CYBERSPACE — Over the last week, several adult performers have come forward with stories about alleged unprofessional and inappropriate sexual behavior by Ivan Itzkowitz III, a Florida-based freelance photographer and director known in the industry as “Papi.”
The flurry of testimonials began when Dolly Leigh, who recently retired from shooting adult content and is currently a dancer in St. Louis, tweeted on June 2 that “Ivan Itzkowitz has manipulated, coerced, and assaulted countless girls in the industry. I’ve heard so many other stories about him. Many have been through much worse than I have. He needs to go.”
The tweet was followed by three screencaps where Leigh retells her version of what happened during a social outing with the director everyone calls “Papi”:
“I know it will be brought up that I had a few polite texts after,” Leigh tweeted later. “Yes, I was acting like nothing had happened because it was easier that way at the time.”
Immediately after Leigh published her account, several other performers added their versions of experiences with Papi.
“He took me to his place and fucked the shit out of me in a very violent manner,” tweeted a blunt Elena Koshka. “I still act civil around him cuz his public reputation is funny, so I just try to forget the Ivan I’ve seen behind closed doors. I prefer to giggle at his humor instead of remembering the b.s.”
Koshka later expressed mixed feelings about Papi and told us she felt compassion for the portly director.
The third-party (freelancer) director, who had worked for Reality Kings and Brazzers and more recently for Bang Bros, is described by sources as initially charming, boasting to models of his many contacts in the Florida night scene.
“Papi” and the Fancy Prison
“It was me and [another high profile performer] who gave Ivan the nickname ‘Papi,’” Charlotte Cross told XBIZ. “I met him at one of my first scenes in Florida when we were brand-new to the industry, four or five years ago. He was working for Reality Kings (RK) and I was staying at the RK model house down there.”
According to Cross, the models, many of whom were 18-21, were told by their agents and others hanger-ons that they were not allowed to leave the house, something that she now knows is not true.
“I barely had an agent!” said Cross. “I called friends and we told them that we were basically in a ‘fancy prison.’ We thought we were not allowed to leave, because we just trusted these older men.”
Ivan Itzkowitz, according to Cross, used the models' naiveté about their freedom of movement to ingratiate himself with them. “I’ll break you guys out, we’ll have fun, I won’t let anybody know,” he allegedly told the young women.
“And so I called him ‘Papi' [Spanish for 'Daddy']” reminisced a wiser, older Cross, now in her mid-twenties.
At the time Cross met him, Papi appeared as himself in the controversial 2015 Netflix documentary “Hot Girls Wanted,” where he is seen as part of the Florida-based circle around the film’s focal character, Riley Reynolds, who now heads the East Coast agency Hussie Models.
Cross alleges “Papi” and her first had consensual sex. But soon after that he insisted they should have sex again, and, after Cross told him she was tired, he kept insisting.
“He was sneaking into Riley’s model house. We kept telling him ‘no,’ but he was always coming into the rooms. Eventually Riley had to ban him from being there.”
XBIZ interviewed several other performers familiar with the Riley Reynolds/Hussie model house and they all confirm Cross’ account of Papi’s banishment, as well as having heard stories that the director’s departure from Reality Kings was due to his unprofessional behavior.
On his now-locked Twitter account, Papi describes himself as “Producer/Director: BangBros/Plumper Pass/TeamSkeet. Former Director for: RK/Mofos/Brazzers.”
Asked by XBIZ how she would handle Papi’s advances if she encountered him today, the now-LA-based Cross said she would “tell him to fuck off.”
“I now have… the confidence?” Cross looked for the right word. “The… the…”
“You mean you’re not a teenager?”
“Exactly,” she said. “I grew up.”
“A lot of girls start in Florida and are given the wrong information,” Cross explained, “and I see this so many times, and then they come to LA and they realize it’s a different ballgame. Here you don’t feel pressure to have sex with a whole bunch of people to get work, like it is in Florida—or at least the way they want you to think you have to down there.”
“The Pressure Was Impossible"
The only accurate feedback new models get is through the grapevine from other models, barely older than themselves, who have gone through their own ordeals.
“I heard bad things about Ivan my first week in porn,” Jane Wilde tweeted. “I never felt right about him after that.”
“I was going to jump out of his speeding car when he wouldn’t let me out,” tweeted Norah Nova, “that was my first week of porn.”
“I’m happy more people are coming forward, Nova told XBIZ. “It was four years ago. I didn’t realize how wrong it was until I came to LA, and there was nothing but professionals here. I’ve never had a director or any camera man grab his own cock during my shoots since him.”
Nova gave us an account of what she describes as “the night he drove off with me in his car.”
“I was only out of the model house to pick up a friend's ID she left on set. He was supposed to drop them off. But he insisted I get in the car. After I did he drove off with me suggesting we should ‘play.’ I said no multiple times. Then he drove faster. I threatened to jump out and he eventually took me back to the model house.”
Zoe Sparx told XBIZ that she did only one photo shoot with Papi “and got enough bad vibes to never talk to him after I got my photos back.”
“He insisted on taking me and another model out to the Miami nightlife after we paid him for a photo shoot,” Sparx recounted. “I wanted to go home and rest, but he doesn’t take ‘no’ for an answer. We were without a vehicle, so he drove us to several clubs and introduced us to lots of promoters and club owners, bartenders, etc.”
“It was somewhat fun at first — it was near Halloween time, so drunk people in silly costumes kept us laughing,” remembered Sparx. “But it wasn’t what we planned for the evening and I really did not want to drink, but the pressure was impossible. I remember him talking about having orgies at his studio and talked about banging different women. Then he would talk about [his home life]. That would make my stomach churn.”
“Eventually I got us out of the situation somehow,” Sparx concluded. “The details of that are fuzzy.”
“Dude directed my first scene,” says adult performer and cam girl Athena Rayne. “He always gave me the creeps. Ivan was well known [among the models] for making advances, even during shoots. When we were doing ‘pretty girls’ [i.e., glamour portraits] during my first scene, he had everyone else leave the room and made several comments about my body that I expressed made me uncomfortable. He told me not to be so serious. I chalked it up to a lapse in judgement.”
“After the second scene, where he started to become more physical with me, I refused to even go back to Florida to shoot,” said Rayne, who thinks Hussie’s Riley Reynolds, her agent at the time, did not do nearly enough to ensure professional behavior on- and off-set.
Other models, like Macy Marx and Jaye Summers, also made extremely serious allegations against Ivan/Papi on Twitter.
Charlotte Cross thinks the Florida-based agencies, production companies and directors should take a good look at the atmosphere that allows behavior like Papi's to go unchecked for so long.
“Florida has a surplus of 18-21 year olds, eager to succeed and do what they’re told. It’s just a bunch of fresh faces. The agents don’t empower women to say no,” said Cross.
“They make you feel that you’re there just to have sex.”
Dolly Leigh Speaks
XBIZ reached out to Dolly Leigh for comment and she spoke to us during a break from her busy dancing schedule at a popular St. Louis, Mo.-area club.
Leigh had stressed that the incident was not the only reason for switching away from hardcore video performing to just dancing. The incident she reported "happened over a year ago,” she tweeted to a fan who inquired. “Stripping is just way better money, I don’t have to travel and I enjoy it so much.”
The usually demure, soft-spoken Leigh — who was a popular, girl-next-door performer until her abrupt retirement — described her alleged ordeal. Leigh broke down in tears several times as she offered details of her version of the experience.
“I first encountered him on set in June 2016,” Leigh told us. “He was a director for Reality Kings and he invited me out clubbing after the shoot. I decided to hang out and socialize and I had a boyfriend at the time and he seemed to respect that. Nothing at all happened that time.”
“Then, in March of last year, I went back to shoot in Florida and I hung out with him again. I did have consensual sex with him the first time we hung out.”
“The second time we hung out, we were at the club, but I got tired and told him, many times, ‘I’m not feeling well.’ I was going to call an Uber to go back to the model house where I was staying, but he insisted that he would drive me. I clearly told him ‘so that you know: you can drive me back but I don’t wanna do anything with you, I just wanna go to bed.’”
“As we got near the model house, he became more and more insistent, and wouldn’t stop begging and pleading. Then I saw he drove me past the door. He took me to a dark place. I got scared. I just gave in.”
“The very next day I got a call warning me that he was a predator. ‘Stay away from Ivan, he’s known to force himself on girls,’ this person told me. ‘He likes to get pushy, really pushy.’”
Leigh thanked them for the advice and did not say anything else.
“I didn’t tell anyone what happened at least for a few months,” Leigh explained. “I didn’t tell anyone in the industry for a long time. I didn’t want to say anything at all while I was in porn, because that was the only career I had at the time and I didn’t want to be blacklisted.”
Shortly after she announced her retirement a few weeks ago, she posted an account of the incident without naming Papi.
“I posted the story without naming him to see if people would go into victim-blaming mode and I wanted to see how the industry would react. Multiple people messaged me asking who he was and when I said ‘Ivan,’ every single person said ‘I knew.’”
After consulting a lawyer, Leigh waited for someone else to come forward first. But, on June 2, after hearing so many people privately tell her “I knew,” she finally identified the subject of her story, and that of many other performers', as Ivan “Papi” Itzkowitz.
