LOS ANGELES — The fourth day of the second set of hearings concerning the Labor Board petition filed on behalf of five former models against agent Derek Hay and LA Direct took place yesterday in downtown Los Angeles, with Hay’s attorney calling in several witnesses, including Hay himself.
The day began with Hay’s attorney Richard D. Freeman continuing the interrogation of one of the petitioners, Sofi Ryan.
The most sensational allegation Ryan has made against Hay, with whom she was briefly involved early on in their professional relationship, concerned an alleged incident in the first part of September 2017. Ryan has referred to this incident several times during the current hearings, including a tearful, very emotional account of it today.
The Mystery of Sofi Ryan’s SMS Messages
Sometime around September 3-9 in 2017, according to Ryan, Hay drove her from Las Vegas to Los Angeles, pulled over by the side of the road in a desolate area without cell phone service, demanded a handjob and threatened her with leaving her there to die unless she agreed.
Freeman has consistently tried, both in cross-examining Ryan back this past September during the first set of hearings, and during his direct examination on Wednesday and Thursday, to press her on details of the exact date of the alleged incident and other events around those dates that supposedly exculpate Hay.
Hay claims he never drove Ryan from Las Vegas to Los Angeles at that time.
Much of the morning was spent trying to get Ryan to be more specific about timeline issues. By the end of the hearing today, the precise timeline was still unclear to those listening to her testimony and the lawyers’ questions.
Ryan has stated that before the ill-fated road trip, Hay “picked her up from set.” Freeman, using LA Direct’s internal records, narrowed that down to September 3-6, 2017, when Ryan performed with Johnny Castle. Ryan was also in Las Vegas on September 5, when she obtained the Sheriff’s Card necessary for feature dancing in that county.
Ryan is not completely clear about any of these dates, replying “don’t know” and “I guess” when pressed for details.
Freeman and Hay contend that the supposed incident on the road from Vegas to Los Angeles never happened, because Hay did not drive Ryan on September 6, 2017.
As a rebuttal, Freeman offered a receipt of a plane ticket from Long Beach to Las Vegas on September 8. On September 7, Ryan had a shoot in Los Angeles. Freeman and Hay also contend that Hay flew with Ryan to Long Beach Airport on September 9, and stayed in Los Angeles that night for a birthday party.
The actual dates in question could be clarified with a complete record of messages from the time. As several witnesses have testified, Hay exclusively uses the messaging application WhatsApp. “He never uses text messages because the government can see them,” Ryan testified yesterday, most likely referring to SMS messages.
A large part of Ryan’s testimony yesterday was taken up with the matter of her WhatsApp and SMS messages during the first 10 days of September 2017.
Ryan contends that she deleted WhatsApp from her phone when she stopped working with Hay. Her SMS app (labeled “Messages” on Apple devices), however, is still on her phone. It has been agreed by both parties that Ryan did use SMS messaging with a driver employed by Hay named Alex around the time of the alleged incident.
Freeman asked Ryan about the Los Angeles shoot on September 7, a day after she claims the incident took place.
“Where was the shoot in L.A.?”
“I don’t recall,” she replied.
“Did Alex pick you up?”
“I don’t remember,” said Ryan.
“Did he take you somewhere after the shoot?”
“I don’t remember,” she said.
Ryan then repeated what she had said the previous day: that she had not flown from Long Beach to Las Vegas on September 8, 2017 and that she had never been to the Long Beach airport. Then she added, “and I can prove that.”
Allan Gelbard, the petitioners’ attorney, handed her a printout of a text message from her phone. Ryan said that it showed a communication between herself and Alex on the afternoon of Saturday, September 9, which she had retrieved “months and months ago,” at the beginning of this case.
Alex asked Ryan when she was coming into Long Beach and she replied “I drove with Derek.”
Freeman repeatedly asked Ryan to produce the messages before or after the one shown on the printout, but the performer demurred. Ryan acknowledged the whole sequence of September 2017 SMS messages are probably still on her phone but steadfastly refused to offer them as evidence.
In what was perhaps the clearest victory for Hay and Freeman during the hearing, they managed to portray Ryan as withholding evidence that would help clarify the question of the supposed roadside incident.
Ryan offered a terse explanation for why she did not scroll up to the sequence of messages in question, or have her attorney do it. "I simply don’t wanna remember the terrible past I had with LA Direct Models," she said.
Throughout this protracted argument, neither Freeman nor Gelbard, nor the presiding officer, Special Officer Salazar, clarified for themselves the difference between “text message” and SMS, or whether different records of the same text conversation could appear on different devices for a number of reasons, or the difference between accessing and/or archiving messages in computers or phones, be it Android devices or iOS devices.
The whole conversation skirted the matter of issuing a subpoena for more forensically sound records from the ISP companies used by Ryan and Alex. Freeman also kept mum about his access to the version of this conversation which supposedly can be accessed from Alex’s device. Hay’s driver was not introduced as a witness for either party and his phone messages have not, as of Friday morning, been entered into the evidence.
Lies and Tears
Freeman then questioned Ryan about the previous day’s statement by Archie Alcantara, the models’ roadie and self-described “friend,” about her meltdown during Exxxotica Denver 2017 concerning her then boyfriend, now husband, performer Justin Hunt.
Much of the interrogation concerned some tweets Ryan had posted at the time alleging Hunt had physically abused her and was “threatening to kill her cats.” Ryan later deleted those tweets and apologized to her fans about the drama.
“I’m a very jealous person,” Ryan told Freeman. “At the time I was just pissed and jealous," adding that she did not understand why she posted the tweets.
“Would you say that was a lie?” asked Freeman, emphasizing the word "lie."
Ryan admitted the allegation of abuse and threats to her pets were untruthful. She added, however, that she had posted on Twitter she had lied and that she was being an adult and admitted the abuse had not taken place.
This testimony underscored Ryan’s lack of clarity about crucial timeline issues, particularly concerning the allegations of sexual assault and coercion, and the timing of Hay’s alleged failure to obtain shoots for Ryan and her unilateral decision to cancel their contract.
These hearings overall have shown that most of the petitioners — Charlotte Cross, Shay Evans and Ryan, in particular — have a difficult time recalling, with clarity, specific dates or timelines, nor do they appear to have rehearsed their testimonies before being sworn in.
“Sorry, it’s very confusing,” is all Ryan offered when confronted by Gelbard to clarify the period of time when she stopped working with Hay.
Eventually, Ryan stopped answering specific questions in frustration, and began to give an emotional statement. “When I started with LA Direct, I would shoot every day for two weeks straight and then go back home to Seattle,” she said. “I then went from [shooting] 10-14 times every two weeks to 1 or 2 boy-girl [scenes] every two months and a feature dancing [engagement].”
“My work stopped significantly” she stressed. “I’m a brand.” She testified that some bookings Hay offered after the first few months, camming specifically, weren't sufficient to "push" her name. "I want my name to be pushed."
Why then, asked Freeman, had she tweeted during this period, “Thank you so much for being the best agent ever” at Hay?
“I’m a persona," Ryan replied. "I have to make it look like I enjoy what I do.”
“So, is this a persona, your testimony here today?” landed Freeman, before Gelbard successfully objected to the insinuation.
After a short break, Freeman put Ryan through his ritual of going through every single credit from a long list he had printed out. He asked if she had paid commissions to LA Direct for each of them. Ryan read them aloud, growing annoyed with each salacious title.
Salazar allowed her to skip some of the more graphic interracial titles.
After the recitation, there was a brief exchange concerning Ryan’s admission of having accepted escorting engagements from an agency. Freeman asked her if she had received immunity from the authorities to speak freely, but Gelbard successfully quashed that line of questioning by referring only to “an ongoing criminal investigation” and the matter was dropped.
Gelbard then read her back the text message in the printout.
“When you say ‘I drove back with Derek,’ is that the ride where he made you give him a handjob?”
“Yes.”
“Is that a crying emoji? And then you texted ‘FML’?”
The attorney had the record reflect that "FML" is "a modern euphemism for ‘F My Life’.”
“Justin never killed your cats, didn’t he?”
“No, he loves them,” replied Ryan.
“And Justin didn’t abuse you, didn’t he?”
“No.”
As Ryan grew more and more emotional, the other petitioners also began crying.
“Why did you decide to leave LA Direct?” asked Gelbard.
“It was the whole thing of him not booking me, calling me a 'fucking cunt.' The car incident, the kill fees, everything," replied Ryan. "He doesn’t care. He doesn’t give a fuck about anything!”
Ryan stared at Hay, who looked down at his laptop.
“He is a terrible person!” she exclaimed.
Ryan was then unable to continue talking; her fellow performers and Gelbard walked her out of the room and a break was called.
After an extended period, a more composed Ryan returned for a few more questions from Freeman, largely concerning the text messages she refused to provide.
The Fiduciary Duty
After lunch, Freeman called a new witness, ATMLA agent Mark Schechter, who testified on behalf of Hay, one of his competitors.
Schechter is jovial, with an easygoing manner, and could have not provided a more striking contrast with Hay. Freeman produced Schechter mostly to have him define “industry practice” or standards in agencies other than LA Direct.
Schechter backed Hay in his contention that booking fees and kill fees were industry-wide practices and not just a peculiarity at LA Direct.
The agent’s testimony included a detailed breakdown of contract practices and different fees. Schechter was vaguely familiar with Ryan and Shay Evans, less so with Charlotte Cross and not at all with the other two petitioners.
Under cross-examination by Gelbard, Schechter admitted that his agency derives 40 percent of its revenue from booking fees and 60 percent from the commissions paid by the models.
Gelbard asked what would happen to Schechter's agency if, as a result of these hearings, the booking fees were determined to be against the talent agency laws.
Schechter replied, “I would have to change my business practices in order to stay in business.”
Gelbard then questioned Schechter about his “fiduciary duty” to his clients, which the lawyer defined as “to do what is in your client’s best interest over what’s in your best interest.”
One of Gelbard’s contentions throughout the hearings is that the agencies’ relationships with production companies, formalized in the figure of “booking fees,” constitutes a clear conflict of interest between their services for their models and to the companies that hire them.
Schechter, like Hay, referred to both the models and the production companies as “clients.”
The final questions Gelbard had for Schechter were aimed at contrasting the manner and style of the ATMLA owner with Hay. “You don’t send someone to a job they don’t want to do?” he asked.
“I don’t make any performer do anything,” Schechter replied.
“Do you ever threaten them with fines?”
“I don’t use threats,” added Schechter.
Not the Human That I Am
After another break, petitioner Andi Rye was called by Freeman, who questioned her over another printout with titles and dates of several productions. After that, Freeman played a few minutes of a Pierre Woodman production Rye had mentioned in her complaint and during her testimony in September.
Rye alleged, during her September testimony, that she had consented to a double-penetration (DP) scene with two male talents, followed by a blowjob scene with Woodman himself. According to the model, however, after ejaculating in her mouth and face, Woodman then said, “You think you’re done? You’re not done yet,” before dragging her by the hair into the bathroom, pushing her head against the toilet, trying to urinate in her mouth, and then, after failing to urinate, getting a bottle of whisky from the minibar and forcing the alcohol down her throat.
According to Rye, she did not consent to anything following the “You think you’re done?” question.
Freeman decided to show the hearing room a video of the very scene Rye had graphically described. Special Officer Salazar seemed stunned by the extreme nature of Woodman’s video, which corroborated Rye’s account.
Rye had much to say about the difference between consensual video work and her personal life. “There are certain things,” the model testified, “that ‘Andi Rye’ is willing to do, that I wouldn’t. That’s Andi Rye, not the human that I am.”
As for what she said in the “paid casting interview,” describing degrading sexual practices she was supposedly into, Rye said, “I act as if I try to land the job.”
“You’re acting?” Gelbard asked her.
“Yes, and everyone knows that," she replied.
“But you would characterize yourself as terrified?”
“Absolutely,” said the model. “I was stunned.”
A Self-Made Man
Finally, one day before the conclusion of the hearings, Freeman called his own client, the man who gave his full name to Special Officer Salazar as Derek Andrew Hay.
Freeman began, as he did with his other witnesses, by asking questions about Hay’s personal background. The agent testified that he’s been in the adult business for about 19 years, since about 2000, having obtained his talent agency license in 2003.
Before entering the adult industry, Hay testified, he had been in the music business, starting in London in 1983. Hay gave an account of his steady rise as a successful, self-made entrepreneur: he started off “erecting lighting for stage productions of musical acts,” then specialized in rigging, then moved into stage and production management, traveling the world with massive musical acts. Employers he cited included the Rolling Stones, the Bee Gees, Tina Turner, Metallica and AC/DC.
By the time he returned from his last music tour in 2000, Hay was living in San Francisco. He started to work in adult entertainment as a performer, under the name Ben English, part-time since 1996-1997 and full-time since 2001. He testified he retired from actively performing in 2010, with "maybe a couple of shoots" over the next two years.
For about a decade, Hay was both performer and agent. In 2003, when he obtained his license, he prepared his first LA Direct contracts and schedules of fees. About 10 years ago, he said, he began using the Best Practices and Rules of Conduct document, including the statement about kill fees, that has been much discussed during these hearings.
Hay confirmed to Freeman that the contract material is never offered in a package “stapled or joined together as a single document.”
In September 2013, Hay moved to Las Vegas and bought a home chosen “because it had a custom office within it.” He started a second company, Direct Models L.V. and also started Direct Models E.C.
Hay gave his version of a number of matters that had been mentioned during the first eight days of hearings:
- He described his Los Angeles property in Otsego as “not a model house.” It is, he explained, his former Los Angeles home where he still keeps a bedroom, but rents out other rooms “with their own keys” to “tenants.”
- He admitted to having had relationships with adult performers, some of them his own clients. “It was my relationship with performers that brought me into this industry,” he admitted. “Over my lifetime, I’ve dated a similar number of women in and outside the industry,”
- He admitted to having had sexual relationships with three of the petitioners: Shay Evans, Sofi Ryan and Hadley Viscara.
- He denied ever having driven Sofi Ryan on September 6, 2017.
- He had sex with Hadley Viscara twice in August 2018, and it was consensual.
- He had sex “several times” with Shay Evans at his home in Vegas, and once in New York.
- He did not pressure Evans for sex during the Hawaii trip, and he had another date there.
- The “You owe me a handjob” text to Evans before a dancing engagement he had helped arranged at Sapphire was “a joke” and “taken out of context,” he testified, “it appears crude, but taken in the context of two people who were intimate and were going to spend the night together,” [it is not].
- He was not upset at Sofi Ryan’s scarce participation at his birthday celebrations, but “it was a little embarrassing.”
- He was concerned about Ryan’s relationship with Justin Hunt, whom he considered “infamous in the business” but not out of jealousy. “I could care less about my relationship with Sofi,” he said. Instead, he was concerned about the effect it would have on her personally and professionally.
- Finally, he was asked if he took his feelings out on the performers by withholding or denying work. “Absolutely not,” Hay answered. “Patently ludicrous."
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