A music video dropped in early February from a relatively unknown rapper named Jugglord, with a feature from his much more famous friend, underground rap darling Lil Tracy. The song, a two-minute track called “Geeked,” is pretty boring, and the video is even more so—just shots of Jugglord, Tracy, and a bunch of girls lying around on leather couches, or walking around a white, modern mansion. Few people watched the video—it has 8,000 views on Youtube—but it’s safe to say, a majority of those that did were well acquainted with Florida’s SoundCloud rap scene, and so it’s even safer to say that some of them recognized that house. It belongs to a guy named Bruno Dickemz.
Bruno Dickemz is one of those characters that’s known only within his own world—the intersection of underground music and hardcore porn—but not outside it. If you dig around in Miami music, or follow underground artists on SoundCloud, or take in any XXX tube sites, you’ll come across his name in contexts that range from humorous to extremely grim.
Bruno seems to know most of the underground hip-hop artists from South Florida, where he lives. He’s managed several major rappers, including Ski Mask the Slump God and XXXtentacion, and a long list of others have crashed, recorded or lived at his house. Just the other day, for example, hip-hop podcaster Adam22 tweeted out two pictures of “Gucci Gang” rapper Lil Pump, fresh from his performance on SNL. The caption read: “From Bruno’s house to SNL in less than two years.”
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But he’s also notorious in the porn industry for being one of the only straight male stars in South Florida to do extremely brutal BDSM shoots, and for bringing all of those practices home to his mansion where a rotating roster of girls live. He’s also been mired in whispered-about—but unsubstantiated—sexual-abuse allegations so widely known they even made it into his PornHub bio. (Bruno denies them).
The specific allegations first arose online in April of 2016, when veteran actress Marsha May tweeted out an image of a girl’s face, her lips bruised and one eye swollen shut. “Newbie in the biz who’s a victim of Bruno dickemz,” she wrote. “Companies need to keep us safe and not let men like this work!” (May, notably, has her own history of sexual abuse, after she was charged in 2016 for recording a sexual encounter involving three adolescents.) Dickemz responded on Twitter, characteristically blasé: “The industry actually hired me for all their abuse sites and pays me to beat bitches like u. They don’t care to listen to u.”
A few of the companies actually did: three talent agencies confirmed with The Daily Beast that Dickemz is on their “No Shoot List,” an informal industry system of identifying suspicious performers named after the “No Fly List” (and is often employed for discriminatory purposes: one agent noted that Dickemz was the only performer on their list for abuse; all the others were flagged for doing gay scenes). “We don’t want to put money in somebody’s pocket that, you know, hits women,” a spokesperson from East Coast Talent told The Daily Beast, although none of the agencies knew of any alleged victims.
But Dickemz does continue to do shoots, at times even producing his own. That’s how he wound up producing a series of videos at an odd intersection of his two territories. In 2016, he started a company called Groupie Lust, where musicians—many of them famous names like XXXtentacion and Ski Mask the Slump God—feature in his X-rated scenes, usually remaining bystanders, but in some cases actually getting involved, or as Bruno put it, “taking one for the team.” (Notably: only two musicians have done this: Tracy, whose scene is in limbo after Bruno’s friend dropped the hard drive in water, and the late XXXtentacion, whose scene is “in the archives” after he was killed at just 20 years old.)
The agent’s real name, as you may have guessed, is not actually Bruno Dickemz but Emmanuel Bruno Jaramillo. As of October 3rd, he’s 33, just like Jesus (his comparison, not mine). He’s tall, muscular, easy to talk to, and not ugly, but not especially good-looking—which is sort of a trend among guys in his industry, where male actors are not stars so much as props. Bruno does have huge eyes and often, one of those scrappy little chin-beards, like an overgrown soul patch.
One thing you should know about Bruno straight out of the gate is that, abuse allegations aside, he does beat up women, professionally. He doesn’t mince words about it. “I’ve always had a sadistic side of me, a little sadistic personality,” he told The Daily Beast. “I’ve always enjoyed inflicting pain, but have it be consensual.” He works for production companies like the Fetish Network, Bang Bros, and Facial Abuse on scenes that, in his words, definitely look “rapey.” But getting paid to be brutal is a somewhat recent development—it’s only come about in the past four years.
Before Bruno became Bruno Dickemz, he grew up between Broward and Miami with his mom, his two siblings, and his stepdad, in what he described as a “pretty good life.” His family didn’t particularly get along, so when he left home at 18 he was “on his own,” working a series of jobs—one of which was pushing timeshares around South Florida. Bruno turned 23 just four days after the 2008 financial crisis and, over the next few months, many of the companies that he worked for went out of business. He was looking for another line of work when, one night, a guy approached him at a club in Miami and asked if he was interested in porn. “And I was like, ‘Hell yeah,’” he said.
At the time Bruno was in a relationship, so he just kept the recruiter’s business card where a high-schooler keeps his condom (wallet) in case things between him and his girlfriend didn’t work out. They didn’t. Not long after, Bruno started booking shoots.
He wasn’t planning to keep doing shoots (his family was proud of his sales jobs; he didn’t want them to know), but he kept picking up one after another to help with his grueling day jobs, occasionally insisting he was going to quit, and then getting back at it again. Once he started recruiting women and working as an agent, he realized he was “sucked in.”
Around that time, he started making connections in music. Bruno had always liked rapping, producing and listening to music, but never pursued it himself, since he had no connections and couldn’t see a way to make it pay.
But as he became a well-known character in the South Florida circuit, artists like SpaceGhostPurrp, Yung Simmie, Denzel Curry—all early players in Miami rap group Raider Klan—started approaching him asking for guidance. “I’ve got the nice house, I’ve got the girls,” Dickemz said. “I’ve got everything these kids want. They see I’m obviously older and wiser and a lot of them don’t have any guidance or direction or good management. It just worked.”
Bruno’s house turned into a regular destination for parties and recording sessions, and it was during one hang that he thought of a tragically lame adult series premise: using his famous friends as bait to coerce girls into sleeping with him. He’d call it “Groupie Lust.” What resulted is a series of aggressively homemade movies with bad animation, dorky soundtracks and cameos from some of the most recognizable underground rappers of the early 2010s. (One of the series’ funniest productions includes an appearance from rapper Denzel Curry, a guy with the carriage of an extremely awkward person who decided to do something cool. During his five minutes of screentime, Curry, who couldn’t look less comfortable, actually does finger guns.)
As Bruno’s famous friends outgrew him—some moved to L.A., others left the business altogether—he found himself a new crop of young acts to manage, befriend, and turn into stars for Groupie Lust, including some future big names and verified talents, like Ski Mask the Slump God and controversial artist XXXtentacion (the rapper was facing charges of extreme domestic abuse before he was murdered in June of 2018). “Everyone knew who I was because of Groupie Lust,” Bruno said. “And X hit me up to be on it.”
At first, Bruno was skeptical of casting the young rapper, who was not yet as famous as he would become. He thought of his project as a series “as real as possible,” and tried to cast only major names, people who would realistically have “groupies.” But X, who was notoriously confident in his abilities, convinced Bruno that he had a dedicated following, and eventually the agent consented. Dickemz says he has no plans to destroy the footage but does not intend to release it, out of respect for his late friend and his mother.
In total, Dickemz recorded with what amounts to a kind of roll call of important South Florida figures and then some—including SpaceGhostPurrp, XXXTentacion, Ski Mask the Slump God, idontknowjeffery, Fat Nick, Pouya (who was also accused of sexual assault), Chxpo, TankHead 666, Lil Tracy, and Mike Dece, a Weird-Al Yankovic-looking kid who has since been excommunicated from that world on account of a bizarre, rabid embrace of Trumpism.
But Bruno says the project could be coming to a sudden end. All of his most recent episodes were lost due to the hard drive-in-water incident. The damaged drive now sits in a lab, waiting for a payment from the friend for recovery costs. “Groupie Lust is done. We cut it. We pulled the plug.” Bruno said. “It’s just an entity that exists and still will exist. But for now, it’s over.”
