Big, former porno-star, Ron Jeremy, arrested for numerous rapes, now may be declared "incompetent"

Apollonian

Guest Columnist

Former porn star Ron Jeremy to be declared incompetent to stand trial for rape​

Link: https://www.yahoo.com/news/former-porn-star-ron-jeremy-215349936.html

James Queally
Fri, January 6, 2023 at 3:53 PM CST


Adult film star Ron Jeremy talks with his attorney Stuart Goldfarb during his arraignment on rape and sexual assault charges at Clara Shortridge Foltz Criminal Justice Center, Friday, June 26, 2020, in Los Angeles. Jeremy pleaded not guilty to charges of raping three women and sexually assaulting a fourth. (David McNew/Pool Photo via AP)

Adult film star Ron Jeremy talks with his attorney, Stuart Goldfarb, during his arraignment on rape and sexual assault charges in a Los Angeles courtroom in 2020. (Associated Press)
Adult film legend Ron Jeremy is suffering from "severe dementia" and will be declared incompetent to stand trial on multiple charges of rape later this month, according to an e-mail obtained by The Times.
Jeremy — whose legal name is Ronald Hyatt — was first charged in June 2020 with raping four women he met in West Hollywood bars and clubs. The case against Jeremy quickly ballooned, as dozens of women came forward claiming the one-time porn king had been abusing women for decades at parties, adult film conventions or on movie sets.
Jeremy, 69, was later indicted on more than 30 counts of sexual assault stemming from allegations made by 20 women, with some of his alleged crimes dating back to the 1990s. But weeks before Jeremy's trial was slated to begin last year, his defense attorney, Stuart Goldfarb, walked into a Los Angeles courtroom and said his client did not recognize him.
In an e-mail obtained by The Times this week, L.A. County Deputy Dist. Atty. Paul Thompson said mental health experts called on by both prosecutors and Jeremy's defense team have determined he suffers from severe dementia and there is no evidence he is faking his symptoms.
“As a result of the agreement of the experts, the defendant will be declared incompetent to stand trial ... his prognosis for improvement is not good," Thompson wrote. "If he does not improve, we will not be able to try him for his crimes. Because criminal proceedings are suspended as long as he is incompetent, we also cannot get a guilty plea from him or discuss other measures to get justice for the victims in this case."
Thompson and Goldfarb declined to comment Friday. Jeremy, who has denied all wrongdoing, is scheduled to appear in a Hollywood courtroom Jan. 17, when he will be formally declared incompetent to aid in his own defense, Thompson said in the e-mail.
While competency to stand trial is fluid — meaning a mentally incompetent defendant can later be found capable of standing trial after receiving medication or therapy over time — dementia is a progressive and degenerative illness from which Jeremy is unlikely to recover.
According to the e-mail, the experts reached their conclusion based on a review of medical documents and interviews with Jeremy, his relatives and several of the Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies who interacted with him while in custody. Some of Jeremy's relatives apparently suspected he suffered from dementia before his 2020 arrest, "which was the catalyst that started the process that resulted in his driver’s license being taken away," Thompson wrote in the e-mail.
Once declared incompetent, Jeremy is likely to be placed in a state-run hospital.
Lianne Young, a former British adult film star who first publicly accused Jeremy of assaulting her in an interview with The Times in 2020, said she was frustrated to learn there were concerns Jeremy had dementia long before prosecutors brought charges against him.
“My first reaction, I was kind of numb," she said. "They were aware of his condition before getting us all involved. They were well aware he had dementia, so I’m very disappointed that they didn’t solve that bit before letting us go on that emotional journey for two and a half years."
Greg Risling, a spokesman for the district attorney's office, said prosecutors were unaware of the severity of Jeremy's illness at the time charges were brought.
"Although his attorney expressed some concern for his declining faculties, we believed him to be competent at the time of filing based upon interviews we conducted with him, among other reasons," Risling said. "We had no records at time of filing indicating that he had a dementia diagnosis."
Young said she was wearing a bikini at an industry party at the former House of Blues on the Sunset Strip in 2000 when Jeremy came up behind her, shoved her against a table and forced himself inside her. The encounter only lasted seconds, according to Young, who said she fought him off quickly. After Young spoke with The Times, she said she was contacted by Sheriff's Department investigators and later called to testify against Jeremy at a grand jury hearing.
Young said she doesn't regret coming forward, as she believes the wave of allegations against Jeremy sparked a conversation about sexual abuse in the adult film industry. But she's also concerned that, without a conviction, Jeremy may be absolved in the eyes of many of his fans.
“It’s going to come down to public opinion now, and public opinion has looked at Ron like a god," she said. "It could be an indication to other predators or viewers of pornography that they can get away with such crimes.”
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
 

Ron Jeremy Found ‘Not Competent’ to Stand Trial in Serial Rape Case​

Link: https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/ron-jeremy-found-not-competent-190801590.html

Nancy Dillon
Tue, January 17, 2023 at 1:08 PM CST


Ron Jeremy Hyatt Court Appearance - Credit: Michael Buckner for Rolling Stone

Ron Jeremy Hyatt Court Appearance - Credit: Michael Buckner for Rolling Stone
Ron Jeremy, the porn star charged with sexually assaulting 21 women, was found incompetent to stand trial Tuesday by a Los Angeles judge.
Jeremy, 69 — whose full name is Ronald Jeremy Hyatt — was not present for the hearing in a mental health courthouse in Hollywood. Judge Robert S. Harrison made his ruling after reviewing a July 2022 assessment from a defense-hired psychologist and an October 2022 report from a doctor hired by prosecutors.
More from Rolling Stone
“Mr. Hyatt is not competent for trial,” Judge Harrison said. “Both reports indicate Mr. Hyatt suffers from an incurable neurocognitive decline, and he would most likely not be restorable.”
Deputy District Attorney Paul Thompson said a prior neurological assessment dating back to 2019 found that some of Jeremy’s “issues may be caused by hearing loss.” He said prosecutors would push for ongoing treatment in an attempt to improve his condition. The judge set a follow-up hearing for next month, saying the “next step” is to get another assessment that could recommend Jeremy placement in a state hospital with possible treatment or some other setting.
A different judge overseeing Jeremy’s felony rape case in a different courthouse suspended the case last year after Jeremy appeared “incoherent” and unable to recognize his own lawyer ahead of a critical hearing.
“I was just up in the cell where he was being kept, and I tried to get his attention unsuccessfully,” his defense lawyer, Stuart Goldfarb, told the court at the March 17 hearing. “He was unable to determine who I was and wouldn’t accommodate both myself and the bailiff to fit into the wheelchair to come down here. I don’t think he should be forced to come down here under these circumstances.”
Judge George Lomeli said the courtroom’s bailiff also found that Jeremy was “incoherent” and “not obeying commands.”
The Los Angeles Times later obtained an email from a prosecutor that revealed doctors had determined Jeremy was suffering from “severe dementia.”
Jeremy, whose legal name is Ronald Jeremy Hyatt, was initially charged in 2020 with raping four women. The case quickly exploded with additional allegations, and he was was indicted in August 2021 on 34 counts of sexual assault involving 21 victims, including minors. The charges, dating as far back as 1996, involve women and girls ranging in age from 51 to 15, as well as a dozen counts of forcible assault. He has pleaded not guilty.
According to prosecutors, Jeremy used his celebrity status to disarm “vulnerable” women and lure them into secluded spaces. Prosecutors say eight of his alleged assaults took place at the Rainbow Bar and Grill, a restaurant on the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood, where Jeremy enjoyed VIP access to behind-the-scenes employee areas.
Shortly before the criminal case was suspended last March, a judge was due to hear arguments on Jeremy’s request to have his case broken up into 21 separate trials. “Allowing Mr. Hyatt’s jury to hear about dozens of allegations of alleged misconduct will prevent his jurors from judging him fairly on each charged count and from scrupulously applying the burden of proof,” his defense motion calling for the separate trials read.
Prosecutors opposed the motion, saying the charged offenses involve the same class of crimes and are “connected by a common plan.” That means they would be cross-admissible in separate trials and involve overlapping witnesses, which would waste judicial resources. They argued eight of the 21 Janes Does allegedly were attacked at the Rainbow Bar and Grill “using very similar methods.”
“More important to the people than the time of the jurors or court is the risk of re-traumatization inherent in having sexual assault victims testify repeatedly,” Deputy District Attorney Marlene Martinez argued in her opposition filing obtained by Rolling Stone.
“In all 21 cases, the defendant preyed on victims that were vulnerable and unable to fight back. Whether that was by isolating the women in a bathroom, in a bedroom, at his friend’s house, in a parking lot or by perpetrating a surprise attack upon them, the defendant never gave the women an opportunity to fight back as he sexually assaulted them,” the reply says. “The only way to prevent a substantial waste of court time, juror time and victim and witness time is to have a joint trial.”
Jeremy’s defense lawyer Kate Hardie said Tuesday that the judge’s decision to indefinitely suspend the case was the only possible outcome.
“[The prosecution’s] doctor found more in favor of incompetency. She was more thorough,” Hardie said after the hearing. “I don’t think there were any other options where there’s a medical issue.”
 

Triple-exthnics​

Nathan Abrams on Jews in the American porn industry​

Link: https://web.archive.org/web/2018082...shquarterly.org/issuearchive/articled325.html

A story little told is that of Jews in Hollywood’s seedier cousin, the adult film industry. Perhaps we’d prefer to pretend that the ‘triple-exthnics’ didn’t exist, but there’s no getting away from the fact that secular Jews have played (and still continue to play) a disproportionate role throughout the adult film industry in America. Jewish involvement in pornography has a long history in the United States, as Jews have helped to transform a fringe subculture into what has become a primary constituent of Americana. These are the ‘true blue Jews’.
Smut peddlers
Jewish activity in the porn industry divides into two (sometimes overlapping) groups: pornographers and performers. Though Jews make up only two per cent of the American population, they have been prominent in pornography. Many erotica dealers in the book trade between 1890 and 1940 were immigrant Jews of German origin. According to Jay A. Gertzman, author of Bookleggers and Smuthounds:The Trade in Erotica, 1920-1940 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), ‘Jews were prominent in the distribution of gallantiana [fiction on erotic themes and books of dirty jokes and ballads], avant-garde sexually explicit novels, sex pulps, sexology, and flagitious materials’.
In the postwar era, America’s most notorious pornographer was Reuben Sturman, the ‘Walt Disney of Porn’. According to the US Department of Justice, throughout the 1970s Sturman controlled most of the pornography circulating in the country. Born in 1924, Sturman grew up in Cleveland’s East Side. Initially, he sold comics and magazines, but when he realized sex magazines produced twenty times the revenue of comic books, he moved exclusively into porn, eventually producing his own titles and setting up retail stores. By the end of the 1960s, Sturman ranked at the top of adult magazine distributors and by the mid-70s he owned over 200 adult bookstores. Sturman also introduced updated versions of the traditional peepshow booth (typically a dark room with a small colour TV on which the viewer can view X-rated videos). It was said that Sturman did not simply control the adult-entertainment industry; he was the industry. Eventually he was convicted of tax evasion and other crimes and died, disgraced, in prison in 1997. His son, David, continued running the family business.
The contemporary incarnation of Sturman is 43-year-old Jewish Clevelander Steven Hirsch, who has been described as ‘the Donald Trump of porno’. The link between the two is Steve’s father, Fred, who was a stockbroker-cum-lieutenant to Sturman. Today Hirsch runs the Vivid Entertainment Group, which has been called the Microsoft of the porn world, the top producer of ‘adult’ films in the US. His specialty was to import mainstream marketing techniques into the porn business. Indeed, Vivid parallels the Hollywood studio system of the 1930s and 1940s, particularly in its exclusive contracts to porn stars who are hired and moulded by Hirsch. Vivid was the subject of a behind-the-scenes reality TV show recently broadcast on Channel 4.

Nice Jewish girls and boys
Jews accounted for most of the leading male performers as well as a sizeable number of female stars in porn movies of the 1970s and ‘80s. The doyen of the Hebrew studs is Ron Jeremy. Known in the trade as ‘the Hedgehog’, Jeremy is one of America’s biggest porn stars. The 51-year-old Jeremy was raised in an upper-middle-class Jewish family in Flushing, Queens, and has since appeared in more than 1,600 adult movies, as well as directing over 100. Jeremy has achieved iconic status in America, a hero to males of all ages, Jewish and gentile alike - he’s the nebbischy, fat, hairy, ugly guy who gets to bed dozens of beautiful women. He presents an image of a modern-day King David, a Jewish superstud who supersedes the traditional heroes of Jewish lore. No sallow Talmud scholar he. His stature was recently cemented with the release of a pornomentary about his life, Porn Star: The Legend of Ron Jeremy. As probably the most famous Jewish male porn star, Jeremy has done wonders for the psyche of Jewish men in America. Jeremy has also just released a compilation CD, Bang-A-Long-With Ron Jeremy. For £7.99 (including delivery), the lucky listener gets to enjoy Jeremy’s hand-picked favourite porno grooves along with narration by ‘the legend’ himself. As the publicity blurb gushes, ‘Out of the brown paper wrappings and into the mainstream’.
Seymore Butts, aka Adam Glasser, is everything that Jeremy is not: young, handsome and toned. Glasser, a 39-year-old New York Jew, opened a gym in 1991 in Los Angeles. When no one joined, he borrowed a video camera for 24 hours, went to a nearby strip club, recruited a woman, then headed back to his gym and started shooting. Although the movie stank, with a bit of chutzpah and a few business cards he wangled a deal with a manufacturer and started cranking out films. Within a few years, ‘Seymore Butts’ – his nom de porn which is simultaneously his sales pitch – became one of the largest franchises in the adult-film business. As the king of the gonzo genre (marked by handheld cameras, the illusion of spontaneity and a low-tech aesthetic meant to suggest reality), he is today probably the most famous Jewish porn mogul. Seymore Inc., his production company, releases about 36 films annually, most of them shot for less than $15,000, each of them grossing more than 10 times that sum. Glasser employs 12 people, including his mother and cousin Stevie as respectively genial company accountant (and matchmaker for her single son) and lovable but roguish general gopher. Glasser currently even has his own reality TV show (also broadcast on Channel 4), a ten-episode docu-soap called Family Business, whose opening credits show Glasser’s barmitzvah photo.

In search of a buck
Jews became involved in the porn industry for much the same reasons that their co-religionists became involved in Hollywood. They were attracted to an industry primarily because it admitted them. Its newness meant that restrictive barriers had not yet been erected, as they had in so many other areas of American life. In porn, there was no discrimination against Jews. During the early part of the twentieth century, an entrepreneur did not require large sums of money to make a start in the film business; cinema was considered a passing fad. In the porn business, it was similarly straightforward to get going. To show ‘stag’ movies or loops, as they were known, all one needed was a projector, screen and a few chairs. Not tied up with the status quo and with nothing to lose by innovation, Jews were open to new ways of doing business. Gertzman explains that
"Jews, when they found themselves excluded from a field of endeavour, turned to a profession in which they sensed they could eventually thrive by cooperating with colleagues in a community of effort . . . Jews have for a very long time cultivated the temperament and talents of middlemen, and they are proud of these abilities".
The adult entertainment business required something that Jews possessed in abundance: chutzpah. Early Jewish pornographers were marketing geniuses and ambitious entrepreneurs whose toughness, intelligence and boundless self-confidence were responsible for their successes.
Of course, the large number of Jews in porn were mainly motivated by the desire to make profits. Just as their counterparts in Hollywood provided a dream factory for Americans, a blank screen upon which the Jewish moguls’ visions of America could be created and projected, so the porn-moguls displayed a talent for understanding public tastes. What better way to provide the stuff of dreams and fantasies than through the adult-entertainment industry? Performers did porn for the money. As ADL National Director Abraham H. Foxman commented, ‘Those Jews who enter the pornography industry have done so as individuals pursuing the American dream.’

Secular sex
Like their mainstream counterparts, Jews who enter porn do not usually do so as representatives of their religious group. Most of the performers and pornographers are Jewish culturally but not religiously. Many are entirely secular, Jews in name only. Sturman, however, identified as a Jew - he was a generous donator to Jewish charities - and performer Richard Pacheco once interviewed to be a rabbinical student.
Very few, if any, porn films have overtly Jewish themes, although Jeremy once tried to get several Jewish porn stars together to make a kosher porn film. The exception is Debbie Duz Dishes, in which Nina Hartley plays a sexually insatiable Jewish housewife who enjoys sex with anyone who rings the doorbell. It has sold very well, spawned a couple of sequels and is currently very hard to buy - perhaps indicating a new niche to exploit. Indeed, according to an editorial on the World Union of Jewish Students website,
"there are thousands of people searching for Jewish porn. After things like Jewish calendar, Jewish singles, Jewish dating, and Jewish festivals comes ‘Jewish porn’ in the list of top search keywords that GoTo.com provide".

Sexual rebels
Is there a deeper reason, beyond the mere financial, as to why Jews in particular have become involved in porn? There is surely an element of rebellion in Jewish X-rated involvement. Its very taboo and forbidden nature serves to make it attractive. As I written in these pages before, treyf signifies ‘the whole world of forbidden sexuality, the sexuality of the goyim, and there all the delights are imagined to lie . . .’ (‘Reel Kashrut: Jewish food in film’, JQ 189 [Spring 2003]).
According to one anonymous industry insider quoted by E. Michael Jones in the magazine Culture Wars (May 2003), ‘the leading male performers through the 1980s came from secular Jewish upbringings and the females from Roman Catholic day schools’. The standard porn scenario became as a result a Jewish fantasy of schtupping the Catholic shiksa.
Furthermore, as Orthodox Jew and porn gossipmonger Luke Ford explains on his website (lukeford.net): ‘Porn is just one expression of [the] rebellion against standards, against the disciplined life of obedience to Torah that marks a Jew living Judaism.’ It is also a revolt against (often middle-class) parents who wish their children to be lawyers, doctors and accountants. As performer Bobby Astyr put it on the same website, ‘It’s an “up yours” to the uncles with the pinky rings who got down on me as a kid for wanting to be musician.’
As religious influences waned and were replaced by secular ones, free-thinking Jews, especially those from California’s Bay Area, viewed sex as a means of personal and political liberation. America provided the freest society Jews have ever known, as manifested by the growth of the adult industry. Those Jewish women who have sex onscreen certainly stand in sharp contradiction to the stereotype of the ‘Jewish American Princess’. They (and I’m speculating here) may have seen themselves as fulfilling the promise of liberation, emancipating themselves from what feminist Betty Friedan in 1963 called the ‘comfortable concentration camp’ of the household as they set out into the Promised Land of the porno sets of Southern California. It signified their economic and social freedom: they were free to choose to enter, rather than coerced into it by economic and other circumstances. Once they had lain down, they could stand on their own two feet, particularly as female performers typically earn twice as much as their male counterparts.

Sexual revolutionaries
Extending the subversive thesis, Jewish involvement in the X-rated industry can be seen as a proverbial two fingers to the entire WASP establishment in America. Some porn stars viewed themselves as frontline fighters in the spiritual battle between Christian America and secular humanism. According to Ford, Jewish X-rated actors often brag about their ‘joy in being anarchic, sexual gadflies to the puritanical beast’. Jewish involvement in porn, by this argument, is the result of an atavistic hatred of Christian authority: they are trying to weaken the dominant culture in America by moral subversion. Astyr remembers having ‘to run or fight for it in grammar school because I was a Jew. It could very well be that part of my porn career is an “up yours” to these people’. Al Goldstein, the publisher of Screw, said (on lukeford.net), ‘The only reason that Jews are in pornography is that we think that Christ sucks. Catholicism sucks. We don’t believe in authoritarianism.’ Pornography thus becomes a way of defiling Christian culture and, as it penetrates to the very heart of the American mainstream (and is no doubt consumed by those very same WASPs), its subversive character becomes more charged. Porn is no longer of the ‘what the Butler saw’ voyeuristic type; instead, it is driven to new extremes of portrayal that stretch the boundaries of the porn aesthetic. As new sexual positions are portrayed, the desire to shock (as well as entertain) seems clear.
It is a case of the traditional revolutionary/radical drive of immigrant Jews in America being channelled into sexual rather than leftist politics. Just as Jews have been disproportionately represented in radical movements over the years, so they are also disproportionately represented in the porn industry. Jews in America have been sexual revolutionaries. A large amount of the material on sexual liberation was written by Jews. Those at the forefront of the movement which forced America to adopt a more liberal view of sex were Jewish. Jews were also at the vanguard of the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Wilhelm Reich, Herbert Marcuse and Paul Goodman replaced Marx, Trotsky and Lenin as required revolutionary reading. Reich’s central preoccupations were work, love and sex, while Marcuse prophesied that a socialist utopia would free individuals to achieve sexual satisfaction. Goodman wrote of the ‘beautiful cultural consequences’ that would follow from legalizing pornography: it would ‘ennoble all our art’ and ‘humanize sexuality’. Pacheco was one Jewish porn star who read Reich’s intellectual marriage of Freud and Marx (lukeford.net):
"Before I got my first part in an adult film, I went down to an audition for an X-rated film with my hair down to my ass, a copy of Wilhelm Reich’s Sexual Revolution under my arm and yelling about work, 'love and sex'."
As Rabbi Samuel H. Dresner put it (E. Michael Jones, ‘Rabbi Dresner’s Dilemma: Torah v. Ethnos’ Culture Wars, May 2003), ‘Jewish rebellion has broken out on several levels’, one being ‘the prominent role of Jews as advocates to sexual experimentation’. Overall, then, porn performers are a group of people who praise rebellion, self-fulfilment and promiscuity.

What are we ashamed of?
This brief overview and analysis of the role and motivations behind pornographers and performers is intended to shed light on a neglected topic in American Jewish popular culture. Little has been written about it. Books such as Howard M. Sachar’s A History of the Jews in America (New York: Knopf, 1992) simply ignore the topic. And you can bet that the 350th anniversary of the arrival of the Jews in the United States did not include any celebrations of Jewish innovation in this field. Even the usually tolerant Time Out New York has been too prim to deal with it, although the more iconoclastic Heeb plans an issue on it. In light of the relatively tolerant Jewish view of sex, why are we ashamed of the Jewish role in the porn industry? We might not like it, but the Jewish role in this field has been significant and it is about time it was written about seriously.
 

Porn star Ron Jeremy committed to state mental hospital​

Link: https://www.yahoo.com/news/porn-star-ron-jeremy-committed-223009485.html

4c07feff4b531bc4b61dfac202b3b163

FILE PHOTO: Adult film star Ron Jeremy appears in court on charges of rape, in Los Angeles

Tue, February 7, 2023 at 4:30 PM CST
By Danielle Broadway

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Porn star Ron Jeremy was committed to a state mental health hospital after being found incompetent to stand trial on rape and other charges, a spokesperson for the Los Angeles District Attorney said on Tuesday.
Jeremy can be held for up to two years, said Greg Risling, spokesperson for the district attorney's office. A hearing on Jeremy's progress is scheduled for May 8.
The 69-year-old had been charged with 30 counts of rape and other sexual misconduct stemming from incidents in the Los Angeles area over a 23-year period. He had pleaded not guilty.
In January, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Ronald S. Harris ruled that Jeremy was not competent to assist in his defense, according to his attorney, Stuart Goldfarb.
Goldfarb did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.
Jeremy was among the biggest names in the adult film industry, appearing in more than 2,000 movies starting in the 1970s.
The actor had been in prison since his arrest in 2020.
 


Ron Jeremy Accuser Sues Sunset Strip Bar, Says It Let Porn Star Turn Bathroom Into ‘Dungeon’​

Nancy Dillon
Tue, November 14, 2023 at 8:37 PM CST·3 min read

Link: https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/ron-jeremy-accuser-sues-sunset-023756319.html


ron-jeremy-new-accuser.jpg US-ENTERTAINMENT-FILM-ADULT-JEREMY - Credit: David McNew/POOL/AFP/Getty Images

ron-jeremy-new-accuser.jpg US-ENTERTAINMENT-FILM-ADULT-JEREMY - Credit: David McNew/POOL/AFP/Getty Images
A woman who claims porn star Ron Jeremy sexually assaulted her inside The Rainbow Bar & Grill four years ago sued the West Hollywood establishment for negligence Tuesday, claiming it allowed the “dangerous, highly sexualized and hostile environment” where the alleged attack took place.
The new lawsuit, filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court, follows three months after two other Jeremy accusers filed a similar complaint against the same Sunset Strip venue and its parent company, Rockin’ Horse Inc.
More from Rolling Stone
The latest Jane Doe claims her assault took place on April 14, 2019 — a year before Jeremy was first charged with raping four women. By August 2021, he was indicted on 34 counts of sexual assault involving 21 victims, including minors. The stunning list of alleged attacks stretched as far back as 1996 and involved women and girls ranging in age from 15 to 51. Several of the purported assaults took place at the Rainbow Bar, according to the grand jury transcript obtained by Rolling Stone.
Jeremy, whose real name is Ronald Jeremy Hyatt, pleaded not guilty but was found “not competent” to stand trial last January. He remains in a state hospital.
According to the new complaint, Hyatt was at the Rainbow Bar on April 14, 2019, when he struck up a conversation with the new Jane Doe accuser and asked her to follow him outside to continue talking.
Instead of leading her to an exit, Hyatt allegedly blocked Doe in a corner of the restaurant and “demanded” she allow him to autograph her breast. Doe refused, and that’s when Hyatt reached into her shirt and yanked her breast “completely from her bra, exposing her breast,” the lawsuit alleges.
The filing claims Hyatt “then used a sharpie to write his name on her breast while holding and squeezing Jane Doe’s breast with his hand.”
“Ron Jeremy then proceeded to aggressively twist Jane Doe’s nipple, without her consent and despite her objections,” it alleges.
Doe claims a Rainbow Bar employee made eye contact with her during the assault but “simply looked away,” which “allowed” the assault “to continue.”
The lawsuit alleges Rainbow Bar management knew or should have known about Hyatt’s predatory behavior when it gave him “permission” to use various locations on the property, including the staff restroom.
“(Defendants) knowingly allowed a known sexual predator into their bar time and time again and allowed him a dungeon, the employee’s restroom, for committing heinous sexual acts,” the filing says.
Rolling Stone previously spoke to Emily J. Sullivan, a former employee at Rainbow Bar who alleged Jeremy was known for “grop[ing] patrons and waitresses.”
“He’d do this weird thing where he’d come up behind us and try to kiss our neck and our ears and grab our butts and call it the Ron Jeremy Tickle,” Sullivan said.
Two lawyers representing Rainbow Bar in the civil case filed last August did not immediately respond to Rolling Stone‘s request for comment on the latest lawsuit Tuesday.
They answered the August complaint by stating Rainbow Bar “did not know and could not have reasonably foreseen that Ron Jeremy and/or another person would commit the alleged criminal and/or intentional acts alleged in the complaint.”
“(The) alleged acts, if any, were done without this answering defendant’s knowledge and consent and ratification,” the answer read.
The Tuesday lawsuit filed by attorney Aaron Osten on behalf of the new Jane Doe is seeking damages for past and present pain and suffering, medical expenses, past and future loss of earnings and the cost of the suit.
 

Ron Jeremy's alleged victims share fury, acceptance after latest twist in court case​

James Queally
Tue, November 28, 2023 at 5:00 AM CST·7 min read

Link: https://www.yahoo.com/news/ron-jeremys-alleged-victims-share-110001080.html/


FILE - In this June 26, 2020, file photo, adult film performer Ron Jeremy appears for his arraignment on rape and sexual assault charges at Clara Shortridge Foltz Criminal Justice Center in Los Angeles. A grand jury has indicted adult film actor Ron Jeremy on more than 30 counts of sexual assault involving 21 women and girls across more than two decades, authorities said. Jeremy, 68, whose legal name is Ronald Jeremy Hyatt, pleaded not guilty in Los Angeles Superior Court on Wednesday, Aug. 25, 2021, to all of the allegations, which include 12 counts of rape. (AP Photo/David McNew, Pool, File)

Ron Jeremy appears for his arraignment on rape and sexual assault charges in a downtown Los Angeles courtroom in 2020. (David McNew / Associated Press)
When Alana Evans found out Ron Jeremy's rape case would end with him being released to a "private residence," she said it left her emotionally drained and completely derailed.
A longtime adult film entertainer and president of the Adult Performance Artists Guild, Evans testified before the Los Angeles County grand jury that indicted Jeremy on more than 30 counts of sexual assault in 2021 and spent years working with women in the porn industry who decided to speak out against one of its most legendary figures.
It was unlikely Jeremy would ever stand trial after a court declared him mentally incompetent in January because of symptoms related to "severe dementia," but Evans said Friday's news felt like a final knife twist.
"I feel betrayed because at no point along the way, during this path of 'Ron is suffering from dementia' and the incompetence issue coming up, never did they say he could be sent home. It was always he’ll go to a facility," Evans said. “We all came forward. We all told our stories. We all put this effort into their case, and I feel 100% let down by the system.”

Read more: Former porn actor Ron Jeremy to be released to 'private residence' with rape case frozen, health deteriorating

A judge's decision to order Jeremy released into private care last week seemingly ended the four-year legal saga that saw dozens of women accuse America's most famous porn star of rape after he was arrested on sexual assault charges in 2020.
Accusations came from sex workers who knew Jeremy for decades and patrons of Sunset Strip bars whom Jeremy allegedly attacked at random. In one incident, prosecutors said, Jeremy allegedly assaulted a 15-year-old girl at a Santa Clarita house party. Jeremy has denied all wrongdoing.
The 70-year-old's fitness to stand trial has been in question since last March, when Jeremy's criminal defense attorney walked into a downtown L.A. courtroom and insisted his client did not recognize him.
News that Jeremy will now be released to a facility that may not even have security has roiled many of the women who made the decision to speak out about his alleged abuses on porn sets and at industry parties dating back nearly 30 years. After the public discord, prosecutors filed a motion asking a judge to reconsider Jeremy's placement, according to Tiffiny Blacknell, director of communications for the Los Angeles County district attorney's office. That hearing will take place Thursday.
"I am profoundly disturbed by the release of Ron Jeremy, who is accountable for serial rapes, based on the grounds of deteriorating dementia. While recognizing the importance of addressing health issues, it is crucial for the justice system to balance the rights of the accused with the safety of the community," Lianne Young, who first accused Jeremy of assault in a 2020 interview with The Times, said in a statement.
"This situation underscores the need for careful consideration of public safety concerns," she added, "as well as a thorough evaluation of legal and ethical implications surrounding the release of individuals facing serious criminal charges."
Court records show Jeremy's health declined to the point that he was placed under the care of a conservator in March. In court on Nov. 17, attorneys advocating for Jeremy argued he is now "essentially bedridden" and no longer a threat to the public, according to an email obtained by The Times.

Read more: Women break silence, tell stories of rape, groping by Ron Jeremy over two decades

Jeremy has been held in the medical wing of the Twin Towers Correctional Facility in downtown L.A. since January. Despite the abuse allegations made against Jeremy, he has not been convicted of a crime. He is unlikely to recover from his dementia and be restored to competency, according to court records, meaning he cannot be housed in a state hospital.
That left his conservator to seek to have him housed in a private medical facility with a “secured perimeter dementia” ward, according to a filing submitted to the Mental Health Court in August. As of July, however, nine such facilities refused to take Jeremy on as a patient. A Ventura County facility did consider caring for Jeremy but also ultimately rejected him, records show.
The court filings do not state a reason for the facilities' decisions. Jeremy's conservator declined to speak with The Times.
The Los Angeles County district attorney's office opposed the judge's decision last week to release Jeremy, expressing concern that he might try to assault caregivers. But a judge in the Hollywood Mental Health Court overruled the prosecutor's objection.
It remains unclear exactly where Jeremy will be housed. The district attorney's office referred questions to an attorney for Jeremy's conservator, who did not return a call seeking comment.
Some of those who worked hardest to bring Jeremy to justice, however, said it was time to move on.
Ginger Banks, a performer and sex worker advocate who compiled more than 100 accusations of groping and assault against Jeremy in 2017, said she truly believes he is too sick to do any more damage.
“I really don’t think he has the mental capacity or the physical capacity to hurt anybody right now, and I think the point of our justice system should be to prevent people from hurting other people until they’re rehabilitated," she said.
Banks — who says Jeremy groped her the first time they met — believes he has been convicted "in the court of public opinion" and is hopeful fallout of the broader #MeToo movement will lead women to continue speaking out against alleged abuses.

Read more: Sunset Strip's Rainbow Bar let Ron Jeremy assault women in its bathroom, lawsuit alleges

"We’ve seen a complete change in society about women coming forward about this. … I think that societal shift is going to outweigh this one court decision," Banks said.
Young echoed those statements, saying victims need to continue coming forward even when the legal system doesn't produce the outcome they hope for.
"Reporting a sexual assault can lead to increased awareness, support, and resources for survivors," she said. "It is my sincere hope that despite my experience, survivors will find the strength to share their stories and seek justice."
But Evans said she believes Jeremy "got away with" dozens of assaults and that the end result of the court case will only embolden his defenders within the adult film industry. A number of actors and producers, including some Evans counts as friends, still believe Jeremy is innocent. The lack of a conviction, she fears, will only further discourage adult entertainers from calling out abusive behavior in their industry.
“They absolutely think that this absolves him and that is the most alarming part. This sets precedents, this sets a tone that it’s OK for this behavior," she said.
In 2017, after a Rolling Stone article first brought allegations against Jeremy into the public eye, Evans said she was invited to lunch by Jeremy and the producers of several films she'd worked on. They were hoping she'd use her position as head of the union representing the vast majority of adult film performers to speak out on Jeremy's behalf.
Evans was stunned. Jeremy had allegedly assaulted her in 2008 by running his hand up her skirt, and she'd confronted him about it before. It was as if he didn't remember, or didn't care, she said.
“I feel his hands. That disgustingness does not ever go away," she said, adding that she is skeptical that Jeremy is truly as sick as his advocates claim.
An official with direct knowledge of Jeremy's health, who spoke to The Times on condition of anonymity in order to discuss his medical condition candidly, insisted the disgraced porn king will not be enjoying himself, wherever he ends up.
“It’s not like he’s going to be living his best life. He has no idea what’s going on," the official said. "He’s going to be a prisoner in his own body.”
Sign up for Essential California for news, features and recommendations from the L.A. Times and beyond in your inbox six days a week.
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
 
Back
Top