LOS ANGELES — A Los Angeles judge today set late February 2022 as the earliest date for beginning the trial of Ron Jeremy.
At a morning hearing on the heavily guarded ninth floor of the Clara Shortridge Foltz Criminal Justice Center in downtown Los Angeles, Judge George G. Lomeli announced this further delay, attributing it to the prosecution’s filing of an 1108 motion. The motion asks the judge to allow testimony from witnesses who are not part of the list of alleged victims in the case, but nevertheless are willing to testify about similar allegations against Jeremy.
Since the defense was expected to contest the 1108 witnesses, Judge Lomeli said he could not rule on those motions easily and "needed more time,” but that he will try to rule by December 1. “This sets the trial for the latter part of February, but we may have to tweak that date,” Judge Lomeli added.
The Body in the Wheelchair
A wheelchair-bound Jeremy was in attendance, having been wheeled in at 10 a.m. wearing prison browns and sporting long, white hair and a full beard. Minutes before, Assistant District Attorney Paul Thompson had asked the deputies in charge of courthouse security, “Is the body here?”
“The body” is the peculiarly dehumanizing term that sheriff's department personnel in California use to refer to people in their custody while awaiting trial.
The small courtroom was largely empty, except for the court officers, the defendant, reporters from Rolling Stone and XBIZ and three friends of Jeremy’s, including sometime performer Gary Lee and a woman who has been visiting Jeremy in jail.
Before the court adjourned, the woman, who only identified herself as “a friend of Ron’s for 10 years" and has a British accent, stood up and told the judge that it was “inhumane for him to stay in jail.”
The judge did not reprimand her, but explained that since the charges were “voluminous,” Jeremy’s attorney Stuart Goldfarb was going to “need a lot of time to prepare this case.”
The 1108 Card
Goldfarb spoke to XBIZ after the hearing, explaining that if the DA wanted to use the so-called "1108 card,” the defense has “hundreds of women and men from Canada to Florida who’d want to testify about what a great guy Ron is, including doctors who have known him over the years.”
Opining that calling 1108 witnesses “doesn’t make any sense,” Goldfarb insisted that none of the allegations even included “threats of violence of force,” unlike in the Weinstein case, where “actresses who were not in the DA’s case were allowed to testify as 1108 witnesses.”
Answering a question from Rolling Stone reporter Nancy Dillon, who told Goldfarb she had read the grand jury testimony and disagreed with his “no violence” statement, Jeremy’s attorney explained that since the DA had chosen to avoid a preliminary hearing, the defense “couldn’t question” the allegations.
Jeremy was arrested in June 2020 and has remained in jail on $6 million bail. To give that figure context, the presumptive bail amount for a murder charge in California is $2 million. Jeremy's unusually high bail reflects the accumulated charges based on testimony of 21 alleged victims.
On August 25, 2021, after the grand jury return its indictment, Jeremy pled not guilty to "12 counts of forcible rape, seven counts of forcible oral copulation, six counts of sexual battery by restraint, four counts of sexual penetration by a foreign object, two counts of sexual penetration of an unconscious or asleep person and one count each of lewd act upon a child under the age of 14 or 15, sodomy by use of force and assault with intent to commit rape."
For more from XBIZ’s coverage of the Ron Jeremy case, click here.
