DAVID ELLEFSON rips DAVE MUSTAINE over "past behavior" comments: “You know what? Fuck off. Just fuck off”.

During a new appearance on “Quemar Un Patrullero”, the podcast hosted by Gustavo Olmedo, a prominent Argentine journalist, radio host, and author specializing in rock and heavy metal music, former MEGADETH bassist David Ellefson discussed his relationship with the band’s leader Dave Mustaine. He said:  ”When I went back to MEGADETH in 2010, Dave and I were close — we were really close. I was helping him with some personal things. He became a good friend to me during that time. So there were periods of closeness as men, as brothers. And I found those opportunities were always the best when it was just me and Dave, when there wasn’t another person in the room. We didn’t have to sort of be on stage performing for anyone. It was just me and him being brothers, at Starbucks drinking coffee, whatever. And those moments were genuine, they were sincere, they were heartfelt.”

Referencing MEGADETH‘s 2022 album “The Sick, The Dying… And The Dead!”, the original version of which featured his bass tracks on it before he was kicked out of the band and his tracks were replaced by those of Steve DiGiorgio, Ellefson said: “Dave didn’t wanna use any of my music. I could tell he resented me. He didn’t want me to be on that album. And I finally wrote a song that was originally going to be included on it. It was a ballad that I’ve kept, ’cause I had Kiko (Loureiro, then-MEGADETH guitarist) play the guitar on it. And it was a very good song — I think an extremely good song that has a place somewhere. But it didn’t make the record.”

Elaborating on his working relationship with Mustaine during the making of what became “The Sick, The Dying… And The Dead!”, Ellefson added: “Dave and I even had a really close moment. We were writing the lyrics for the song that became ‘Soldier On!’ He eventually took my lyrics off of it and then used the song without my lyrical contributions… He wrote the music — it was his song — but I was invited to write the lyrics for it, which I did. And he decided to call it ‘Soldier On!’ We collaborated from there, which I say, well, look, when Dave got fired from METALLICA, at least they kept his words and his music and they paid him and gave him credit. Dave wasn’t so kind to me. He kicked me out, took my performances off the record, and took my lyrics and everything off the record. So I think I have a horse in that race when I speak about how properly METALLICA handled things and how I think improperly things were handled on my behalf. ‘Cause I saw it; I lived it.”

Ellefson went on to say that his “farewell with MEGADETH was really in 2018. That was my farewell. That was my farewell tour,” he explained. “I feel like I played on the last great MEGADETH record, which was (2016’s) ‘Dystopia’. Dave announced from the stage in Buenos Aires in November 2017, he said, ‘We’re gonna go home and start working on a new album.’ So I feel like that was kind of a good closure for me with MEGADETH, which is why I’ve moved on and done so much other stuff. I don’t have bitterness in my heart. I almost feel like I was set free to not have to deal with that anymore. Whereas Dave had bitterness toward METALLICA, I don’t have bitterness toward DaveorMEGADETH. I really don’t.”

Ellefson also once again opened up about his dismissal from MEGADETH nearly five years ago, just days after sexually tinged messages and explicit video footage involving the bassist were posted on Twitter. At the time, Ellefson released a statement on Instagram denying all social media chatter that he “groomed” an underage fan. He also filed a report with the police department in Scottsdale, Arizona alleging unlawful distribution of sexually explicit images of him by unknown offenders. In the report, Ellefson admitted that he had been exchanging sexual text messages with a Dutch teenager, who captured a video of several of their virtual “masturbating encounters” without his consent and shared them with friends. (According to Ellefson, the woman was 19 at the time of their first virtual sexual encounter.) Ellefson, who lives in Scottsdale, first became aware of the video on May 9, 2021, when the claim “David Ellefson of MEGADETH is a pedophile” appeared on Instagram. Ellefson told police he was notified on May 14 by MEGADETH that the band would be parting ways with him. Three days later, he was fired.

David told Olmedo: “(The MEGADETH camp) called me to fire me. And I told ’em, ‘Guys, there’s nothing here. There’s no reason to let me go. This is all just nonsense on the Internet. It’s all it is. It’s nothing at all. And I will maintain that position all along,’ and I have.

“At some point you could just stay going after people on the Internet and trolls and all this kind of shit. It’s endless,” David continued. “There is no Internet police, there’s no Internet human resources, where you can go and say, ‘Hey, this guy said this’ and ‘this person said this’, and da, da, da, because you should, because it’s highly defamatory. And defamation is when something harms your reputation, maybe even prevents you from getting more work. Those are real things. And the fact that it can happen on the Internet, which is kind of a fake place. It’s not even real. It’s kind of a fake place, yet that that could somehow come over to your reality. I’m fortunate that the fanbase stood by me. They said, ‘Dude, that is bullshit. How dare you do that to Ellefson?'”

Addressing the fact that Mustaine seemingly gave the story “legs” in the media by releasing a statement at the time in which he said “there are clearly aspects of David‘s private life that he has kept to himself,” Ellefson said: “The statement that was put out, what Dave personally signed, was deflectionary, to kind of keep it away from him. And I said, ‘There’s nothing to keep away. There’s nothing here.’ I mean, my own legal team even said, ‘Hey, if you wanna open up on the Internet and blast that guy, you have our blessing’. And this is a top-level law firm in Phoenix, and they said, ‘We have never seen something so unconscionable’ as a legal word, meaning unconscious — not thinking, with no, basically, human heart. ‘You have our blessing.’

“There’s a Bible scripture. It says, ‘Resist the devil and he will flee from you.’ And that’s where I went with it. I said, ‘I could tangle with this guy again, and I could fight with this guy like I did with the lawsuit,’ which I had every right to do of what happened then,” Ellefson continued, referencing the $18.5-million lawsuit he filed against Mustaine in 2004, alleging the frontman shortchanged him on profits and backed out of a deal to turn Megadeth Inc. over to him when the band broke up in 2002. (The lawsuit was eventually dismissed and Ellefson rejoined MEGADETH in 2010.) “And Dave did not win the lawsuit,” Ellefson clarified. “We settled out of court. That was another one. It was just another opportunity to try to kick me. And it’s, like, no, we settled out of court. And I ended up in a far better position than had I not done that, so I’m glad I went through that process, as horrible as it was.”

Ellefson also touched upon an interview Mustaine gave to SiriusXM‘s “Trunk Nation With Eddie Trunk” last December in which the MEGADETH leader shot down the possibility of his band playing the final show of its farewell tour with a lineup that could include all surviving former members of the group, with Mustaine explaining, “I can’t really do that, because of the behavior of one of the bandmembers in the past.” Ellefson said: “To have it end where it did, and then (for Mustaine) even recently to say, ‘Oh, because of what one person did, I can’t bring anyone back.’ You know what? Fuck off. Just fuck off. Who is that one person? It wasn’t me, ’cause I didn’t do anything that would prevent me from coming back at all. At all. And so this sort of deflectionary thing, to sort of get on some moral high ground, it’s, like, gimme a break. Really? And look, I had rock stars much bigger than Dave coming to my side and coming to my aid, standing by me, saying, ‘Man, just let me know if you need anything at all. That’s really fucked up.’ It’s fucked up about how I was handled being discarded. People saying, ‘I’m really disappointed that they chose business over brotherhood,’ ’cause at the end of the day, the brotherhood will always last beyond the business of owning a rock band — especially something we started and built together.”

Ellefson added: “So, with that said, at one level, again, I could call a lawyer, I could go back into defamation lawsuits, and I have every right to — trust me. But at the same time, there’s two ways to win in tug of war. I either pull you over the line or I just drop the rope and let you fall on your ass. (Laughs) And that’s what I’ve chosen to do — drop the rope. Drop the rock.”