LA's Cloak & Dagger Goth Sex Dungeon closes after Thomas Middleditch (Richard from Silicon Valley on HBO) exposed for groping women and owner covers it up

When Cloak opened in 2015, Bravin and Patterson tried to re-create the mystique of L.A.’s Goth scene of the 1980s, when bands likeChristian Deathand45 Graveforged a darkness-amid-the-sunshine aesthetic, fetishizing decayed Old Hollywood glamour.

Bravin, of the electro-rock duo She Wants Revenge, and Patterson, a Grammy-nominated producer, were veterans of L.A.’s music scene. She Wants Revenge played Coachella, and Patterson worked on the Oscar-winning score for “The Social Network.”

L.A.’s contemporary Goth scene is diffuse, spans generations and stays largely underground. Fifty-year-old industrial-music producers mingle with early-20s OnlyFans fetish models at warehouse techno parties and private clubs for bondage, dominance, sadism and masochism, or BDSM, across downtown and Hollywood. Until the COVID-19 pandemic, Cloak was thriving: Diplo often stopped by to DJ, and the club expanded to hold events in Chicago and Mexico City and a large music festival in downtown L.A.

Libertinism was an accepted part of the culture, though the scene has begun reckoning with sexual abuse accusations against Goth’s most famous figure, Marilyn Manson.

Lines between denizens’ work, social scenes and personal lives were often hazy.

“When I started at Cloak, I was living with an abusive boyfriend,” recounted one female staffer, who guided guests through the club’s staged rituals. (She asked for anonymity, fearing attacks in her professional life.) “I was vulnerable. [Bravin] and I slept together a few times, and he offered to hook me up with movie roles or to jam with She Wants Revenge.”

Those hopes never materialized. “When it went sour with us, it definitely affected the work environment,” she said. “I’d come to work, and he wouldn’t speak to me.”

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/music/story/2021-03-21/cloak-and-dagger-goth-nightclub-closed-sexual-misconduct-claims

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Bravin and Patterson personally scouted members, who were welcomed with a robed initiation ritual. The dress code was all black — no exceptions. A tattoo artist inked regulars (and employees like Morgan) with the club’s abstracted knife logo. Photos were banned, and guests were sworn to silence about what happened inside.

“Don’t go anywhere uninvited,” staff instructed guests upon entry. “If you speak of anything you have seen or heard here, you will lose [your membership]. If you see or hear anyone else speaking of what they saw or heard, let us know. Do you understand?”

Annie Lesser, 32, an L.A. playwright and theater producer, composed Cloak’s scripted elements, such as initiation rituals at which guests chose totemic objects or received three ink dots under their eye.

“By letting us mark you, you were giving us your trust and power. It was all designed around that dynamic,” Lesser said. “People had an emotional attachment to it in a way you couldn’t do with a normal club.”

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Cloak’s membership was tightly vetted and curated for celebrity and influence. Some of the several thousand members were allowed to join for free; others paid $100 a month, which gave them access to private social media groups and more secluded areas of the club, a haven for elite members of L.A.’s kink scene and electronic-music underground.

Guests often came dressed in BDSM leather, lingerie or less. The performances and scenery changed week to week — candlelit tarot sessions, avant-garde dance recitals, sensory-deprivation play. While it wasn’t branded as a sex club, members had “safe words” on file if any of the bondage play, ritual performances or casual hookups got too intense.

The club did foster strong emotional connections, especially during the pagan-inspired rituals at which guests would unburden their troubles to staff.

“I felt like I finally found people who didn’t think I was weird and celebrated what I believed in,” said the ritual guide. “I had plenty of experiences where people would go through the rituals and be bawling by the end.”

Sometimes the rituals were vaguely menacing, including one in which a group of actors threatened members if they ever “betrayed” Cloak’s strictures. But Bravin balanced the occult imagery with Facebook and Instagram posts assuring fans that the club’s sense of freedom was rigorously guarded.

“If any members ever see a member or a guest of a member being rude, aggressive, invading personal space, taking photos/video, breaking rules, anything out of line, immediately inform [us] so we can handle it immediately,” he wrote in a February 2018 Facebook post.

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But employees and guests said Bravin used his position as a gatekeeper to pressure members and employees into tense encounters.

“Adam flirted with almost every female employee, either asked them out directly or sent flirty messages at 2 a.m.,” Lesser said. “We organized a [separate] Zoom meeting for former employees where someone said, ‘Raise your hand if you’ve been hit on by Adam and Michael.’” The vast majority raised their hands, Lesser said; other employees recalled the meeting similarly.

That went for members, too. Bravin “hit on me straight away, and he’d use the same methods and lines to all my friends: ‘Oh, you inspired my set tonight.’ We were all rolling our eyes, but there was pressure to be like, ‘Thanks,’” said member Alison Waxman, 28. “He was the owner; you had to play nice and placate him.”

Image From left, Cloak & Dagger owners Michael Patterson and Adam Bravin and employees Kate Morgan and Morgan Rooms. (Kate Morgan)

Unwanted attention from Bravin made members nervous to come to him to report other incidents. One night, Waxman said, two men she didn’t know snuck up behind her on Cloak’s dance floor, grabbed her by the hair and tried to drag her away from the crowd.

“Of course we were all afraid of speaking up” to Bravin and Patterson, she said.

Bravin told The Times that “as a result of my unconscionable ignorance to an existing power dynamic between me as part-owner of Cloak & Dagger and the members, I came to understand how my flirtatious communication could have been inappropriate and unacceptable.”

Former employees also said Bravin and Patterson cut corners with safety.

“Everybody working under them really did want to keep the place safe,” Morgan said. “But they had all the power, and every decision was run past them. We were never empowered to actually solve things. The buck stopped with them, and [safety] was not their intent.”

Lesser, who worked for the club either full or part time from its 2015 inception through 2020, said she was physically attacked by a venue owner at one of Cloak’s festivals.

“He grabbed me and dragged me out of a back room and said, ‘I can touch whoever I want.’ I was very shaken and told Michael and Adam, and they said, ‘We’ll deal with it,’ but all I got was a half-assed apology, and they said, ‘So now we’re all good.’”

While the Pig ’N Whistle employed a professional security guard in the main bar and had a doorman to handle Cloak & Dagger’s entrance, staffers said the bar left the Goth club more or less on its own.

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For security, Cloak largely relied on volunteer members, who wore red lapel pins and were portrayed on social media as trusted figures to seek out if members felt unsafe. But they were mostly friends of the owners, with no security training. Some took their roles seriously, but the confusion about who, exactly, was in charge made it difficult to deal with misconduct.

“When people came to them with safety concerns,” Morgan said, “they just weren’t equipped to handle it.” Former members used phrases like “completely gaslit,” “very uncomfortable” and feeling “totally crazy” in describing their experiences reporting misconduct.

Patterson said, “As far as I am aware, they reported every incident to us, and to my knowledge, we dealt with every single issue brought to our attention.”

COVID-19 shuttered Cloak & Dagger in March 2020, though the club continued to livestream DJ sets. The simmering issues around harassment soon collided with the club’s response to the Black Lives Matter protests.

Vanessa Benton, a 27-year-old Black member, was angry that an ostensibly progressive nightclub was doing so little to help with the cause.

“We were out in the streets protesting and then got an email saying, ‘Come party,’” she said. “I came at them respectfully, saying, ‘I’m a Black member, and it’s disturbing that you haven’t said anything yet.’”

Amid more criticism, Bravin, Patterson and Tiffany Naiman, a UCLA professor and music-industry consultant who worked part-time with the club, hosted a Zoom call for longtime members on June 23, 2020. According to several who participated, the call fell apart when Waxman told Bravin, as dozens of assembled members listened on, that “you need to stop hitting on every woman who comes in. We don’t like it, we’re half your age, it’s inappropriate.”

“I was totally surprised and offended,” said Craig Klein, a theater and nightlife executive who was on the call. “I reached out to everybody I worked with in nightlife immediately to tell them to avoid Cloak. I was livid.”

After the call, in an angst-filled message on Instagram, Bravin wrote: “My behavior was inappropriate and unacceptable,” adding that he was “also educating myself on why and how my behavior could be harmful and emotionally manipulative.”

Shortly after being contacted by The Times in January about Cloak & Dagger’s alleged toxic atmosphere, Bravin and Patterson announced that the club was closing permanently and deleted all their social media content.

“Thank you for your business and support over the years. We wish you the best,” they said in a brief statement to members.

Rather than cover up her Cloak & Dagger knife tattoo, Morgan decided to keep it as a reminder of what she hoped the club could be and as a tribute to the friends she found there, in spite of everything that happened in those dimly lit rooms.

“It was like putting someone under a spell,” Morgan said. “Once you believe somebody is magical and they care about you, it’s so hard to undo that.”

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Dark to Light

Marvel's Cloak & Dagger

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Cloak and Dagger's address: 1666 1/2 N Mccadden Pl, Los Angeles, CA 90028