Deryck Whibley
(Travis Shinn)
Deryck Whibley is ready to tell you everything.
When the Sum 41 frontman first sat down to write what would become his unflinching memoir, “Walking Disaster: My Life Through Heaven and Hell,” he genuinely didn’t think his life merited an autobiography. At least not compared to volumes he’d read by his rock n’ roll idols, for example, Mötley Crüe’s debauchery-packed “The Dirt.” Still, he kept writing. As the words flowed out, Whibley realized he did have something important to say about the highs and lows of his career, including alleged sexual and verbal abuse by his band’s former manager.
“I don’t look at my life as anything worth reading,” says Whibley, who is calling in from Miami where he and Sum 41 are due to perform as part of the band’s ongoing farewell world tour. “I’m just a guy who wrote some songs and had some success and went through a couple things. But then I thought, the idea of wrapping Sum 41 up [with a book] is a good way to move on from my past. I’m starting a new chapter.”
True to its title, Whibley’s book barrels in like a tornado of extreme highs and lows. There are the expected moments of rock star excess and depravity: chart-topping albums such as the 2001 punk revivalist “All Killer No Filler” and its darker 2002 follow up, “Does This Look Infected?” as well as tales of trashed hotel rooms, a night under the influence of a Japanese “mystic blue powder,” lavish celebrity-studded Hollywood parties and a whirlwind affair with Paris Hilton.
For every win, however, there is an excruciating defeat. Whibley also recounts the physical tradeoffs of band life: two herniated discs, nerve damage in his feet, a surprise bar attack in Tokyo, a debilitating panic and anxiety disorder, multiple near-death experiences, liver and kidney failure from drinking, and alcoholism. (Whibley celebrated 10 years of sobriety this spring.)
Whibley has talked about these challenges in interviews before. But there are key details about his life he’d shared only with a few people, revelations that he poured into the book. “I don’t know how to tell the real story without getting into some of this stuff, because it’s all intertwined with my life, intertwined with the music and in the band,” says Whibley. “It’s just such a big part of it.”
Throughout the pages of “Walking Disaster,” Whibley describes a fraught and frightening relationship with Sum 41’s first manager, Greig Nori, whom the singer alleges groomed and sexually and verbally abused him for years, starting when he was 16 and Nori was 34.
Nori did not respond to The Times’ multiple requests for comment.
Nori, who fronts the Canadian punk group Treble Charger, had been a hometown hero to Whibley, who in the mid-’90s was getting Sum 41 off the ground with his high school friends — guitarist Jon Marshall, who was later replaced by Dave “Brownsound” Baksh; drummer Steve “Stevo32” Jocz; and bassist Richard “Twitch” Roy, later replaced by Jason “Cone” McCaslin. As Sum 41 were playing the local underground scene, Whibley’s idea of success meant getting out of Ajax, Ontario, Canada, a working-class suburb about 30 miles east of Toronto. (Whibley’s mother was 17 when she had him, and money was always tight.) So when he sneaked backstage at a local Treble Charger show and invited Nori to one of Sum 41’s upcoming performances, he felt ecstatic that Nori handed him his phone number.
As Whibley writes in “Walking Disaster,” he couldn’t believe his good fortune that Nori, whom he knew was older, would find him cool enough to engage with. When he’d call Nori to pepper him with music- and band-related questions, they’d stay on the phone for hours, talking about their lives and families. Nori even gave Whibley and Jocz their first drinks — glittering shots of Goldschläger, Whibley writes in the book.
Nori became Whibley’s songwriting mentor — later, Sum 41’s manager. He booked the group studio sessions, invited them to parties and raves, and helped them network with industry figureheads. “Greig had one requirement to be our manager — he wanted total control,” Whibley writes in the book. “We couldn’t talk to anyone but him, because the music business is ‘full of snakes and liars’ and he was the only person we could trust.”
One night when he was 18 and intoxicated at a rave, Whibley writes, Nori asked him to come to the bathroom to drop another hit of ecstasy. Jammed together in the stall, Whibley writes, Nori grabbed his face and “passionately” kissed him. Whibley writes that he walked away stunned. He’d never thought of Nori like that before, and Nori reasoned that while he’d never experienced same-sex attraction before, “[Whibley] brought it out in him because what [they] had was so special,” according to the book.
As the weeks progressed, the book says, Nori tried to make the case to a disoriented Whibley that what they were doing was worth exploring because “so many of my rock star idols were queer. … Most people are bisexual; they’re just too afraid to admit it.” As Sum 41 grew in popularity, the band went on the road more and more. Whibley writes that he felt relief at the distance. Back home in Ajax, he writes that he attempted to end the physical encounters with Nori, as he ultimately didn’t identify as gay or bisexual. In the book, Nori grows irate in response, call Whibley homophobic and listing the myriad reasons Whibley “owed” him for helping his music career. Whibley writes how Nori would flip the script and accuse him of allowing the relationship to start.
Whibley tells The Times that he never told anyone about his relationship with Nori, who continued to claim they shared a “special connection” while pressuring Whibley into sexual relations. When Whibley began dating Avril Lavigne in 2004 (the two were married from 2006 to 2009), he writes in the book that he eventually confided in her, prompting Lavigne to exclaim, “That’s abuse! He sexually abused you.” Whibley also told his current wife of 10 years, Ariana Cooper, who reacted the same way, he says.
In the book, Whibley writes that Nori ultimately ceased instigating sexual encounters when a mutual friend learned what had happened. In the book, the friend tells Whibley and Nori that their relationship was abuse.
The sexual component to their relationship might have ended, but the alleged psychological and verbal abuse became worse, Whibley writes. Sometimes, Nori would lavish praise upon the frontman (usually when he wanted something). Other times, Whibley writes that Nori would berate him and pit the rest of the band against him, telling them that Whibley had “gone Hollywood” because of his relationship with Lavigne.
Whibley writes that Nori, who produced “Does This Look Infected?” and “Chuck,” would also insist that he be credited as a songwriter on most of Sum 41’s tracks, allegedly telling the band that the music industry would take them more seriously if they saw his name as a co-writer. (In 2018, Whibley won back the songwriting share of Sum 41’s publishing credits after filing a lawsuit against Nori.)
At one point, Whibley writes, he urged his band members to fire Nori, leaving out the personal nature of their past and focusing on alleged managerial missteps: being unreachable, failing to respond to important requests, missing opportunities and even allegedly showing up to a Sum 41 show high on ecstasy. At first, his bandmates refused to part ways with their manager, Whibley writes, but Sum 41 did eventually fire Nori after the “Chuck” album cycle in 2005.
Deryck Whibley of Sum 41 performs during the Festival d’été de Québec on Friday, July 15, 2022, in Quebec City.
(Amy Harris / Amy Harris/invision/ap)
Whibley still hasn’t told his bandmates — former and current — about his abuse allegations against Nori. He also hasn’t warned Nori about the allegations in “Walking Disaster,” though he admits that there’s a part of him, the one that used to feel emotionally manipulated, that feels like he should.
“You know, I don’t owe him anything,” he says. And yet he acknowledges that he still feels like he does. “I’ve had an inner battle, like, ‘Why do I want to tell him? Because I feel like I’m supposed to? Because he still has this thing over me?’ He controlled everything in my life, but even the rest of the guys through the band. We were all under his wing. Me more, obviously. But he was such a controlling person.”
Aside from the allegations in the book, Whibley also claims that Nori’s control extended to the band members’ relationship with their parents. “He wouldn’t let our parents know anything,” Whibley tells The Times. “He tried to keep them away all the time. Now it makes more sense. Because he was the same age as our parents, and we didn’t know that at the time. He knew they would get suspicious of the way things were running. … He would always be like, ‘You can’t have a relationship with your parents and be in a rock band. It’s not cool. It’s going to hurt your career.’ ”
After Sum 41 fired Nori, Whibley moved forward. The band went on to release four more albums between 2007 and 2019; they were nominated for a Grammy in 2012 — best hard rock/metal performance for the song “Blood in My Eyes.” In 2014, he married Cooper; the two have two young children. In 2024, he reunited with Sum 41 to release their eighth and final project, the pop-punk-metal double album “Heaven :x: Hell.”
Book cover for “Walking Disaster: My Life Through Heaven and Hell”
(courtesy of Simon and Schuster)
As Whibley neared his 35th birthday almost a decade ago, he uncomfortably realized that he was approaching the same age Nori had been when they first met back in the ‘90s. He realized the imbalance of life experience and power.
“It all became so clear,” Whibley says. “Then about a year later, the Me Too thing started happening. I started hearing stories of grooming, and it all started to make sense.”
For all the apparent transparency in “Walking Disaster,” courage was the last thing Whibley felt while writing about the worst moments of his life. He mostly felt embarrassment. “Like people are going to ridicule me and say, ‘This is your own fault,’ ” he says. “And then I got over caring about that.
A part of him felt conditioned to be ridiculed by people, because the band has been subjected to that over its career, he says.
“We’ve been counted out so many times. I automatically have this conditioning of, ‘Well, people are going to trash me. People are going to hate this.’ Even high school was like that.”
On this tour, he says, he has to remind himself every single night that people are there because they want to be here. ‘Because I am still conditioned to go out onstage feeling like I need to prove myself. I haven’t shaken that mindset yet.”
The band’s final show will be in Toronto at the end of January, and Whibley is excited to see what’s next. He’s not a big planner, though he’s always ruminating about new opportunities — not to mention he’ll finally have time to take Cooper on a proper honeymoon. “Our last show is on Jan. 30, and by Feb. 1, I’ll be like, ‘OK f—, I got no job. What am I gonna do? What is exciting me today?’ ”
Whatever Whibley ends up pursuing, he’ll do with an open heart and clear mind, he says. “I didn’t hold back,” Whibley says of “Walking Disaster.” “I kind of got to a point where I’m like, ‘I don’t care what people take away from it.’ That was the only way I could write the book. And I think having that freedom may let me be as honest as I could be.”
He ends with a wry joke, revealing a flash of the scrappy, mischievous teen with big dreams of starting a punk band with his best friends. “I remember I told my wife, ‘I feel like I could run for office at this point, because there’s nothing you could f— find on me.’ ”