What's the deal with this Lana Del Rey/Eli Roth "rape" scene?

A video titled "Sturmgruppe 2013 Reel" has been the buzz of the Internet since its posting to YouTube on Wednesday night. And not the good kind of buzz. The video, apparently a demo reel from a production house called Sturmgruppe, is mostly composed of scenes from a couple of Marilyn Manson videos. But there is also a brief sequence in which singer Lana Del Rey is depicted as being pushed onto a bed and held down by someone who looks a lot like actor and filmmaker Eli Roth. (Other bloggers have described this as a "rape scene" but I won't go that far; at the end of the scene the man is shown getting up and walking away with his pants still on.)

The video has since been removed, although others have reposted it, and you can watch it below, for now.

Last October, Roth (the director of Hostel and one of the stars of Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds) told Larry King, "I shot a video with Marilyn Manson and Lana Del Rey...The footage is so sick it's been locked in a vault for over a year."

So, there's that. For his part, Manson has denied any involvement in the matter. His representative, Kathryn Frazier, told Billboard: “Manson did not direct this, shoot it, not was it for a Marilyn Manson video or out-take footage made by him or to be used by him with his music. It must be a fan video splicing up old Manson video footage with someone else’s Lana Del Rey footage.”

Uh-huh.

Manson hasn't exactly shied away from depicting violence against women in his videos, with himself as the perpetrator. Remember the video for his 2009 power ballad "Running to the Edge of the World", in which he pummels the crap out of an underwear-clad woman? It's okay to admit if you don't remember it; it stirred up surprisingly little controversy, which is more a testament to the state of the singer's career than anything else.

Del Rey herself has been accused of glorifying male violence against women in the lyrics and imagery she employs. In a review of the performer's most recent Vancouver concert, Straight scribe Vivian Pencz noted that the title track of Del Rey's most recent album, Ultraviolence, "sounded like a repulsive, creepy romanticization of domestic violence".

Neither Del Rey nor Roth have publicly commented on the matter, and Sturmgruppe has pulled all the content off of its website.

Whatever the full story is behind this footage, one thing is certain: it should have stayed in the vault.