In the second part of this investigation, RA shares the stories of an additional seven people who claim to have experienced or witnessed alleged acts of sexual harassment, assault and inappropriate or unpleasant behaviour committed by Derrick May.

The accounts below further attest to an alleged pattern of sexual harassment and sexual assault by May spanning the last three decades.

May was contacted and given time to comment on these allegations but has failed to do so. However, his US lawyer wrote to us describing these allegations as “false” and “reckless.”

Names have been changed to protect identities.

Eleanor — 2019, Europe

Eleanor* was working as a photographer at a music festival and was scheduled to take photos of May, who was playing there. He wasn’t responding to her text messages at the time they were supposed to meet, but she spotted him having a drink outside the hotel where they were both staying. He invited her to sit down with him and two acquaintances until he was ready to have his photo taken.

“During this conversation he made a couple of inappropriate comments about my body, like out of the blue in front of the others, which made me feel a bit uncomfortable,” Eleanor says. “One of the things he said was he asked how old I was. I said 28. And he said he could tell that I was over 23 because I’ve got CBH—child-bearing hips. It felt like a really weird, creepy comment to make, like we weren’t talking about anyone’s bodies and he just pointed that out in front of the other people.”

He made another comment that Eleanor can’t remember word for word, but it was something along the lines of her “needing a black cock.” “Like, he was insinuating that that’s what I needed because I was so pale,” she says. “And that made me feel uncomfortable, but the others kind of laughed as well.”

Eventually, May said he was ready to have his portrait taken. After a few shots, Eleanor offered to show him the photos so he could choose his preferred images for publication.

“He just responded saying that if I picked a bad photo of him, he would tell everyone that we had anal sex and that he left me in a mess in his hotel room,” Eleanor says. “I was quite taken aback by the comment at the time. The language he used was so aggressive.”

In shock, she laughed off the comment, just as she’d laughed off his previous comments in front of his acquaintances. “I feel like an idiot because I think I was so focused on being professional,” she says. Eleanor was new to freelancing and “felt like I had to put his comfort before mine,” she says. She told a colleague at the festival about the incident, who confirmed this account to Resident Advisor, but Eleanor did not want to report it or make a fuss at the time.

“I feel like I just pushed that incident to the side in my head just because it was him,” she says. “I mean, because he’s so looked up to in this industry and he’s seen as like, this legend, basically. I saw him that way, too. But now I’m hearing about all these other allegations and now that those comments have been put in the context of what he’s actually done to so many other women… I feel disgusted by that, basically, and quite upset to understand that he is this kind of person.”

Celeste — 2002-2004, Detroit & London

Celeste* was in her late twenties and working in the music industry when she first visited Derrick May in Detroit to start working on a project together. When she arrived, he showed her his office, then said he’d take her to dinner to discuss the project. He suggested she wait in his apartment adjacent to his office and took her next door to let her inside. After entering the apartment, Celeste was halfway up the staircase when she “felt his hand on my head and he’s basically pushed me down to the ground as he’s turned around and pulled out his cock. I’ve been in Detroit for less than an hour and the man I’m supposed to be working for, his dick is right in my face. I’m not from Detroit, I don’t know a single soul from there, all I could think of to do at the time was laugh. I was like, ‘Does that work for you, man? Put it away!’ He zipped up his pants and laughed as well and called me a tough audience. We then proceeded upstairs, he left me for a bit to attend a business meeting, then he came back and was as nice as pie and we talked briefly about the project. Afterwards, I went to check into my hotel and ended up going to dinner with another colleague.”

Celeste believes that her dismissive response when May exposed himself to her “started this whole chain of events with me and him where I was fair game and he liked to antagonise me because I said no.”

When May invited Celeste to work with him on a Detroit music festival the following year, she said yes. It was a huge opportunity for a young woman working in music. But Celeste says she felt that May was regularly verbally and physically abusive towards her and other office colleagues during the two years that she worked for him. The sexual harassment was more of a day-to-day occurrence, Celeste says. “This man [May] would come in every day and try and grab my breasts, you know, or pull my skirt up and rub against me in the office.”

Celeste’s final encounter with May was in London, where she moved in 2004. She ran into May at a boat party, not knowing that he was going to be there, and locked eyes with him just as he was being paid for the DJ set he was playing at the party. May still hadn’t paid Celeste for her work on the Detroit music festival over the past two years and Celeste says he “freaked out because he knew he owed me money. So he comes over, and I’m with DJ Paulette and he was foul to Paulette.” [Paulette recounts her own experience with May at the same party below.]

Celeste spent the rest of the party trying to avoid May but at one point, he staggered over to the table Celeste and her friends were sitting at with a bottle of red wine in his hand. He seemed drunk to Celeste, which was unusual as she didn’t know May to drink often. “He comes over to my table, he slams the bottle of wine down and says, ‘This is just to thank Celeste for all the times she let me fuck her.’ He says this in front of all my friends,” she says. Celeste says she spent the rest of the party “trying to convince my friends not to kick his head in.”

A couple of days after the party she got a phone call from May. “He was really salty, he was like, ‘I guess I should just pay you this money, I don’t know why you’re making all this fuss, I was going to pay you.’ I said, ‘Well, pay me then.’ He said, ‘Well, come to my hotel.’ He used to stay in this little private hotel on Tottenham Court Road in London,” Celeste says.

Celeste recalls the whole experience as a frightening one. “It had just got dark, so it was early evening and it was starting to rain. I can’t remember the room number—it was just a very small boutique hotel, so I’d gone to his room by foot and not by elevator. His room was relatively small, I went in and he was rude and sarcastic from the jump, which is how I realised he wasn’t intending to give me the money. I was there for five, ten minutes, max. He was standing near the bed when I went to leave and all I really remember after that is his right hand slamming the door when he reached over my head [after she had opened the front door to exit the hotel room]. I was wearing a denim catsuit that zipped all the way up to the neck and he grabbed the zipper and pulled it down to just above my crotch. I remember hearing his belt buckle clank—I’m not sure if it was done up or if he had undone it, though. When his hand connected with the door, I kicked backwards with my foot and got him in the nuts before he had a chance to push up against me. He stumbled back a bit when I kicked him and lost the grip on my catsuit too, and that gave me enough time to get out of his room. He only had the one hand on me, which probably made it easier to get away. I didn’t really look back, just got the hell out of there.”

Celeste has not seen May since that day. “I didn’t try and get my money after that and over the years I just haven’t thought about this stuff, I had to put it [her traumatic memories of her experiences with May] somewhere healthy.”

In November 2019, Celeste was contacted by a friend of May’s who had seen her private information shared on Michael James’ Facebook page (this was how Celeste first learned that her personal information had been shared without her permission). Responding to this man, Celeste wrote, “I did my best to deal with him, given where I was over there with no friends around me, but Derrick is an abuser and he abused pretty much everyone around him. I have seriously thought many times about how I could have handled Derrick better but it’s not easy to stand up to an abusive bully.” Resident Advisor has seen screenshots of these messages.

Music journalist, author and DJ Bill Brewster ran into Celeste at an industry event in 2009 and remembers being told about her ordeal with May at the time. “We were just talking about Detroit, and then she started completely out of the blue telling this story,” he says. “She just started telling me in fairly forensic detail about what happened—about the fact he assaulted her on the steps going into his apartment and all of that and I was really, really shocked at a) that someone would tell me something like this and b) that it happened.”

Paulette — 2004, London

British house DJ Paulette will never forget the first time she met Derrick May at a boat party in London in 2004. “It was a fleeting encounter with somebody who I just thought straight away was off-key,” she says.

“And especially because it’s somebody who I totally respected. To me, he’s one of the gods of music, a founding father representing everything, a Black man in the music industry who’s created this body of music that is just incredible. He’s been part of creating this scene of which I have become a part of, you know, as many reasons as I could have for revering that person. And then when you get that moment where you meet that person and the first words out of their mouth are, ‘So when are we going to fuck then?’ Those were the first words out of his mouth and he didn’t say anything else after that because I said, ‘You know what, not interested.'”

It wasn’t the first, nor is it the worst encounter that Paulette’s had with a male DJ, but it’s one she’s never forgotten.

“It’s just wrong, it’s just icky and wrong,” she says. “He has absolutely zero respect for women. Zero.”

Terry – 1996-2019, USA

Terry* worked with May from the mid ’90s until the turn of the millennium and says she was sexually harassed by him the first time they met in Detroit. “It was horrible because I couldn’t tell anybody because I wanted the gig,” she says. “I was ridiculously young and had nothing on my resume.” Terry says that, as they were walking up the stairs of the Transmat office, May, who was behind her, grabbed her ass. “I was shocked,” Terry says. The only reason she continued to work with May at that point was because a colleague said she would be able to work from a separate office outside of Downtown Detroit, away from May. Terry refused to go to his office alone after the incident and rarely saw him after that first encounter.

Around three years later, however, Terry and May happened to be in the same city overseas for separate DJ gigs. They were having what Terry describes as a “normal” conversation in a hotel lobby when May suddenly asked her to join him in his hotel room, “like I’m some kind of groupie,” Terry says. “I just looked at him in horror and I just couldn’t understand why he kept having to go there with me.”

After ceasing to work with him and leaving Detroit in 1999, Terry has only run into May on a few occasions. Every time, she says, he’d grab her ass or make sexually suggestive comments. “There have been instances in ’05, instances in 2015, instances about two years ago,” she says. “He’s just one of those people who feels he can do whatever he wants.”

Terry says May made a more aggressive pass at her at a party five years ago. “He was surprised to see me and he sort of grabbed me and I said, ‘Oh my boyfriend’s right there,’ and he was like, ‘So?’ He was very grabby and he’s strong and muscular, even in his fifties, and he was just very aggressive. I never experienced that with him before, he was always kind of the bottom-grabber,” she says. “And he doesn’t care if you have a boyfriend or if you’re married, he just doesn’t give a fuck.”

Aria — 2017, Detroit

Aria* is a Detroit local, but not a techno fan. She has a friend who would visit Detroit every year to attend Movement Festival, however, and in 2017 this friend invited Aria, then 21 years old, to a festival afterparty at Derrick May’s house.

“My friend told me he hosts people from all across the world, and it was true!” she wrote in an email. “It was enlivening to be around people from all across Europe and South America. It was clear that Derrick was the star everyone orbited around at his loft. Yes, it was his loft, but I quickly understood he was a person with a certain charisma or charm, and I could tell people, particularly women, received his attention.”

At one point, Aria and her friend decided to open another bottle of champagne. “When we were discussing who gets the first pour, he [May] looked directly at me, then addressed the room, not looking at me, saying, ‘She can have it since she has the nicest tits here.’ I was 21. I was very embarrassed. A man at the party shook his head and later checked in on me to see if I was OK. As these things are common when you’re a woman, I shook it off and don’t think of it too much, but in reading about his behavior with other women and also knowing how he treated my friend, I felt it appropriate to speak on my sliver of experience with Derrick,” she wrote. RA spoke to Aria’s friend who was present with her at the party, who confirmed this account.

Peter — 2010, Amsterdam

Peter* was working with a DJ who played with May at Melkweg during Amsterdam Dance Event 2010.

“It was just like dirty talk constantly about women and when they went by he was just grabbing their asses and pulling them towards him and making indecent proposals,” Peter says. “He was trying to get them to go into the College Hotel which is like a hotel that he’s always at… he was just being an obnoxious asshole.”

Peter says he intervened when May started trying to hit on one of his friends. “I said, ‘You’re one of my favorite DJs and what you do behind the turntables is great but could you just leave her alone. Because she’s here to enjoy herself and she’s not here to look over her shoulder.’ I’m just paraphrasing at this point, I don’t know what his exact words were, but he made a remark along the lines of ‘Bros before hoes’ or something like this. That was his way of trying to justify what he was doing.”

Peter says he’s witnessed this kind of behaviour from May many times over the years, at different gigs. “At the end of the day, that God complex comes in… I have the feeling that he doesn’t even know that he’s doing something wrong. He thinks that it’s normal.”

“I think the best way to look at Derrick is he, you know, he’s that weird uncle at the party that nobody trusts, and there’s always rumours about him, and at one point the rumours become facts and and that’s what happened here as well.”

Natasha

An associate of May’s, Natasha* says “the scope of Derrick May’s impropriety runs deep within his character or lack thereof. Women are not a conduit to life; they are a means to his end. Derrick’s language toward women was ingrained with misogyny and dehumanization. There were multiple encounters I observed but one prime example was Derrick sitting at lunch with a European promoter. When the pizza arrived, he said that the Buffalo mozzarella sitting atop ‘bursts open like a woman’s pussy.’ He was proudly vocal about his pornographic references to women, even in a professional setting.”