,” she says, referring to the lawsuit against Boynton.
She says Fletcher showed up at her house while he was on tour with his band Joe Fletcher and the Wrong Reasons in 2014 — it was late and he was drunk and upset about their mutual friend who had died just weeks prior.
“I was trying to tread lightly because he was so sad and he was a friend,” she tells the Scene over the phone. “And he was very good friends with people that I’m really good friends with, and I didn’t want to be rude.”
She says Fletcher went into her bedroom while she was using the bathroom, and when she went to get him, he swiftly pinned her down on her bed. She says he started licking her neck and gyrating on top of her.
“I said, ‘Whoa, Joe, this isn’t gonna happen. You need to stop. You have a girlfriend, and I don’t want to do this.’ He was using one forearm to pin me down and had his other hand, sort of really aggressively rubbing between my legs. I was trying to push him off of me but he was such dead weight that I couldn’t. I was also completely terrified, and at that point I really vividly remember thinking, ‘Oh my God, Joe’s gonna rape me.’ ”
She says Fletcher passed out on top of her before it went any further, and she managed to fight her way out from under him. She stayed up the rest of the night in the next room.
“I don’t doubt that I may have gotten sleazy or tried to kiss [her] that night,” Fletcher tells the Scene, “but I do severely doubt that I maneuvered myself and pinned her down and stuck my hand between her legs. I just don’t believe I did that.”
At the time of that alleged attack, Fletcher was living with his girlfriend Libby Rose, a music festival producer who now splits her time between Nashville and Austin, Texas. Rose and Fletcher lived together in Nashville for three years, between 2013 and 2016, and Rose says their relationship was often tumultuous as Fletcher struggled with alcohol addiction and cheated on her with a “copious amount of people,” lying in an effort to cover it up. Fletcher admits to cheating on Rose “semi-regularly.”
Their relationship ended in 2016 when Rose was told by a friend that Fletcher had assaulted the couple’s roommate, a young woman who had recently moved to Nashville. Rose was told that Fletcher had gotten drunk and gone into the roommate’s room and attempted to force himself on her while Rose was out of town.
The roommate declined to talk about the incident on record, but she tells the Scene that she filed a police report at the time. The Metropolitan Nashville Police Department confirms a report of sexual assault at that address was filed. The report is sealed because the victim chose not to pursue criminal charges.
“I did go upstairs and let myself into the room,” Fletcher says about the incident in 2016. “It’s sleazy, but I was trying to convince her [to have sex].”
He left the room when she turned down his verbal advances, he says, adding, “I never put a hand on her.”
Fletcher says he doesn’t know why these women — and some of the men who have corroborated their stories — would lie. He says he’s generally supportive of women who share their stories of abuse.
“I think the Me Too movement is a really great thing — I feel like it’s really important to empower women and level the playing field,” he says. “Not everybody, not 100 percent of people can be telling the truth, and certain people are going to lie for whatever their own advantages are. And I know that it looks terrible that four or five people are saying kind of the same thing [about me], but I’ve been single my whole life, I’ve been dating for 26 years, I’ve made enemies.”
He admits to having unprotected sex without disclosing his STD status. “That’s probably the thing I’m most embarrassed about,” he says. “That is the one thing that I feel absolutely horrible about.” He also says he’s cheated on girlfriends and slept with his friends’ girlfriends.
He says he wonders if that, paired with the success he’s had in the music industry, is motivating people to make up stories about him. Fletcher says he and some of the men who corroborated women’s stories were all in a band together. “Everybody wanted to be musicians for a living,” he says. “Not everybody is excited for you when you start to do well or break out of town — people like to see people fail.”
When Anthony is told that Fletcher denies ever abusing or assaulting her, she starts to get emotional.
“Those are some of the clearest memories of my youth, and I didn’t even realize until I was older that that shit was fucked up,” she says. “It’s not connected to my life not at all, it just makes me —” she pauses. “I’m just mad for my younger self.”
“Why would so many women make this stuff up about him?” she adds. “I don’t care about him, this is 20 years ago. I just hate seeing other women being not believed, so I wanted to add my piece, because I know he’s absolutely capable of all that stuff.”
When Fletcher filed his lawsuit in January, Tennessee state laws didn’t have much in the way of protection for those being sued for something they said on social media. According to Nashville lawyer Daniel Horwitz, lawsuits like Fletcher’s are, “without exception,” SLAPP lawsuits — “an attempt to silence someone from speaking out further and to punish someone for speaking out in the first place,” he tells the Scene. Fletcher, for his part, does not characterize his lawsuit as a SLAPP lawsuit.
The only anti-SLAPP law currently in place in Tennessee applies to those who speak out against government agencies. But on April 23, Gov. Bill Lee signed the Tennessee Public Participation Act, an anti-SLAPP law that “creates a process by which a person may petition a court to dismiss a legal action that is based on the person’s exercise of the right to free speech, right to petition, or right of association.” It will go into effect on July 1.
“Once the Tennessee Public Participation Act takes effect, many — perhaps most — social media posts and blog posts will receive heightened protection against defamation lawsuits, whereas today, almost none do,” says Horwitz.
It’s too late to benefit Boynton. But Horwitz says it could protect future victims who want to come forward with their own stories without fear of litigation.
“I can’t imagine a time when the protections afforded by Anti-SLAPP laws would not have been enormously beneficial,” says Horwitz, “and I suspect that movements like #MeToo and others may have come along even earlier if robust speech protections had already been in place.”
The woman who says Fletcher attacked her in 2014 is thankful that Boynton spoke up. She says she feels the allegations against Fletcher, which have been not-so-quietly whispered about in the Providence music scene, are finally being taken seriously.
“When Rebecah’s GoFundMe started circulating, I decided that I wanted to donate, but I also really wanted to tell her that I believe her,” the woman tells Scene. “To no fault of the people that I spoke to at the time [of my assault], because I understand, I felt when I tried to say something it was a little bit dismissed as, ‘Wow, that was a dumb thing that he did. He shouldn’t have done that.’ But it wasn’t taken all that seriously.”
