Do we like them?Do we like Richard Kruspe?
Our score: 6 out of 10. No harmful words or acts of his own turned up, but the record is thin, so this is a cautious yes.
Richard Kruspe is the guitarist in Rammstein, the German industrial metal band, and he also runs his own project, Emigrate. Loudwire reported in 2015 that the band took that year off, and he used the time to focus on Emigrate and its album Silent So Long. So he is the bandmate who keeps a creative life outside the big stadium machine.
The biggest scandal near him isn't his. In 2023 a woman alleged that she was drugged and pressured at a Rammstein after-party in Vilnius, and Berlin prosecutors opened an investigation into frontman Till Lindemann. Lindemann's lawyers said there was nothing to the allegations, and prosecutors dropped the case for insufficient suspicion of a crime. The sources we read name Lindemann, not Kruspe.
The nearest thing to a Kruspe moment in the record is April 2021. A Russian activist, Andrei Borovikov, was sentenced to two and a half years over a Rammstein video he had reposted online. Kruspe posted on Instagram that the sentence was shocking and that the band had long supported artistic freedom. Critics of the ruling saw it as politically motivated, and he was the one in the band who spoke up.
On the harm check, we searched for anything he has said or done about LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants, vaccines or the climate. Nothing turned up, good or bad. That is an absence of evidence, not a clean bill of health, and it is why this isn't a higher score. The only company question is Rammstein itself, and the allegations against its singer were dropped without charge.
On the court record, no case against Kruspe personally turned up. A plagiarism suit over the band's song Deutschland was reported, but the coverage we saw named the band, not him. Nothing else in the sources we read lands on him personally.
Nothing new has surfaced on him lately that we could verify. Some gossip pages circulate rumours about retirement and the like, and we left them out as unsourced. If something real turns up, this card needs a rethink.