'I Was Just Shocked and Frozen': Alleged Sexual Assault Victims Reveal Chilling Details About Ron Jeremy

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 to 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.

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In an opening 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. He said that many of the alleged assaults took place at either the condo of his friend Michael Lipman; or at the Rainbow Bar and Grill, a restaurant on the Sunset Strip of Los Angeles where Jeremy was a regular.

Four of Jeremy’s alleged victims were models whom Jeremy met on a photo shoot. According to Thompson, Jeremy offered the models extra money in exchange for undressing, promising that he would distribute the images overseas and photoshop a celebrity’s face on their bodies so they were unidentifiable. After covering their faces, “he would penetrate their vagina either with his finger, his tongue, or his penis” without their consent, Thompson said.

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 buyers remorse.” “I have never raped anyone,” he said in a lengthy statement.

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, 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 the 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 bar manager for the Rainbow 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, he said, “His position is the same as it was when they issued the criminal complaint. He is innocent of all charges.”

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