LOS ANGELES — Adult performer Mr. Marcus, who last week admitted he covered up a positive syphilis test and also went along with what he alleged was an industry testing lab helping him with a cover-up so that he could continue working, told XBIZ late Tuesday that a story published today by San Francisco Weekly took his remarks out of context.
In the story that ran on the SFWeekly.com blog, Mr. Marcus was quoted as saying that he acted alone in altering his STI test results and that an employee at Talent Testing Services did not assist him in omitting the syphilis portion of one of his tests.
Marcus said the story "was very biased and that was no where near the conversation we had." He maintained that he was misquoted and what he previously told XBIZ about TTS was actually what occurred.
SF Weekly wrote, “Originally, Marcus claimed that an employee at TTS aided him in his endeavor. When I asked him if that was true, he simply said, ‘It was all me, no one else helped.’”
The way the SF Weekly report read differed from Marcus’ statements to XBIZ on Aug. 21, when he claimed that during the first week of August one of the TTS clinicians offered to change his test for him and then did so.
“The syphilis thing was still reading, and I looked at them and they looked concerned, and they said, ‘Maybe we can omit it from the actual test. When we submit your blood, we can just not have them test for that,’” Marcus said at the time. “And I was like, ‘can you do that?’ [They said] ‘I think so.’
“And so they sat down at the computer and started clicking on things. And I didn’t see what they were clicking on but I saw that they were clicking on something.”
Marcus alleged that a TTS clinician told him that the part of his test that shows “reactive or non-reactive” for syphilis could be removed from his test “because it’s always going to be there.”
“I get over there to pick up my test and they told me that the numbers were still there, and they gave me the printed copy of my test without the syphilis. It was omitted,” Marcus said on Aug. 21.
He added, “There’s a man and a woman there. And the guy was the one that sat down at the computer and started trying to change it for me. To try to make it so that that’s not tested for.”
Sixto Pacheco, president of Talent Testing Services, has categorically denied that Mr. Marcus’ test had been altered by someone who works at his lab.
In an interview with TheDailyBeast.com that was conducted on Saturday and published on Monday, Mr. Marcus also noted that he first went to his personal physician on July 11 after noticing a rash “which turned out to be stage two” of the infection.
“So, stage one came and went, and I was only recognizing stage two,” he told TheDailyBeast.com.
That led to some images surfacing Monday of a thumbnail gallery posted July 17 showing Mr. Marcus performing with Lylith Lavey in a Bang Bros scene that appears to clearly show that Marcus’ genitalia was in an advanced stage of the infection. That gallery has since been removed, but the photos had already gone viral within the adult industry. According to MikeSouth.com, the date of production from the gallery was June 27, raising questions about when Marcus actually did contract syphilis and how far back a genealogy needs to go in order to determine which of his partners may have been affected.
Lavey on Monday evening assured her followers on Twitter that she had tested negative for STIs twice since that scene with Marcus and she also has been taking "precautionary meds."