Transcripts from the criminal case against porn legend Ron Jeremy, who a grand jury has indicted on more than 30 sexual assault charges involving 21 victims, reveal new details about the performer’s alleged history of using his celebrity persona to prey on women.
The charges, which date back as early as 1996, include 12 counts of forcible rape, seven counts of forcible oral copulation, six counts of sexual battery by restraint, four counts of sexual penetration by a foreign object, two counts of sexual penetration of an unconscious or asleep person, and one count each of lewd act upon a child under the age of 14 or 15, sodomy by use of force, and assault with intent to commit rape. The alleged victims include a 19-year-old woman who claims Jeremy raped her during a photo shoot in the San Fernando Valley, a 26-year-old woman who alleges she was raped at a nightclub, and a woman who says Jeremy sexually assaulted her in his home. Jeremy pleaded not guilty last week and has denied all charges against him. In 2017, he dismissed the allegations against him to Rolling Stone, referring to them as “pure lies or buyer’s remorse.” “I have never raped anyone,” he said in a lengthy statement.
Paul Thompson, deputy district attorney of the county of Los Angeles, outlined Jeremy’s alleged pattern of assault over the course of two and a half decades in his opening statement. He then called the 21 Jane Does to the stand, as well as several of their friends and husbands who had been nearby during the alleged assaults.
One of Jeremy’s accusers, known as Jane Doe 5, was 15 years old at the time of the alleged attack. She said on the stand that he had forcibly digitally penetrated her vagina while they were at a rave in Santa Clarita, California, in June 2004. The rave, called “Almost Better Than Sex,” was hosted by Jeremy. Despite the young woman being underage, Jeremy’s assistant offered her sips of a vodka-cranberry cocktail, and she had taken half an Ecstasy pill. According to her testimony, Jeremy invited her backstage, then asked her if she wanted to “see something cool.” He then allegedly picked her up around the waist and inserted a finger into her vagina.
“I was just shocked and frozen pretty much,” the woman testified. Though she tried to push him away, she says she was unable to do so. “It all happened so fast,” she said. “He’s a lot stronger and bigger than me.” The young woman’s friend allegedly witnessed the encounter, and told Jeremy to stop, but Jeremy was reportedly unfazed. “He just said, ‘I don’t give a fuck,’” the woman testified. The woman said she did not report the encounter until the initial charges were filed against Jeremy in the summer of 2020. “I didn’t understand that adults have power and I was just a kid,” she testified. “I used to blame it on myself a lot.”
An adult performing legend with a decades-long career, Jeremy established a reputation in the porn industry as a lovable schlub before crossing over into the mainstream, appearing in reality TV series like The Surreal Life and making cameos in films like Detroit Rock City. In 2017, Rolling Stone spoke with more than a dozen women in the adult industry who alleged that Jeremy used his reputation as one of the most well-known men in porn to grope and sexually assault fans and fellow performers with impunity. “You’d be hard-pressed to say there’s any other person who’s been able to publicly sexually harass or assault people and get away with it,” Julia Ann, a popular performer who alleged that Jeremy had assaulted her, told Rolling Stone at the time.
After the Los Angeles district attorney’s office filed charges against Ron Jeremy in the summer of 2020, Rolling Stone reported the allegations of an additional dozen women, most of whom were not in the adult industry, alleging that Jeremy had assaulted them as well. “I can see now that … his sleazy persona was a sort of weird double bluff,” said one woman who alleged that Jeremy digitally penetrated her without her consent in 2009, while she was a student at Washington University in St. Louis. “As though someone playing up their lewdness for laughs couldn’t be capable of actual inappropriate behavior. But it’s become clear that an ironic predator is still a predator.”
According to the district attorney’s office, Jeremy committed many of the alleged assaults at the Rainbow Bar and Grill, where he was a regular. “He was there so frequently and so often that the people that worked there knew him well, and he was able to use his knowledge of the people that worked there and his knowledge of that restaurant to help him to commit the sexual assaults,” Thompson said.
Rolling Stone previously spoke to Emily J. Sullivan, a former employee at Rainbow who alleged that Jeremy had a reputation 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. (A former manager for the bar said in 2020 that Jeremy was “a groper, no rapist.”)
Stuart Goldfarb, Jeremy’s attorney, did not respond to a request for comment. In a statement to Rolling Stone after Jeremy was indicted in August, he said, “His position is the same as it was when they issued the criminal complaint. He is innocent of all charges.”
Ron Jeremy at the 2011 EXXXOTICA expo in Chicago. (Photo: Paul Warner/Getty Images)
The testimony, which stretches over the better part of 1,500 pages, lays out how Jeremy would allegedly use his status as a D-list celebrity to attract potential victims. “I don’t want to say he was a celebrity, but, you know, he kind of was,” said one woman who testified Jeremy raped her in a hotel in Los Angeles in January 2013. “I grew up in a very small town and he was like a status symbol. He was a celebrity.”
While Jeremy had different “hunting grounds,” according to Marlene Martinez, deputy district attorney for the county of Los Angeles, the patterns of the alleged assaults were consistent: “He would assault victims where there would be as little fight as necessary and so that he could do whatever he wanted.”
One woman alleged that she met Jeremy in 2014 at the bar Sardo’s, where she also met former NSYNC member Joey Fatone. After becoming inebriated and kissing Fatone, she went outside and ended up in an alleyway with Jeremy, where her friends later told her she gave him oral sex. Jeremy allegedly contacted her the next day and offered to set up a meeting between her and Fatone, only to drive her to Lipman’s apartment and forcibly perform oral sex on her. “He pulled his penis out and I said no,” she testified. “And he said, ‘just the tip’ a few times.” After experiencing vaginal pain, she went to a doctor to have a full physical examination, and told him she had been assaulted by Jeremy.
“He asked me why I didn’t report it, the doctor did, and I said I just wanted it to go away,” she said. “And it doesn’t go away at all.”
Another woman testified that she met Jeremy at the Rainbow Bar and Grill in 2013, and that she and her friend had a short conversation with him after they approached him for an autograph. At one point, Jeremy offered to show the woman where the restaurant makes their pizzas. She then said that he ushered her into a tiny bathroom and locked the door behind him, pushing her up against a toilet. She testified that he grabbed her breast and tried to shove his hand down her pants, saying, “I just want to see your boobs,” before she shoved him into a sink and got away, telling her friend they had to leave.
“I said, ‘Ron just tried to rape me,’” she testified.
Another woman testified that Jeremy attempted to assault her in a bathroom at the Rainbow Bar and Grill in 2013. After he ordered a drink for her at the bar, which he referred to as “the Ron Jeremy special,” he offered to accompany her to the “VIP bathroom” when she said she wasn’t feeling well. According to the woman’s testimony, he then proceeded to block access to the door and forcibly penetrated her vagina with his tongue and his penis.
Though the woman testified that she said “no” to Jeremy multiple times, she said that she felt like she couldn’t move because her arms felt “weightless.” “I can’t run out because he’s blocking the door. I can’t fight. I can’t move. I’m out of control. So it’s hopeless,” the woman said, referring to her state of mind at the time of the alleged rape.
Another woman who met Jeremy in 2014 at the Rainbow Bar and Grill also testified that she had started to feel sick after accepting a drink from him. “I started to get very dizzy and then I started throwing up profusely,” she said. Jeremy advised her to follow him to his friend’s apartment so she wouldn’t be arrested for public intoxication, an offer that she accepted. She testified that she laid down on the couch in the living room, only to wake up to his fingers in her vagina. “I said, ‘No, no, you can’t do this,’” she testified. She said she then ran to the bathroom to throw up, and he followed her in there, grabbing her vagina from behind while she vomited.
“I thought that this was my mistake,” she said when asked why she did not immediately report the alleged attack. “Like I made the mistake by trusting that he meant what he said by taking me somewhere safe.”
Another woman, identified as Jane Doe 2, said she stopped at the Rainbow Bar and Grill while on vacation in Hollywood with her husband in March 2017, and met Jeremy outside the restaurant at closing time. She had to use the restroom before going back to her hotel, so Jeremy offered to take her to the bathroom after he signed her chest. At that point, she alleges, he followed her in and blocked the door and wouldn’t let her leave unless she showed him her rear end. He then pulled down her pants and placed his penis against her anus and the lips of her vulva.
“He was telling me that he was really big, that his penis was really big, and he didn’t know if I could handle it, and was I getting wet, was he making me wet,” she testified. “I just kept saying the same things, just, ‘No, I just need to leave. No, I just want to go.’”
Jeremy then allegedly told the woman he wanted to show her a “trick” in which he made his penis soft and hard by saying, “Get big, Ron Jeremy” or “Get small, Ron Jeremy,” forcibly putting her hand on his penis. She said she reported the assault in her home state several months after it happened. “I felt disgusting… I didn’t feel like anybody would believe me, especially if it was somebody who had money,” she said.
The Rainbow Bar and Grill on the Sunset Strip in L.A. (Photo: GC Images)
According to the testimony, Jeremy would use this “trick” as a tactic to disarm potential victims. One alleged victim testified that after meeting Jeremy in 2019 at a New Year’s Eve party, he invited her outside to show her this “trick,” then turned her around, bent her over and forcibly penetrated her vagina and anus with his penis while she was against a park bench. “I told him it hurt and asked him to stop,” she said, adding that she told him she was on her period. “He kept telling me he was almost finished.”
Immediately afterward, the victim said, Jeremy asked her what she thought the encounter “was worth.” “I didn’t understand him,” she said. “And he took out $40 and gave it to me.” She reported the assault, which is the most recent charge against him, in the spring of 2020, a few months after it allegedly took place, because she said she did not think anyone would believe her. “He was a celebrity and I was just a drunk girl at a party,” she said.
As laid out in the testimony, Jeremy also used his position as an elder statesman within the industry to gain access to his victims. Jane Doe 22, who was 17 at the time of the alleged 2008 assault, said she was living in a house in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, when her roommates, all of whom worked in porn, threw a party. Though she wasn’t participating — she’d been in a car accident the year before and was still on painkillers and having mobility issues — she looked out her door when the crowd erupted into cheers and laughter, and saw Jeremy had just walked in. They locked eyes, and she became nervous and went back into her room. Soon after, Jeremy came in. “He walks in and says, ‘Are you in the porn industry?’” she testified. “I said, ‘No, I’m only 17.’”
She tried to back up to the bed, she said, then tried to get to the door to get out. He pulled her pajama shorts down and pinned her to the wall, she said, before raping her. “I was in pain,” she testified. “I said ‘no.’ I was shaking. I remember trying to grab the door and make some commotion so my housemates or anyone would hear. And then I remember him kind of patting my back and touching me, telling — almost like petting me, telling me to calm down and be quiet and, like, ‘Everyone does this…. Just relax,’ you know, ‘Stop making noise.” She testified that she later told police she believed she may have contracted herpes from the alleged assault.
Some of the women who were allegedly assaulted by Jeremy reported having encountered him in a professional capacity. One then-22-year-old model said that she met Jeremy in the summer of 2010 after he offered her $400 to do a nude photo shoot for a Japanese magazine, in which he would Photoshop a celebrity’s face onto her body. After she met him at his apartment, she said, he told her to disrobe, covered her face with a towel, and asked her to pose on his bed. At that point, she said, he started to make comments about her vagina before digitally penetrating her and licking her vagina without her consent.
“I told him several times that I did not want him doing that to me, that it was really gross, that it’s disgusting,” she testified. “He kept telling me, ‘No, we’re clean people, we eat clean food, we drink clean water.’ I’m like, ‘No, sir, you are not clean. I’ve heard you verbatim tell me what STDs you have contracted in your career.’” She said she eventually “froze” and relented after it became clear he would not stop. “He clearly doesn’t care. So are there gonna be consequences for him? No, of course not,” she said she remembered thinking at the time.
Many of the victims said they came forward after seeing the news that Jeremy had been arrested and charged with sexual assault last summer. One woman testified that she was inspired to come forward after seeing Jeremy quoted in Rolling Stone denying the allegations against him, referring to his accusers as having “buyers’ remorse.” “There is no part of me that is a liar or a remorseful buyer from that instance, from that event that happened,” she said. “I was just eating dinner and I was not in any way trying to have any association with this man when he attacked me.”
This story has been updated.
From Rolling Stone US
