by Jake Brown
I tried everything, from going to AA meetings with him, getting to know his sponsors so I could be in touch when he was falling off the wagon, stopping drinking around him, everything. It was sad how far I went in context of how far gone he already was, because he couldn’t see any of it. Maybe he just didn’t care at that point, but I still did, and had to find a way to emotionally separate myself from him once and for all. I certainly wasn’t doing myself a service by staying with him, so I made the decision heading into the New Year to work toward ending the relationship. It would take me another six months, but I knew it was the right thing to be focused on as a goal. What sucked was outside of that relationship, everything else in my life was going well — I was happy financially and in my career, and there were a million other girls who would have killed to be in my shoes professionally going into 1998.
Part X ii
Time to Move On…
As low as some people were sinking in their jealousy of my steadying rise in international popularity, as the New Year began, and my prospects looked even brighter still, I took the high road, preferring to focus on everything good that was happening for me at that point. Unfortunately, other people close to me had taken note of that as well, and were taking every advantage they could of our good fortune. My long-time director, John T. Bowen had signed a deal with Crème Productions, and he had also expanded his star roster to include a couple new comers — Zoe and Kendra Jade.This was motivated in part out of some financial troubles his company was experiencing, which I had stood by him through.That’s just something that’s in my blood, and if you look at my life, I’ve always been loyal to people around me, and for John, that meant tolerating his inability to produce the bigger-end movies that I wanted. So I was patient with him, and to be fair, he was getting me better male talent. So I was working with guys like Brandon Iron, who was really hot and had a big dick. There was no movie in January, but I had many bookings. I was also still dating my alcoholic loser boyfriend Earl, and even though I wasn’t very happy, I was so caught up in being Jasmin that I wasn’t thinking about what was the healthiest thing for Rhea. I was expected to be Jasmin 24 hours a day, and even though I knew there were normal guys who would not want to date me because of my profession, so my attitude had become: if you can’t beat them, join them. And Earl was in the business as well, so it was just easier.
That sense of internal surrender had really bothered me too, because for as big as my public persona had become, I had always viewed my adult film career as a stepping — stone to somewhere better. The sacrifices hadn’t just been professional so far though, they’d also taken a personal toll that drove my sense of self low enough to date a douche bag like Earl.
173 His alcoholism was at a high point, and I didn’t know what the fuck to do. I wanted someone in my life to be my partner, and I definitely didn’t have that with him. I knew he was cheating on me, and cheating in porn means that when you have sex with someone else off-camera when you’re not working. It was also hard during that time of year to be having the problems we were, because I’m very old-fashioned about love no matter what, and Valentines Day was no exception. At that same time, I had also grown sick and tired of my manager Charlie taking 25% of my money. I had figured out by that point that he was a scumbag, after anyone shook his hand they felt like they’d been talking to a used car salesman. You feel like you have to wash your hands afterward, but because of my contract, I couldn’t leave him yet.
February put me back before the camera, working with Hershel Savage on ‘Smell My Fingers,’ another classy title. Hershel was an older guy, but really good looking and really nice, and was from New York, a commonality in our background I picked up on and used in our conversations before shooting the scene to make him feel more comfortable with me. It was the same routine with a lot of the male stars I worked with, where I had begun making it a point to speak to them because it made everyone feel a little more comfortable. I never saw myself — and I still don’t see myself — as an intimidating woman to any man, but I tried to work with them because when a male star can’t get his dick up because he’s so intimidated, when that shit happens, what am I supposed to fucking do? Sit there all day? It’s like being a photographer, you show up with your shit, and you’re ready to shoot, but some of these guys weren’t showing up with a hard-on like they were supposed to. But in the end, we always seemed to get the problem straightened out. I took a trip in March of 1998 for GVA, who distributed my videos, to do a signing in Cleveland, Ohio, and the strangest part of that trip was Jenna Jameson coming up to my booth and talking to me as though we were long-time friends.
Dominic Accara: When she’d show up for a shoot, she was all business, and that intimidated a lot of people. We did a shoot with porn star Mark Wood, and it was one of his first scenes ever, and Jasmin was again all business, ‘Get your dick hard and fuck me — NOW,’ and this dude crawled out of that room. That was Jasmin in general.
Jasmin: I was also doing a lot of feature dancing, and the time on the road gave me some distance to realize just how fed up I was with John T. Bone’s whole operation. He’d brought Kendra and Zoe in without consulting me, and John was also starting to fuck around with Kendra, which is just not good business. If John had had his eye on the ball instead of on her ass, he wouldn’t have made the colossal mistake of letting the Jerry Springer scandal that followed later that spring happen.The whole thing was unhealthy for our business in general, and it was a dirty way to think, which I know sounds ironic given we worked in a business where actors and actresses are paid to have sex on-screen. But there was a big distinction — at least to most of the actors — between being an adult film star and a prostitute, so when John suggested my next film should be another fan gang bang, which was beneath me at that point. But then again, that’s how low things at Crème Productions had begun to sink by that point in general. Still, I did my best to stick with all of them — John, Charlie, Earl — all of them, because one of my biggest faults is I like to see the good in everyone, and wish and hope for the best. I grew up with a lot of negativity in my life from my mom, and I would always scream it out and wouldn’t listen to it. I think, looking back, I was doing the same thing here. At that point, I really didn’t know what to do, but personally I was becoming more and more desperate to get away from it all.
That desperation finally boiled over on one particularly ugly night in March following a fight with Earl, wherein he’d drunkenly thrown my cat Chloe against the wall. She ran out of the front door and off into the night, and I quickly booted Earl in the same direction. I was in pieces, first because I thought my cat was gone forever and also because I’d begun thinking, ‘What’s up with my life?’ I felt totally abandoned. I sunk into a deep depression that caused me to take every single pill I could find in my apartment, trying to escape it. Thankfully, I’d forgotten that I had a girlfriend coming over that evening, and it’s a good thing, because if she hadn’t, I’d have been dead.
When she found me, she later told me that she and her neighbor had raced me to Marina Del Rey Hospital. I had flat-lined. All I remember was feeling really warm and seeing white, which I know you always hear everyone say, but I also saw my dad’s face, and I was ready to go. At that point it was okay with me, it didn’t make a difference, and it certainly didn’t make a difference to anyone around me, it felt like no one really cared if Rhea was gone, in spite of how popular Jasmin had become. I wasn’t speaking to my mom, and I felt like no one really would have cared. It’s a good thing I was wrong and my friend found me, because she saved my life. I owe my life to her, and sadly, she’s dead now, but I’ll never forget her and will always be grateful to her.
Thankfully, once I had been revived, they moved me quickly to a private room because one of the hospital staff working in the emergency room recognized me.They also told me they were going to keep this quiet, and I remember a doctor saying to me ‘We’re going to act like this never happened, you’re alive now, but you should be call
ing a therapist after you’re discharged.’Anyway, once I’d gotten out and back to my apartment, I had the best home-coming present I could have asked for: my cat Chloe was waiting for me on the doorstep. The whole event had been a big wakeup call for me, and it forced me to ask myself: ‘Who in their right mind wants to kill themselves like this?’So I decided from that day on, the only two ways I would die would be of natural causes, or by someone choking the HELL out of me while they’re fucking me. Anyway, I knew suicide wasn’t the way I wanted to go out, because what would I have died as: a PORN STAR and I didn’t want that. That strengthened my resolve to keep my eye toward the goal of graduating out of that business as soon as possible. I didn’t tell Charlie or John, or even Earl about the overdose, and the next day decided to take my first step toward a fresh start by going to the pound and adopting a second kitten. I found a cute black cat, and he ran up to me, and when I came back the next day, he ran up to me again, so I named him Trent and took him home with me.
Going back to life as usual — albeit with a new sense of resolve to get out of this business sooner than later — I shot another of John’s tastelesslytitled movies later in that month, This Little Piggy Went to Porno. I finally started to get a better picture of what John and Charlie were trying to do with piggy backing Kendra and Zoe off my popularity, which wasn’t cool. For instance, for any type of live gig, Charlie would say to the club owner or promoter ‘Well, if you want Jasmin, you have to take Kendra or Zoe the next month.’ I didn’t see a percentage of any of their earnings, in spite of those monies coming in partially off my professional name. At that point as well in the mid-spring, my passion for wrestling was starting to grow stronger for that time, and I became an active fan and student. I watched as many matches as I could on T.V. — I was also making more of an effort to have my own life outside of porn — going to concerts, mixing with metal personalities, flying to New York now and again to see my mother when I could, and developing friendships with regular people outside of the adult film industry. I tried more and more to treat my work in adult film as a profession that Jasmin pursued, but personally, Rhea was a different person, so I also wanted that reflected in my associations.
Earl was still in the picture, but cheating on me, and so I ended the month by getting a little revenge via my first scene with Brandon Iron for This Little Piggy Went to the Whore House. He was a Canadian guy who was hung like a horse so he reminded me of a nice guy with a big dick. We were just friends really, but he was huge, and it was a nice little break from Earl’s bullshit, which heading into April, was at an all-time worst and we weren’t really seeing each other as much. I’d used the opportunity to break away from him and bring another guy into the picture — Keith — and we started having an affair behind Earl’s back. We were going to the beach, and it was a lot like having a normal boyfriend for a change. He wasn’t in the business, he seemed to care, he was handsome and built, and I wasn’t thinking about Earl as well. I didn’t have a film to shoot that month and things were relatively peaceful for a change until one day my beeper went off, and a hell of a different sort started to break loose. Basically, behind everyone’s back, John T. Bowen and Kendra Jade had orchestrated a sex tape with tabloid talk show host Jerry Springer, and now the rumor had officially leaked. Well, of course, as with every leak, the pipes quickly began bursting all over L.A. and it didn’t take long before it spilled over and flooded into my world.
According to Wikipedia, ‘in May 1998, a photo story about Springer having sex with porn star Kendra Jade in Chicago’s Executive Plaza Hotel appeared in the tabloids News of the World and The Globe. Kendra’s stepmother Kelly Jade was also present in the hotel room, and Kendra, Kelly, and porn director John Bowen appeared on Springer’s show the next day, discussing a 350 person gang bang.’
Kendra’s comments on the Springer show also included the following specific references to Jasmin St. Claire in July, 1998: ‘I also had seen Jasmin St. Claire’s World’s Biggest Gang Bang tape and thought to myself, ‘I can do this!’…I wanted to beat Jasmin’s gang bang record…I talked with Jasmin (St. Claire) the other night. She told me, ‘when you reach my status, you’ll understand why I had to move on.’ I only hope that I can reach such status.’
Once John told me he was going to do the next gang bang video with Kendra, I told her if she wanted to have that title she could, I was past all that shit. With Kendra, it’s not that I ever had anything against her personally, but I made it a point also not to get to know her that way. So when you have private investigators and tabloids like Star and the National Enquirer calling asking you all these questions about who has the sex tape, telling me they’ll pay me X amount of money to find out, it made me livid. I called John and told him what was happening, and his reply was: ‘Don’t do anything, don’t say a word. I can’t tell you any more about it.’ I was shocked he would admit its existence so easily, and even more shocked I’d been left out of the loop on something that was already affecting my privacy. I shot back by telling him ‘I’ve been here longer than any of these other people, when you were writing bad checks I stayed loyal to you, and you can’t even tell me who has the tape.’ At this point, I also figured out he was fucking Kendra, and he had lost all sight of his better judgment. That he couldn’t recognize how out of line it was that my privacy was being compromised by people looking for drama, the straw that broke the camel’s back with John and I was when Private Investigators hired by these fucking tabloids started stalking me outside my residence in early May. I had come back from breakfast one morning to find a pair of assholes standing outside my apartment door, looking like cops — I quickly realized it was bullshit when one of them asked me, ‘Are you Jasmin St. Claire? We’re looking for the Jerry Springer/Kendra Jade sex tape, and we want to know if you know who has it? We’ll pay you a huge amount of money.’ I told him, ‘I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, I was told by John T. Bowen not to tell anyone, so I’m pretty sure he has the tape, why don’t you go bother him and leave me alone.’Then the guy actually took another step toward me, and I said, ‘If either of the two of you step one more foot toward me, I’m going to kill you, stay the fuck away from me.’ So they want back to their car, and I called John and told him what happened, and he didn’t even care. In adult film, the anonymity of a star’s private life is even more important than mainstream movie stars because of the nutty perverts and stalkers who can do real harm to you if they find out where you live. So the fact that John had not cared made really take a step back and open my eyes wide, thinking ‘Wow, what a scumbag!’ I had given a lot to that company, but it was clear they didn’t value me the way I deserved based on my investment in them.
Charlie Fry: John and I eventually became partners in our own film production company, Crème, which was a mistake on my part, because John had a really, really bad reputation out there as a businessman, he had been notorious for not paying people and all this kind of stuff. My perspective was, being 3000 miles away in Florida, as long as I was getting what I needed for my girls, it wasn’t my problem, which was naive. Because by getting involved with him, and unfortunately letting him control the money, things eventually started to fall apart in our relationship.The betrayal came with another star of mine, Kendra Jade, who was a newcomer to the porn business, a literal nobody from Connecticut. I’d gone to Jerry Springer’s people, and successfully pitched them on a show covering a movie we’d done with Kendra for the entire hour.To get that kind of exposure for an adult film that introduced Kendra Jade was something you could have afforded to buy, certainly not a prime-time hour of T.V.
Well, John T. Bone decided behind my back and without my consultation or my approval, to convince Kendra it would be a good idea to seduce Jerry Springer — who was kind of a horn dog. John had sold the story ahead of time to the British tabloids, who had secretly set up cameras in the hotel room to catch him and Kendra in the act. So they essentially set up Jerry Springer, and that had several adverse impacts, for one,
Jerry didn’t know I wasn’t involved because I was in business with John, so it put me on the outs with his camp. Moreover, it ended my relationship with John because I was furious and absolutely let him have it, and a further fall-out from that relationship ending was Jasmin was still making movies with John’s company. So now you’ve got this opportunity for a rift to develop, where Jasmin is out in L.A. working with John every day, where they already have that director-actress relationship for him to play on, telling her every distrusting thing he can think of to put in her ear. And that ultimately led to her sticking with John, who ultimately proved to be what he is to her as well, and eventually we got back together, but it caused a lot of damage to our relationship. I think after she saw how he handled the whole Kendra-Springer debacle, she wanted out of their working relationship as badly and quickly, as I did mine with John.
Jasmin: Coincidently, the next day I had a photo shoot with another porn star, Tom Byron, who happened to co-own with another director named Rob Black a really hot film company called Extreme Associates. Also, amid the voicemails I had been getting from these fucking parasite P.I.s, there had been a few others on my machine hipping me to the fact that Rob Black was interested in working with me. Rob had even gone as far as having Gene Ross from AVN Magazine place a call, trying to
18 0 what the hell was i thinking?!! make an introduction. That kind of courting was exactly what I needed at that time in my career, because its attention I definitely was NOT getting back at Crème, between John’s obsession with Kendra, and her and Zoe’s jealousy of my stardom. At the level of fame I’d attained by that point within the business, I truly and legitimately, I think, felt I needed to be in business with a company that placed my interests first, because I had worked my ass off to get to # 1. Kendra and Zoe were trying to jump the line, off my back, and I wasn’t going to allow it. So at the shoot, I went ahead, did what I needed to do, and reached out to Tom to ask if he knew Rob. Once he explained they were business partners and he put me in touch with Rob. We began a dialogue over the phone about what I had in mind for my future, its extension beyond adult film, and he was very receptive, which gave me hope for the first time in a long time.