from www.adultcybermart.com - What’s amazing to me is the almost comme ci, comme ca, indifference the adult world has taken to the news of the Ryan Idol murder case.
Few have recognized the fact that Idol was practically the John Holmes of the gay industry. Lifeguard handsome, Idol was the king. Then, again, so was Elvis, and Elvis died on a toilet seat.
Which is the way Idol chose to go out. Except, like in a Warner Brothers cartoon, Idol clunked his girlfriend over the head with one. Well, actually a porcelain toilet tank lid if you’re a stickler for detail, but toilet seat sounds a lot funnier.
What’s also amazing is the fact that Idol’s trial was kept under wraps. It was only this week when a jury in Sacramento handed down a guilty verdict that we knew anything about it. My suspicion as well as David Forest’s [Forest managed Idol’s career for 20 years off and on] is that no one in the mainstream press made the connection that Marc Anthony Donais, the man on trial, and Idol were one and the same guy.
Cripes, if Jenna Jameson were on the witness stand for whacking Tito over his bleach blond noggin, TMZ would have been all over it. So, just on general principle, if I were running the Sacramento Bee, I’d hang the reporter by his thumbs for blowing a missed opportunity.
What’s again amazing, is the fact that the mainstream has picked up on this story in ways the porn industry hasn’t. Certainly all the major gay sites have done so, but real world news and business sites saw this intriguing story for what it was - another celebrity fallen from grace soap opera.
This story was OJ but without the gloves. Where with OJ, it was rampant ego, so it was with Ryan Idol, but in reverse. His was very fragile, and that, mixed with booze, is a deadly cocktail.
The girlfriend’s name has been withheld from the press, but she was 41, and Idol used a self defense tactic at his trial. He claims she wielded a knife. He wielded a toilet lid. In a street fight, a toilet lid usually wins, but they’re not the most portable of weapons unless the fight happens to occur in a bathroom which this one did.
The attack occurred at a condo in Sacramento which Idol and his estranged girlfriend both shared at one time.
They were an item in the early 90’s, but they split up after she discovered Idol's career as a gay porn star, but they got back together in 2008 after the woman looked him up in New York where he was working on Broadway.
The pair then moved into a condominium that was allegedly bought by one of Idol’s male lovers. When the man later moved in with them, she caught Idol having sex.
The woman testified that a couple of days after that incident she had been in the bath when Idol visited. Telephone records show that Idol had called his former partner 17 times before appearing at her home.
She also testified that she let him in and was returning to her bath when he was to have said 'I came over here to kill you.'
'He just grabbed me like I was nothing, and he picked me up and he threw me into the bathroom,' she told the court.
'He came in and he started beating me with his fists. When he took the lid off the toilet I thought, ''Oh, my God, I'm not going to live.'' And I looked down because I didn't want him to smash it on my face, and he smashed it on my head.'
The woman fled into the street and called the police. She said she had blacked out for a minute and felt blood gushing over her shoulders.
Idol told the jury that he had been playing poker and had a shot of whiskey before driving to his former lover's home. He claimed to have been concerned that she was being manipulated by drug dealers.
According to testimony, Idol accused her of cheating and she became upset before trying to attack him with a knife. He claims to have used the porcelain toilet lid to defend himself. One report said that Idol was admitted to a hospital with shards of the porcelain lid stuck in his skin.
To give you some idea, the last time I chatted with Forest was at the old KSEX building when it was in Burbank.
The thing that amazes Forest, is the speed in which the news about Idol’s conviction spread diversely around the Internet. Sites he never heard of were carrying the story. Of course Forest did his share by emailing the story around. I asked him why he would do that, considering that he had a long, and I assume, a good association with Idol.
“I felt it was the right thing to do,” he says.
“And it’s reality- people love to know the truth.”
Via the defense attorney, Forest was aware of the case several months ago.
“We were asked to say nothing. I don’t know what their theory was. Two weeks before the trial began Ryan and I discussed some sort of personal announcement just so people understood that there was going to be this case.
"But his attorney [Johnny Griffin III] said no, you don’t want anyone to know anything. I knew some of the details about the case and things certainly changed a bit. What was printed in the last day or so is slightly different from what I was told.”
Forest points to another apparently erroneous media report that had Idol telling the woman he was going to kill her.
“The way it was conveyed to me is that this was all bullshit, and that he will get this thing taken care of, and that it was a he said-she said case.”
According to Forest, Idol went into the courtroom quite confident, feeling that he had a good case of self defense.
“Where this knife came from, I don’t know. Ryan never mentioned anything to me about it other than her lunging for him, but not with a knife and requiring him using a toilet tank lid. Those things are deadly and have been used in murders before. We’re talking about him coming to the house and immediately pounding her. I don’t know where that comes from, either. That’s not what I was told.”
However Forest isn’t excusing Idol’s behavior.
“If you’re a guy and you strike a girl, in this country, you’re wrong. It’s as simple as that, and he’s had that problem with women before. This has happened on eight or nine different occasions and it looks like he’s going to get his punishment though I wish him well."
Besides being Idol’s manager for a significant length of time, Forest describes his relationship with Idol as one of close friend and confidante.
“We had our ups and downs and I really did put a lot of effort into him. And he did very well, come on.”
No argument there.
In the end, Forest says Idol wanted to move into different directions. Idol’s final movie was going to be a movie from Bob East at Odyssey.
“The next day I bring back the agreement and Ryan goes, ‘that’s not Bob East’s signature.’ I said Ryan don’t start this. What do you want me to do, get it notarized? He goes, yeah. I told him to stick it up my fucking ass. And that was the end of it. Chi Chi Larue was going to direct, but he never did it.”
“It was a $29,000 guarantee,” Forest adds.
Idol blew another golden opportunity when he stood up VCA’s Russ Hampshire on a movie, and another proposed $115,000 movie Hampshire was offering was so snake bit, an Indian fakir would have stayed away from it.
The media as well as Deputy DA Kevin Jones attorney have also made a big thing of Idol’s temper. Forest says he hasn’t seen evidence of that for years. Though he recalls an incident in a NY hotel room in 1993 when another lady friend told Idol she was leaving him. He went Charlie Sheen on her.
“The worst thing is when he gets boozed up, he loses all sense of security,” Forest points out.
“So if a girl’s leaving him he feels awful. That night he was throwing doors from the closets out the window.”
In the celebrated 1998 incident when Idol jumped out of a third story window and landed relatively unhurt, Forest explains that Idol was trying to score coke, couldn’t get any, so he got liquored up on Martinis.
“You know how Gin can be. That’s probably why he didn’t die, he was so snookered up.”
