A porn star accused of hacking a colleague to death with a sword jumped to his death Saturday after a standoff with a Los Angeles SWAT team. He was reportedly holding a sword. Richard Abowitz reports on the gruesome crime and why it has some in the adult-film industry worried that male porn stars are becoming more violent.
A brutal murder apparently perpetrated by a samurai-sword-wielding porn star leaves another porn star dead. Some would say you can't make this stuff up. Others would say it was bound to happen.
On June 1, police allege that a little known adult-film performer named Stephen Hill, a.k.a. Steve Driver, lost it at a porn-company studio with a samurai sword, attacking three people. The sword was possibly a prop from a porno flick. One of the victims, porn actor Herbert Wong, a.k.a. Tom Dong, was killed, the two others wounded. Hill jumped to his death after a standoff with Los Angeles Police Dept. SWAT team in Canoga Park, near the Chatsworth Nature Preserve. He had been standing at the edge of a cliff and threatening to jump, while reportedly clutching a sword—it's unknown whether it is the same sword that was used in the June 1 murder.
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One porn star says he knows of two performers who wear testosterone patches in the hours before a scene in the belief it will make them more aggressive during sex.
According to sources, a short time earlier Hill had been fired from his job and evicted from the place the crime occurred, the Ultima DVD studio, where he was also living. After the attack, and while Hill was still missing, Eric Jover, owner of Ultima DVD, offered a $2000 reward for information that could lead to his arrest.
The details of exactly what happened are sketchy, but on his website tribute to the victim, Jover, who refused to comment about what happened that night, writes: “Tom [sic] heroism a few days ago enabled us to escape with our lives, and his sacrifice will not go unheard.” According to sources familiar with the incident, Wong was a longtime friend and co-worker of the suspect, and he stepped into the path of the attacker to protect another man, a little-known performer who worked under the pseudonym John Luxor. Luxor is currently hospitalized with serious injuries to his hand, according to Glenn King, owner of Mean Bitches, which specializes in films of women dominating men. King was reached by The Daily Beast just before preparing to visit Luxor in the hospital.
The Ulitima DVD location is well known in the industry and was rented out for parties. Visitors recall that prop swords were displayed in one of the rooms. King, who has been to the Ultima DVD studio himself and has talked with witnesses to the incident that occurred there, says Hill apparently went crazy when he was asked to move out of the studio.
“Basically there were a group of guys living in the studio and conditions were pretty tight over there," says King, who knew the victims both socially and professionally. "So they, as a group, decided to tell Steve to move out. Steve then left and came back and got in a confrontation with Chris [John Luxor] and started hacking at him. The others threw a table at Steve and tried to pull Chris [Luxor] out of there. They ran into the parking lot and when they got out they realized Tom was still inside”
Despite its sensational nature, this was not the first incident of violence to take place at Ultima DVD, and Hill, if he did it, was not the first porn performer to snap there and attack other performers. At the same studio in November, at a party hosted by King for the star Brooke Haven, a mixed martial arts fighter turned porn star who goes by the name War Machine, had a confrontation with a group of fellow porn-industry players, including the same Luxor who is now hospitalized with sword wounds. In that incident, according to participants who were there, a performer known as Alex Knight was punched by War Machine. King says he too was hit by War Machine at that party. “He ran up and hit me as I was looking at the crowd.” But War Machine finally settled on his own agent, Derek Hay, a former performer and owner of LA Direct Models. According to King, “War Machine chased Derek to the other end of the parking lot. He hit him a few times and knocked him down, and then when Derek got up and started running again, he chased him more.” Hay offers this acid recollection of his confrontation with War Machine: “I would not say he beat anyone up. He assaulted some people.”
War Machine admits he snapped that night. “They surrounded me and the worst thing you can do is scare me, because that makes me real aggressive and I start fighting and throwing punches.” Chillingly, he even says he saw the swords in the studio shortly before the fight. “I remember seeing all these cool swords and I grabbed one and was playing with it," he says. "I held it and checked it out.”
This week's lurid homicide has the porn world looking inward for answers, and some are asking whether this type of behavior is a problem endemic to the industry itself. Some in the adult-film industry, in fact, say that violent incidents involving male porn stars are increasingly common. Though specific incidents are hard to track down because most porn actors perform under pseudonyms, there have been a few high-profile incidents in recent years. In 2008 a performer named Jack Venice was convicted of second-degree rape, first-degree burglary, and two counts of residential burglary. And Kid Vegas, star of Kid Vegas: Whoremaster, was charged with sexual assault among other crimes in Nye Country, Nevada a few years ago.
Yet, outside of anecdotally, virtually nothing is known about male porn performers. “I have never seen any research or study on men in the industry," says Robert Jensen, author of Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity. Gail Dines, author of Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked our Sexuality, concurs with this. But both Jensen and Dines believe that the emergence of more aggressive sex scenes creates a culture that tolerates violence, and that what the adult industry describes as "aggressive" is, in fact, violence against women. “What makes the men in pornography different from other men is that they are actually being paid to do violence," says Dines. "This is what they get their money for. If you look at mainstream stuff on the internet today, the stuff that is called 'gonzo,' it is violence."
Many industry professionals in all corners of the porn world dispute this characterization. "The people in adult are just like any other industry," says Lyla Katz, who is covering the Ultima DVD murder for industry trade publication X Biz. "They go to work and they do their job and they go home to their lives. It is just a typical cross section of people, and men in porn are not known for being violent at all."
But others in porn paint a more complex picture in which this multibillion dollar industry is still largely composed of tiny, unregulated groups of actors and filmmakers. According to Glenn King of Mean Bitches, “There are big companies like Vivid and Evil Angel. Evil Angel has an office. They have a woman who runs accounts payable and another who runs accounts receivable. They are a business. They could be selling widgets. But many of us in this business are one-man operations working without a business plan.” The result, according to adult female talent agent Mark Spiegler, is that the industry "is like high school, with all the cliques and feuds and stupid fights. Then add to that you have guys doing recreational drugs and steroids.”
Steroids and Viagra are the most common drugs on porn shoots today. (Stories of endless lines of cocaine all over the sets are '70s-era folklore.) Long-term steroid use has been shown in multiple studies to increase aggressive behavior. War Machine says the majority of the men in porn have tried steroids, and many in the industry confirm this, noting that steroid and growth-hormone use have become much more conspicuous in the last five years. “Yes, a lot of the guys use steroids and everyone knows it,” says Mark Spiegler, perhaps the most powerful female-talent agent in the business today. One female performer says, “They shoot it in their ass and the spot gets sore. If you smack them there some guys will grit their teeth and others will cry out in pain. But most of the men do steroids.”
Performer Eric Swiss says the steroids issue is overblown. “Some of the C rate performers use them, but it is not common," he says. "Out of the 20 performers I could name off the top my head maybe 3 or 4 use steroids.” (That, of course, would still be close to 20 percent.) But Swiss admits he does know of two performers who wear testosterone patches in the hours before a scene in the belief it will make them more aggressive during sex. Yet another performer, who asked not to be named, admitted to rubbing a testosterone cream on his chest hoping for the same effect only more quickly.
If there is violence in the porn industry, much of it might be caused by the changing dynamics of the business side, rather than anything to do with sex. “It is rare to see violence," says King, "but now that revenues are down a lot of the small companies and webmasters are not paying people. And, like high school, it is hard to avoid seeing someone. If you owe money or someone who owes money to you are yelling on the phone, you can see each other at a party a couple hours later. There are a lot of little confrontations.”
It's this kind of violence—the sporadic, un-referreed kind, that unnerves performers like War Machine. “Porn is more violent than MMA [mixed martial arts],” he says, in that “fighters respect each other and almost never fight outside” the ring. Violence in the porn world, says War Machine, is "more like high school."
As for this comparison to high school that everyone seems to agree on, the murder of Herbert Wong shows that when the high school mentality is put in the context of the business of sex, there can be lethal results.
“Porn is never going to be what the people in porn want it to be," says one longtime female performer. "Porn star sounds great, but it is not a mainstream thing. It is f------ on camera and that is not a normal thing no matter what fantasy people in porn have about being mainstream.”
Richard Abowitz has chronicled the rise and continuing fall of Las Vegas for over a decade. He is the author of hundreds of articles for Las Vegas Weekly. Abowitz is perhaps best known for writing the Movable Buffet blog and continuing print column for Los Angeles Times. In addition to covering Vegas, Abowitz has been writing about music and culture for Rolling Stone since 1996. In December 2009, Abowitz launched GoldPlatedDoor.com to be an honest broker reporting on all things Vegas.
