1990.10.30 - MTV - Telephone interview with Axl (about the wine bottle incident)

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TRANSCRIPTION:
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Kurt Loder: It was the kind of police bust the mainstream media love: “Hard rock superstar arrested for beating woman with wine bottle.” The star was Guns N’ Roses’ singer Axl Rose, who was arrested at his Los Angeles apartment in the wee hours of Tuesday morning after a run-in with his next door neighbor, a 37-year-old woman named Gabriella Kantor. [Footage of Axl exiting the police station after his release is shown as Loder continues talking] She charged that Rose had shouted at her when she came home at about 2:30 in the morning, tossed her condo keys off the 12th floor and down on the ground, and then took a wine bottle she was carrying and hit her in the head with it. Released on $5,000 bail a few hours later, Rose had a rather different take on the incident.

[Footage of Axl talking to reporters outside the police station:

Axl: I live next door to a psycho.
Reporter: Yeah? She’s been off on you?
Axl: She’s been going off for a couple of years now. Yeah... Like what do you want from a psycho (?)
Reporter: What can you say, man?
Axl: What can you say. (Getting into a limo) Have a good one. I’ll see you in court.]

Loder: We’ve been unable to reach Ms. Kantor - there’s an unlisted telephone and no attorney at record with the police. But we did speak to Axl Rose on the phone a few hours after his release, and here’s his side of the story:

Axl: I was sitting here at home with a friend of mine, Dave Lank, and his fiancee, (?). My wife, Erin, was asleep, um, she had a miscarriage last week, and she’s just been in bed. My neighbor was out in the hallway about 1:30, um, drunk and yelling to talk to Dave - and she doesn’t even know Dave, she just seems to [?] my friends from Indiana. And he didn’t want anything to do with it, and she was out there yelling for a while. And finally, I just went outside, went out in the hallway, and said I wanted her to shut up and go in and crush. (Laughs) She was wasted and she came flying at me, screaming, “What you gonna do, who are you and what you gonna do, hit me, hit me” and swung this bottle of wine at me. I grabbed the bottle of wine out of her hands, and then she threw her keys at me which went into my apartment, so I just said, “Well, I guess you don’t need those either”, and I shut the door, threw her keys off the balcony, and poured the wine out. Then she proceeded to... For about 20 minutes she just ran full speed into my door and kicked it, and bashed into my door, and... We’ve taken some photos of the door and everything, there are black marks and [?], and the doorbell all bashed up and stuff... And screaming that she is going to stub me, and get me when I’m not looking, and all these other things. And I thought I was calling the police, I had the building call the police on her, and for me - and we called the sheriff’s office. They didn’t really seem to care. And she went downstairs, and was screaming and yelling; and called the sheriffs from downstairs and they came, and she told them that I hit her with the bottle. So they came up here and arrested me on felony assault with a deadly weapon.

Loder: You’re saying you didn’t actually hit her over the head with the bottle, right?

Axl: No.

Loder: Okay. Has this been going on for a long time, this...?

Axl: Yeah. It’s been going on in the way that she’s been warned by the building [that] if she bothers me and knocks on my door in the middle of the night and yells or whatever, that she’s gonna be fined by the building for disturbing and constantly keeping it up to her. Her big thing is to throw parties because she lives next door to Axl. I get calls from club owners and stuff all the time going “Oh you’re in here for another one tonight – Gabby was in here, and she was drunk, and, you know, saying she lives next door to you.” (Laughs) It’s funny, people like Madonna’s dancers and stuff are always knocking on my door, and looking for (?)

Loder: Really? (Laughs). Do you anticipate any problem at court? I mean, it’s just gonna be easy to prove your case when it comes up?

Axl: Um, I don’t know. I don’t think I’m gonna have much of a problem. But then again, you never know, and I’m not, you know, going to sit here and say that everything will be just fine, ‘cause you never know in a court of law, what can happen. I just know that I’m gonna take the step also... and with a civil suit against her for all the inconvenience and the stress to my wife and, you know, being arrested falsely and everything.  So it’s just been an ongoing problem and I’ve been on the phone with my lawyers and management for about the last year-and-a-half, saying, “Something’s gonna happen,” “Something’s gonna happen,” you know. And this is her 15 minutes, as Andy would say. She’s inventing her life, she’s one of these people that, like, I feel sorry for. She’s lonely and doesn’t have much in her life. But, you know, she’s trying to cling on to something and now she’s found a way to get involved, and she would rather be in a confrontational argument than be ignored.

Loder: You have another place in Los Angeles, another house. Do you think that maybe it’s time to, like, move there and stay there? (laughs)

Axl: Yeah, but there’s things I have in this place, like setups as my office and stuff, that I don’t wanna take -certain things like fax machines and computers and all that stuff- up to the house, and you know, Guns N’ Roses the business all the time. I’d rather have that for family life, you know. I’m gonna try again with this baby thing and hope it will work out this time.

Loder: Rose and his neighbor will be in court to resolve this dispute on November 20th.

New footage from Axl's release after his arrest: