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[thunder rumbling]
[airplane droning]
[instrumental music]
[Mark Cromer] The premise was 16 years ago.
Could a virus, a sexually-transmitted virus
finally accomplish what 35-40 years
of vigorous prosecution
by the United States Justice Department couldn't?
And that is, end as we knew it,
the multi-billion dollar commercial pornography
industry in the United States.
It was a real moment, sort of,
the Cuban Missile Crisis, if you will,
for the-for the porn industry.
It was sort of, "Wow, what's gonna happen?"
"This is scary."
♪ The holy water the holy holy water ♪
♪ Wash down over me ♪
♪ The holy water the holy holy water ♪
♪ Wash down over me ♪
♪ I've been wicked yup I've been wicked ♪
♪ Just the same as anyone ♪
♪ And I can't see the sun ♪
By the '90s, the industry had risen
to total acceptance in society's eyes.
♪ I'm afraid ♪
♪ Of the Karma Thunderbolt ♪
♪ The Karma Thunderbolt ♪
♪ The Karma Thunderbolt ♪♪
[Bill Margold] We were no longer outlaws,
we were a common acceptable commodity.
We were being marketed everywhere,
we were being sold everywhere.
There was this whole mainstreaming
of porn that happened in the late '90s.
[upbeat music]
In preparation, you followed around a porn star?
His name is Ron Jeremy.
That is the first naked lady in the history of radio.
Ginger Lynn would show up for a signing.
And you have 500 guys at the door waiting to get a signature,
and maybe 30 girls.
This was a profound cultural shift
in an amazingly short amount of time
since Hugh Hefner had launched "Playboy" in his kitchen.
[Tom Byron] When I got in the business,
I actually thought that
the two industry would eventually merge
because that seemed to be where it was heading.
The budgets were getting bigger,
the acting was getting better.
And I thought, I could end up
doing a fuckin' three-way with Robert De Niro.
[instrumental music]
I actually thought that.
In 1991, there were 1200, uh, adult videos
produced per year.
By the time of 1998, we were easily up to
six or seven thousand per year.
It went from being family and friends,
and it became a business.
[Mark Cromer] Porn really, as a-a massive
national industry, took off.
[vocalizing]
[Jim South] When video was introduced,
the industry exploded.
Those were the days where the, the money really flowed.
It wasn't bad at all.
Continuous adult entertainment 24 hours a day.
Welcome to the "Erogenous Zone" on Spice.
[man on TV] Hard bodies on Playboy TV.
[vocalizing]
Great money.
The '90s were awesome, right?
I-I think I was, I was making up to like almost 70,000 a year,
just performing.
I'm Jenna Jameson, and I'm an adult film star.
-This girl could be a model. -Thank you.
I mean, she doesn't have to be in porno.
I'm taken care of--
Oh, you mean, you're makin' a lot of money?
Well, I'm under contract with Wicked Pictures.
Yeah, but, well, how much money could they p...
I heard some girls only get, like, a $150 a picture.
Oh. Oh, no, no.
-You get tons of money? -I get... Oh.
Why would I be doin' this if I wasn't?
[Stern] I don't know.
I think that I was a very
different kind of porn girl.
I looked at it in a different way.
It wasn't about the money. I was in college,
and I had a full-ride scholarship to college.
[man] Your major. Go ahead, Tricia.
I'm majoring in pre-medicine.
I want to go to medical school and be a doctor.
[Tricia Devereaux] So, it wasn't about paying
for college or anything like that.
It was about, I had been that perfect little Stepford child
when I was young, you know, perfect grade As
became a med-school student, was a national level musician
that traveled across the country, um,
and to Europe, um, so, it was kind of empowering.
I mean, I was kind of definitely that college nerd
that nobody would have ever expected it of,
and everybody always used to say that I was like the girl
that shouldn't be doing this that was awesome at it.
I had never been with anyone
until I got engaged to my husband.
It was, it was definitely exciting.
[upbeat music]
[Ginger Lynn] I just had the best time.
I'm thinking, "Oh, my God, I'm being paid to do this
and I'm having the best time of my life?"
Yes and yes.
[screaming]
[Tricia Devereaux] There was a core group.
-Hi, Mom! -We knew each other.
We trusted each other.
[Bill Margold] I referred to all
of them as kids. I referred to them all
as "Over-aged juvenile delinquents"
in the playpen of the damned.
To me, every person in this business stopped growing
at 12 years old.
Come on, Gary, we started.
I just love these long, hard round things.
The family of X is really a dysfunctional family.
We have the bond of knowing that we were the rebels,
and we did this thing.
I'm not a boy scout.
-I'm a do-gooder. -Sixty-nine.
You are a do-gooder. Could you do me good?
To me, it's almost like being a member of "AA,"
but you never stop drinking.
And the winner is...
Tom Byron!
[crowd cheering]
I'd like to thank every beautiful woman
I've ever put my cock inside.
It's a business that allows you to remain a fuckin' child.
[chuckles] I never met a girl
who got to the point quite so fast.
[Tom Byron] I used to want to get high
and fuck girls, and do these cool little movies,
and, you know, have this fucking easy, great life.
[moaning] It's good. It's good.
[Mark Cromer] There was almost a Peter Pan
like quality to we're off in
never-never land.
[Bill Margold] They don't have any responsibility,
that's part of the nature
of a great adult performer.
They can't spell the word "Tomorrow."
They have no idea about the future.
They live for the moment, and they live for the glory.
I have something to show you.
July "GQ."
-Yeah. -There she is.
Six hundred and twenty men in one day.
We knew what life was like for the rest of the world.
[Jim South] They were making ten times, twenty times the money
they would normally make for a regular job.
So they partied more, they got more days off
'cause they don't need to work seven days a week.
[Mark Cromer] Work, I mean it was a bit
of a party, it was a bit of a bacchanal.
It was a bit of a scene.
[scatting]
[vocalizing]
♪ No man's in the nighttime ♪
♪ The logic of my town ♪
♪ Yeah cruise like in the nighttime ♪
♪ The logic of my town ♪
♪ Yeah fools like in the nighttime ♪
♪ The logic of my time fools like in the nighttime ♪
[woman] Kaitlyn Ashley.
[crowd cheering]
The best day of my life.
♪ Let's go ♪♪
There was certainly
a carefree atmosphere to it,
and there didn't seem to be any sense of impending disaster.
Nobody seemed to see that we weren't in a tunnel
and whatever light we were lookin' at
wasn't really a train barreling down
the tracks at them.
I've done more mainstream films now than-than adult films.
And I was cast in a series called "Wing Commander."
Mark Hamill's the leading man in-in the series.
So we're getting ready to do the scene
and the producer comes over and says,
"Your agent's on the phone and we need to talk."
You're teasing me. Stop it.
[Ginger Lynn] Mark Hamill had refused
to kiss me because he was afraid he was gonna get AIDS.
Um, I'd like to thank all my fans out there.
You guys are great...
Everybody in that business at that time was whistling
past the graveyard.
You think it could never happen to you.
We have a disease here. And we have no cure.
[man on TV] Indeed for the foreseeable
future throughout the world,
the number of people dying from AIDS
will continue to increase dramatically.
An epidemic that is still raging out of control.
You are doing nothing! We need action!
It's time to put up or shut up, Bill!
[woman] Sit down!
A Manhattan project on AIDS!
Research, we need it now!
[people clamoring]
The-the backbone of pornography
was denial about HIV in the '90s.
There's no fucking doubt about that.
There's no doubt about it.
[Bill Margold] HIV has never really
frightened me because I believe
it was a chemically-bred form of eugenics
perpetrated on society by governments desirous
of ridding the world of three factions
that nobody would give a shit about.
Homosexuals, intravenous drug users, and minorities.
We were all very much in denial
and fuckin' tortured by it.
[Ginger Lynn] We never really worried
about it in the industry,
and I think the general consensus
was that HIV was a gay disease.
The gay people are giving their blood
knowing that it is contaminating people...
Nobody wanted to hear it, nobody wanted to talk about it.
It was, like, "Let's just not, let's just ignore it."
It didn't concern me so much where I didn't want to perform.
I wanted to perform.
[Ron Jeremy] I was scared of getting HIV.
And then I realized, and-and I-I explained to girls I work with,
if I haven't had a problem now, being probably
the longest running guy in the business.
I still do scenes even today.
I mean, obviously I have the lifestyle
that doesn't lead to HIV,
'cause I woulda had it by now.
I was afraid of HIV the first time I ever heard of it.
Federal health officials consider it an epidemic.
Scientists say they are dealing with some new deadly
sexually-transmitted disease.
[Tom Byron] I thought that was God's
or whoever's ultimate fuckin' joke that,
"Here I am, fulfillin' my life's dream,"
and a fuckin' deadly disease drops out of the fuckin' blue
that kills you in two weeks.
It scared the fuckin' shit out of me.
I kinda figured, "Oh, if you're getting tested
for something and it turns out fine, then you're fine."
-Huge dick. -Be very afraid.
[Tricia Devereaux] So, it completely
minimalized my concerns.
I'm ashamed to admit it, that's what I, that's what I thought
"Eh, you're not gonna get it unless you're a junkie."
And even if you're a junkie, if you're sharin' needles
that's when you get it, or if you're doin' that gay stuff,
you might get it too, but nobody's doin' that,
so, yeah, everything's cool.
How wrong we were.
[instrumental music]
[Mark Kernes] There were a couple of cases
of people I know who died of HIV.
We're not sure where those people contracted their HIV,
but it generally was not on the set.
I don't tell him how to edit.
[Mark Cromer] It-it was John Holmes.
And he doesn't tell me how to fuck.
[Mark Cromer] And his contracting HIV
and developing AIDS...
-You do have it? -I've got it.
That brought it, however briefly,
into maybe the national consciousness,
and then it went away.
[Michael] He was doin' gay movies
or doin' gay stuff off-screen, and he was a junkie.
-Do you take drugs? -No, I don't take drugs.
I don't even like aspirin.
[Mark Cromer] I think the industry looked
at it as kind of an outlier, a one-off.
Or we dodged a bullet.
No one really was looking at, "Okay, John Holmes,
the poster boy for commercial pornography
in the United States is dead
and he's dead because of AIDS."
Um, what does this mean?
It's like there's a giant hourglass somewhere
rapidly pouring out the sands.
[instrumental music]
[Bill Margold] Holmes dies and the industry
breathes a sigh of relief.
We then sort of forget about HIV.
[instrumental music]
Hi.
[Sharon Mitchell] People wanna turn
a blind eye 'cause there's money to be made.
They all have to pay.
So, who the fuck wants to talk about HIV?
[Tom Byron] If you talk about it,
you're not put on the fuckin' list.
Troublemaker! You're a troublemaker.
We don't talk about that.
Fuckin' do that line and shut up.
Just fuck, get it on camera...
Get a little girl-girl, maybe a little blowjob with you.
-I need to go and do my... -Okay.
[Mark Cromer] There's a discardability
of the performer base in the industry.
[man] Were you a sick fuckin' animal
before you got in this business?
[Mark Cromer] Having said that, I'm ambivalent
at best about whether or not condoms can and should be
mandatory in porn.
Condoms, man! It's repression, man!
Just another tool of the establishment
just to bring us down!
Condoms are a violation of the vicarious thrill
that we provide the audience.
Use one or get none.
[narrator] "Sheik. Get some."
It's like getting some oration about morality
in-in a porn scene, it's a total downer.
Condoms destroy porn.
[Bill Margold] The orgasm, the money shot
into the face of society
is exactly what this business is all about.
No one wants to see a condom
because a condom connotes reality.
And we're not reality. We are a fantasy.
This industry is a carnal version of Disneyland.
[imitating seals barking]
[Sharon Mitchell] The sex was selling
because there were no condoms.
And it was a tremendous amount of money
because it was the precipice of the internet.
People just knew, it was a whole new era.
New technology permits us to do very exciting things
in interactive, erotic software.
I still jerk off manually.
Wave of the future, dude, wave of the future...
Technology drove us into the '90s...with computer sex.
[Mark Kernes] The internet was really just
beginning to get its sexual chops on.
The internet, digital video disks, and who knows what...
And remember who is on the backs of all technology?
The pornographers!
♪ The internet is for porn ♪
[woman] What are you doing?
♪ Why do you think the net was born? ♪
♪ Porn porn porn ♪♪
You have to remember, the internet is not
a regulated environment.
[upbeat music]
[Mark Cromer] It's like a flywheel,
it creates its own momentum.
Now we want more. We want whatever fetish.
We want whatever desire catered to.
[man on TV] Wow. They're, like, really soft.
[Ron Jeremy] More and more public revealing.
More and more porn films. They wanted to see more kink.
It's 24 hours live hardcore.
-Live? On the internet? -Yes. Yes.
The ensuing glut of commercially made and sold pornography
gave way to a tsunami of cheap shot-on video,
sold on video productions.
For event-styled shows like this, if you're high-end film...
About three of those a month... About four of those a month...
[Mark Cromer] The excitement of pretty girls
getting screwed by handsome guys wore off.
In the popular culture, there was this trend...
♪ Do the extreme! ♪
[Michael] For, like, extremes.
I can do this.
[Michael] All of a sudden, it's not
a regular soft drink, it's an extreme soft drink!
[man] If you're gonna do it,
dew it extreme!
[Michael] The X-games, professional
wrestling is getting more extreme.
All this kinda, like, swap-meet level entertainment.
You know, porn, like anything else, picks up on this.
[instrumental music]
[David Foster] The truth is that in your face
vileness is part of the schizoid direction
porn's been moving in all decade.
For just as adult entertainment has become more mainstream,
it has become also more extreme.
[woman laughing]
[indistinct chatter]
We're gonna have a little gang-bang goin' on.
In the mid '90s, in the late '90s, it was changing.
It was getting riskier, and so many more people
because of the video boom and the internet now,
it was just getting riskier and riskier.
[Mark Cromer] The glut of it
led the industry...
[man] Can somebody get a dick?
To decide we have to start
showing our consuming public
in the United States things they haven't seen before.
I'd like you people to be original and different.
We have to show them new and exciting
and, quite frankly, evermore debauched scenarios.
[upbeat music]
[man] We're doing a good thing,
and we are gonna take it to more limits.
I can't believe we get paid for this.
[crowd cheering]
Directors had to keep pushing the envelope.
Anal became a phenomenon at that period of time in the '90s.
Best anal theme feature, best anal sex scene in a video.
Best anal sex scene in a film.
"Butt-Slammers."
"Gluteus To The Maximus."
-"Sodomania 21." -"Sodomania 22."
"The Anal Diary Of Misty Rain."
-"Butt Row, Unplugged." -"The Anal Food Express."
"Butt-Man."
"Ben Dover's Little Smartasses."
-"Bottom Dweller Five." -"Corporate Assets."
"Ben Dover Babes."
I'm here for "Anal Graveyard."
Anal's the hot thing, everyone's talking anal tonight.
Movie doesn't have anal sex?
It's not... You can't even call it porn.
They were so fascinated with
a-all this unprotected anal stuff,
and ejaculations in the eye, and this and that, and bukkakes...
cum, cum, cum, cum, cum.
[man] It was absolutely the industry
saying, "It's no longer enough to make 'Debbie Does Dallas.'"
"It's no longer enough to make 'Wanda Whips Wall Street.'"
"It's no longer enough to make 'The Devil In Miss Jones.'"
We need to show them something
that is absolutely Roman.
In its size, in its scale, in its scope,
in just the outrageous, outlandish nature of it."
It's about, "We are in the Colosseum,
and the gladiators are down below."
Most guys I ever did was 466.
[man] Wow.
This is my chance to be at the top of my profession.
Call me crazy, but 2000 guys, you're not gonna be on top.
[all cheering]
This is about spectacle.
This is spectacle porn.
We're having the world's biggest gang-bang.
Will history be made, or will the men go limp under pressure?
♪ I never have a chance to shake ♪
♪ A money-maker ♪
♪ It's all go meek to me ♪♪
[Mark Cromer] This led to the rise
of such surreal events as "Gang-Bangs."
Uh, 100, 200, 300...
[man] The last gangbang was cut
a little bit short because Annabel Chong said
that the guy's fingernails were bothering her.
The point here is to break the record.
We're gonna assassinate the record.
Yessiree, we're gonna beat the gang-bang records.
What we're going to achieve today is 300 men...
[crowd cheering]
♪ I got a pleasure appointment ♪
♪ I'm cashin' in the chips ♪
♪ And I'm goin' to ♪
♪ A pleasure appointment with you ♪♪
[instrumental music]
[crowd cheering]
Oh, my... The-the type of behavior that was going on
in the late '90s was a recipe
for HIV transmission...
And that's the truth.
[Ron Jeremy] It was actually the late
great Bobby Astyr, who was a porn star and a comic one,
and he said that, "Why is this business
getting more into anal sex, when, at the same time
HIV outbreak is all over the world."
[man] They have had no luck.
Short of driving a train up someone's ass.
It was very, you know, it was-it was very frightening.
[Mark Kernes] Part of the problem in those
early days is that producers
generally did not look at performers' HIV tests.
Some of them did, but very few of them.
[Sharon Mitchell] The testing protocols
of that time were people going
to the county health clinics
or the methadone clinics, or getting tested for free
and exchanging tests.
I'm working with John West today,
so I'm going to show him my test results.
So, it was on an individual level,
people that presented their test and expected from other people.
John will now show me his test dated August 4th, and I...
[Sharon Mitchell] But the tests were from
different clinics, they weren't under the same roof.
It was catch-as-catch-can.
[Michael] When I'd go onto sets,
most of the time, nobody was showing any kind of paperwork,
it was just, "I'm here, let's get it on."
[Mr. Marcus] We'd all show up all with a test
and there'd be a stack of piece of papers,
and then there-there'd be a production manager
who would, you know, "If anybody wants
to see the test, they're over here."
Most of the guys would go focus on the girl.
That is not a system.
That is not a protocol.
So a system had to be put in place.
And we're here at AIM Healthcare.
[Bill Margold] We then create "AIM."
The Adult Industry Medical Healthcare foundation
to make sure there'd be more coordinated testing.
Get early-detection HIV tests.
[Mark Kernes] Sharon Mitchell, who at that
point was still an actress
and eventually went on to get a doctorate in Public Health,
was hired by Bill Margold
who ran Protecting Adult Welfare.
I had went back to school, for a while,
and I gravitated toward HIV research,
and I'm asked to start a clinic.
[Mark Kernes] And so AIM was formed,
and became the testing facility for the industry,
and just everybody went there.
We tested all the guys.
[Dr. Tom Horowitz] She became our go-to person.
We're here to make sure that your tests are current,
and everybody has a safe, great time.
She had credibility in the industry.
She could to the actors and look eye-to-eye
and say, "I've been there."
I know just how dirty people can get.
[Bill Margold] We'd been taking something
called the "ELISA Test."
It might have been every six months
to every three months.
This would tell us we were okay,
and we could go bang our brains out.
[Sharon Mitchell] The ELISA HIV test isn't really
the most suitable for the adult entertainment industry
simply because it could take up to six to nine months
in some people to show up.
They were really basically useless,
and something was about to happen.
When you have an exponentially large group of folks
fucking for a living without condoms,
something is about to happen.
It is precisely at that moment that that outbreak occurred.
[rock music]
[Luke Ford] It was thought inevitable
that the industry would get infected with AIDS.
It was just kinda taken for granted.
Society's always been ready
to put us under a tombstone of HIV.
[Luke Ford] In 1995, Barbara Doll,
a beautiful blond French porn star tested HIV positive.
Then, in February of 1997,
Nena Cherry tested HIV positive.
And then you had Jordan McKnight in, uh, summer of 1997.
And there was a lot of uproar and concern.
And then everything was quiet for another six months.
Then, uh, came the big one.
So, '98 comes along, and I'm getting,
I'm getting sort of these strange rumblings about HIV.
-Tell me your name? -Hi, I'm Tricia Devereaux.
-And where are you from? -I'm from Ohio.
And I moved over out here a couple years ago
and now I live here in Los Angeles.
[Tricia Devereaux] In 1997, I had actually left
the business for a couple of months
and I had a very normal job,
and then they found out that I had done porn,
and, um, asked me to leave.
And I was, like, "Okay, I'll,
you know, get, go get another job,
and, you know, maybe I, maybe I'll do a few scenes, you know,
this or that," just get, you know,
kind of a head start back in life.
So, an editor for a magazine
asked me to consider working
for a director that I hadn't worked for before,
and I ended up saying, "Sure."
Um, it was actually the director that did
the "100 Men Gangbang" movies.
So, I went to site, it was, like, October,
maybe November of 1997.
The guy that I was supposed to work with, um, got sick
or didn't have a clear test or something.
And so they said, "Oh, well, your-your agent
has this other guy available."
Partway through the scene, they asked if it would, could be
an internal cum shot.
I had looked at his test, I saw the word "Undetectable"
and I was like, "Cool."
[man] Do you like an audience?
[Tricia Devereaux] I don't like when I'm by myself.
I don't like being alone.
[mellow music]
When I found out that I had HIV,
I thought, "What, like...
Whe... What did I do wrong?"
I mean, my first reactions were
obviously shock, um...
And I knew that my life was never gonna be the same.
[moaning]
[man] It is not hard to see where
porn is eventually going to have to go
in order to retain its edge of disrepute.
It's clear that the real horizon, late '90s porn,
is heading toward, is the snuff film.
This created shockwaves throughout the industry
because we-we hadn't had a working actress
who was suffering from an infection, really ever.
This one appeared to be on the set.
She got back in the business, she had HIV.
People really freaked over Tricia
'cause they really liked Tricia.
The winner is...
Jeanna Fine and Tricia Devereaux!
[crowd cheering]
Nice girl.
I really wanna thank, um, Elegant Angel
for hiring Jeanna to work with me.
It was incredible. I just...
She worked a lot, performed in,
you know, some of the harder scenes.
She was on that cusp of being extreme.
I'm gonna play teacher today.
We kind of very quickly went
into panic slash control mode.
You know, this is not gonna happen again!
But if it does, we're going to find out the very next day.
[Mark Kernes] So, it was announced that there
was going to be an industry-wide meeting
because they couldn't figure out
where Tricia'd gotten it from.
We went to VCA who had the largest warehouse
and 300 people came.
Place was packed, it was full of industry people.
There was, like, the, it was really hot, people screamin'.
[Michael Louis Alba] It scared 'em.
There was definitely a sense of fear in that room.
There was a certain amount of panic.
They were comin' out with new drugs, but it was still
kind of a death sentence.
[upbeat music]
There were a lot of rumors about how you could get HIV.
But one thing the performers knew was
it was a deadly disease,
and the other thing they knew was
they didn't want to have it.
I was told to bring these
life-saving drugs to Dr. Whoppers.
I'm Dr. Whoppers.
[comical music]
Recess is over in the playpen of the damned.
We now had to realize that maybe we could get sick.
[Mark Kernes] At that point, everyone
had to come in for testing.
In particular, a-a kind of a new form of HIV test
called the PCR DNA.
The ELISA test just looks for HIV antibodies,
with the PCR DNA, it looks for the virus itself.
And you'll find it, if it's there, within 14 days.
We decided to implement this test on everyone.
[Mark Kernes] At that point, Sharon Mitchell
and Bill Margold begin creating what they call genealogies.
That's basically a list of people Tricia had worked with
and then once Sharon had those names,
she did genealogies for those people.
[Bill Margold] You start with the first person,
you go to second generation, third generation,
fourth generation and then it's over.
A... It's sort of a tree diagram.
You know, so and so work with so and so
who work with so and so, and they all had to be tested.
[Sharon Mitchell] We had to go back six months
with Trish, and thank God for Trish
because she was very copious
in her note-taking in her partners.
So, I had her partner list to go on
and I found another, a month later.
Yes!
[moaning]
Oh, yes! Oh, yeah! Oh, oh, yeah!
[instrumental music]
[moaning] Ooh, yes.
Yes!
Pretty extreme. It's like there's regular sex
and there's anal sex
and she's doin' an anal gangbang.
Now she shattered.
In early 1998, the cases just started falling one a month.
[Sharon Mitchell] We had Trish and then we had
Brooke Ashley a month later.
Caroline a month after that.
Then Kimberly Jade after that.
Pretty eyes, wild girl, wild girl.
From Europe, wanted to work very hardcore, really loved sex.
A lot more open to tryin' new things, very aggressive.
[instrumental music]
-It was... -It was...
-Crazy. -Crazy.
Girls were coming up positive, right and left.
And nobody could figure out what the fuck was going on.
We all came up with these justifications, these denials
like, the porno business does.
We said "Tricia Devereaux is..."
"She got drunk and fucked a bunch of guys
at a Matt Zane party and that's how she got it."
And, uh, Brooke Ashley, she did drugs
and she was a hooker and she musta got it that way.
And Caroline, she was probably a hooker, everyone's a hooker
and that's how they got it.
You know, it wasn't in the business, you know...
It's no longer a one case phenomenon.
Now there are whole bunch of cases...
They were blindsided.
You know, nobody foresaw what was going to happen.
[Bill Margold] Shit hit the fan because
people were tryin' to remember who they had
had sex with, and not everybody remembers
everybody they've had sex with.
If you're dealing with risky sex, anal shit,
you know, you're dealin' it with an HIV positive person,
you're fucked, man.
Remember, this was back when a guy would be
perfectly healthy one week...
Doctor, do you think he'll make it?
You see him two weeks later, he's knockin' on death's door.
[man] He doesn't look too good.
It was knockin' down motherfuckers left and right.
You look like you're doing pretty good.
It was just, like, "What the fuck, man?"
I mean, one of those women literally tried
to jump out the window when I gave her results.
And the fuckin' press was disgusting.
[male reporter] We're attempting to determine
the extent of HIV infections...
[male reporter] This week another adult
performer tested positive
for the AIDS virus.
The industry must protect
those that are employed in it.
[stammers] Vans lined up, people outside,
trying to film people and...
I mean, I literally caught someone
trying to shove a camera
into the window of the bathroom
where we were taking urine samples.
It was just horrible.
Fear was running rampant.
It was fucking mayhem.
Panic in the street.
People just forgot themselves.
Every month there was another girl until there was five of us.
It appeared that we had a full-scale outbreak developing.
It was complete and utter panic.
-Panic. -Panic.
It was an onslaught.
There were a lot of frightened children.
[instrumental music]
All of a sudden you realized, "Wow! This is real.
This is real life."
If ya think about it, one person working with one woman
or two women who is popular, that can spread so quickly.
[Mark Kernes] In 1998,
within a five-mile radius of this building
probably 75% of all the adult videos
in the country were produced.
I mean, we're talking exponential growth here.
[Michael Louis Alba] There were several people
that were testing positive.
And it doesn't take a genius to figure out
this could be a big problem.
One needn't have the gift of a prophet
to see the evermore outrageous numbers
and the situations that were being depicted
to assume that if somebody came
into that very tightly
controlled and cloistered group of performers,
if you had a patient zero, the resulting explosion
had the potential to be massive.
[instrumental music]
The free-wheeling days of the X-rated industry exploding
into a billion dollar thing,
something had to come crashing down, man.
Everybody has to pay the fuckin' piper
and-and-and AIDS and HIV was that.
[Tom Byron] That was the first time
that HIV had touched us.
Remember that, I mean, that's the biggest fear
of-of the business...
was that disease, that fucking thing.
It-it just spun people's minds, like, what, you know,
"What the hell is going on here?"
[Tom Byron] We created this illusion
that we all had sex with each other
and nobody had sex with anyone outside the circle
and therefore we were all safe.
[Mark Kernes] At that point, we-we didn't
know what the source of the HIV was,
we didn't know how many people were infected,
we didn't know how they were being infected even.
Nobody could have seen this happening
and not know where it came from.
I was racking my brain
and tryin' to figure out when and where.
[Bill Margold] We can't seem to put our
finger on it that people
are coming down with HIV
one after another after another.
[Ron Jeremy] We can't locate
who is giving out HIV
like a-a raffle ticket.
The very incestuous, tightly-knit
nature of the industry posed
I think a-a different set of challenges
for dealing with this outbreak of HIV.
[Sharon Mitchell] I was piecing together
a very giant puzzle.
There were a lotta common partners.
I had to go back six months.
I had to go back to 425 people
and test them and multiply that by six different types
of testing and efficacies.
[Michael Louis Alba] The one person that hasn't
been tested is Mitchell's
ex-heroin shooting buddy, Marc Wallice.
[Mark Kernes] The one person who showed up
on all of those lists
and he was the only one, was Marc Wallice, who at that point
had not come in for an HIV test with PCR DNA
even though he had been requested to do so.
[instrumental music]
[Mark Kernes] Marc Wallice was a very
popular performer and he performed
in a lot of X-rated movies.
[instrumental music]
He was very popular.
Marc was a mainstay in the industry.
Marc was liked by everybody.
Who doesn't love Marc?
[instrumental music]
Certainly, in LA one of the top performers.
[instrumental music]
[Marc Wallice] I love bein' a porn star.
Man, it was great. Don't think you could ever
get any better than that.
The winner is...
Misty Rain and Marc Wallice.
[Michael Louis Alba] A lotta the women
that worked in LFP
that maybe weren't even associated
with the adult end of the stuff we did
loved Marc Wallice.
There would always be this timid knock at my door,
"You wouldn't happen to have any movies
with Marc Wallice in 'em, would ya?"
[instrumental music]
He was with me for so long,
he was almost like an adopted son.
He was one of those old school guys
that had been around forever...
I really, really liked Marc Wallice.
He was one of my favorite guys. You know, girls loved him.
He had a little banana boat shaped penis,
which was so easy to work with.
Good-lookin', and girls I knew,
they always spoke highly of him as well.
[Bill Margold] Marc Wallice seemed to be
the most carefree, irresponsible,
out for the pure joy of it
and I think the most vulnerable.
He was sort of a rattling cage.
I remember that when Viper worked with him
she said that he had a strange death wish about him.
Well, there is a arrest warrant for you in Shelby County.
[Tom Byron] I met Marc Wallice...
Can't we work something out?
Probably a few months after we got into the business.
No, ma'am, afraid we can't. The law is the law.
Are you tryin' to bribe a peace officer?
[Tom Byron] We were kinda like the hot
young kids on the block.
We had an apartment right off Sepulveda.
He's definitely my best friend. 100 percent.
[instrumental music]
I get into business as a serious life choice.
We're ever in your debt.
I don't know if he meant to find himself in this business.
I think it was an opportunity for him that he took.
He wasn't like me. He didn't, he didn't seek it out.
I didn't mean any harm.
It was there, so he found it
and I don't think he had
a high opinion of himself
for making that choice.
I think he wanted to be...
I'm not sure what he wanted to be, to tell you the truth.
[instrumental music]
♪♪♪
There were rumors goin' around that it, that it might be him.
And I was, like, "Uh, nah, it's fuckin', you know, Marc."
[Ron Jeremy] Tom Byron and Marc
lived together, and Tom,
and this is very poignant, I think,
Tom had warned one of the girls
not to work with his roommate, Marc.
The only thing I knew about Marc is that he would disappear
for days at a time and come back.
Sketchy that I knew that he-he liked
to go off and binge drugs.
He loved to smoke cocaine. Loved it.
[instrumental music]
In April of 1998, my sources got coming to me and saying
"Hey, it's Marc Wallice, he's the one behind it.
Now, there are girls who won't work with him."
"He's dangerous and he needs to be stopped."
I posted that on my website, April 23rd, 1998,
and everybody went crazy.
[phone beeping]
Marc Wallice called me said, "You did me wrong
and this is not true."
But it wasn't incandescent rage that I was dealing with.
It wasn't what you would expect from an innocent man
who'd been totally wronged.
It was way too reasonable.
He hadn't been tested, he hadn't been tested.
It got to a point where everybody in the world
had been tested that was involved in all those lists
and still Wallice hadn't been tested.
[Luke Ford] Marc Wallice did not want
to come in for a PCR DNA test.
He did not, he was avoiding it.
So, Sharon Mitchell let Marc slide on getting tested
for a long time.
[instrumental music]
He told me that he had a...
He had a test from his doctor
and I took that at face value.
She told me that she had asked him several times to come in
uh, but they were friends and, you know, he assured her
that he had been tested and he was not HIV positive
and for a while she accepted it.
I love Marc and it's no secret that we had been lovers
but it doesn't mean I'd let him get off the hook.
Would you relax?
This chick sniffs clues
and then weeds them out like a bug.
As the weeks dragged on, she started to worry, I think,
and she became more insistent that he come in for testing
with PCR DNA.
[instrumental music]
[Marc Wallice] I was bein' asked to come in
and take a test, and I was busy.
I was doin' this. I was doin' my show. I was editing.
I just couldn't make it down. I said, "Okay, I'll get there,
I'll get there," and he called me couple days later.
"I'll get there." I just didn't think it was important.
I didn't think it mattered because I knew
I wasn't positive.
Is this some kind of a joke?
I didn't even give it a second thought.
If the industry says "Herschel, you need to come in
and take a test today." I say "For what?"
They say, "Because of this." And I say, "Okay. I'll be in."
"I can't come in today, I'll be in tomorrow."
You-you don't fuck around with that.
Goddammit! Fuck, she's gonna get me.
Goddammit. What the fuck!
[woman] She doesn't even know
who you are.
[Sharon Mitchell] I'm into this
testing protocol
for eight or nine weeks
and I'm down flipping the last few people
that haven't been tested.
And...this is it. You know, I knew it.
It has to be, like, who, you know, like, why don't...
Why doesn't he come and show us that it's not him?
If that's, if that's what it is,
it'll take simply take a blood draw
for him to show us that it is not him.
And he couldn't be bothered to do it.
I was kinda buried in editing.
[Marc Wallice] It was maybe two weeks,
maybe two weeks and I just
kept putting it off.
And it's not really worth my time.
[Tricia Devereaux] Maybe he really
was just that much
of a fucking piece of shit
and selfish asshole.
To hear that you had worked
with five girls that all came up
HIV positive and you were the only person
who had worked with all five of those girls is,
maybe he's just stupid.
It wasn't at the top of my... It wasn't a priority.
It didn't seem necessary and it didn't sound urgent
from them. "Oh, Marc!"
They just said "Marc, you need to come down."
"We need to get another test."
I just thought it was another test.
[Sharon Mitchell] It was clear that Marc was
avoiding it every which way
and I'm calling him as my friend
and he's giving me the jive talk, it's bullshit.
And I know something's wrong.
Something was clear, you know, clearly wrong.
[Luke Ford] He would dissemble,
he would lie.
He would push it off.
He-he found it insulting.
He was at that point editing a series that he was doing
that he was doing for Elegant Angel
and claimed that he was not performing and that he hadn't
had on-camera sex for a while.
So, he didn't have to present any test that he claimed
that he hadn't even worked with these women...
Just anything to deflect it from him.
Um, I don't have an answer as to why Marc would refuse
to get a test.
He knew something was up obviously.
He knows I've got him by the balls.
[Marc Wallice] So then after the weekend,
Patrick Collins called me
and said, "Marc, Sharon has called you three times
to come down to AIM to take a test."
And he tells me, "You have to do that
or the cops are gonna come to your house."
I go, "What are you talkin' about?"
He says, "Just go take the test."
-This is the police. -Alright, alright.
Get your fuckin' hands up.
You with the bad haircut, up against the wall.
I'm not workin' today. I'll go down today.
Be there in ten minutes.
[engine starts]
Uh, you know, I'm not proud of what I had to do
but, I had to...
I had to go to Patrick Collins
who he was working for as a director
and tell him what was going on and what I suspected.
And I had Patrick hold out $10,000 and say he was going
to meet him in a van and I put him in the van
and I basically fucking kidnapped Marc to draw his blood
because he was that reluctant.
I know that's not ethical.
I'm telling you that's what I fucking had to do.
It was the only way I was gonna get proof.
Um, I'm not really proud of that
and I really haven't talked about that,
but...I had at this point,
like, 425 people at, at risk.
And I already had four girls, you know, grow in numbers
every week, I'm finding...
[sighing]
What the fuck would you do? You know...
Uh...he was not happy that night.
But it came back that he was positive.
He was clearly patient zero in this.
[instrumental music]
[Marc Wallice] Fuckin' Sharon.
She didn't do that.
That never happened.
Kidnapped? Thrown in a van?
Brought to AIM? Fuckin' Sharon Mitchell.
Wow. Wow.
It took really the insistence of Patrick Collins
to get him to come in for testing,
uh, and, you know, at that point they found his infection.
And since he was really the only thing in common
with all of the women who had turned out to be positive,
it's accepted fact in the industry at this point
that Marc Wallice was what they call "Patient Zero."
The person who had it first.
[telephone ringing]
[Marc Wallice] I got a call from Jim.
I go, "Hey, Jim, what's up?"
And he said, "You're positive."
And I don't remember anything
because I don't remember anything
at that moment.
[Tom Byron] I fuckin' remember the day
it happened, he just kept sayin'
"It's all over, man. It's all over, man."
"It's all over."
And then he, uh,
he went on another drug binge.
I-I-I was so incredibly
distraught during that period.
You have no idea.
I still... To this day, I still...
[sobbing]
[instrumental music]
[man] Not unlike certain other
culturally marginalized guilt,
the porn industry is occluded and insular in a way
that makes it seem like high school.
There are cliques, anti-cliques, alliances,
betrayals, conflagratory rumors, legendary enmities
and public bloodlettings.
You're either in or you're not.
So, Sharon Mitchell announced at an industry meeting
that Marc Wallice was patient zero
and that he was HIV positive.
This was a difficult time and I had to reveal what happened.
[Marc Wallice] Sharon announced
to all these people
that I'm HIV positive.
It was like public knowledge
that I was HIV positive.
I had to do what I had to do
and, and I know Marc's a big enough man
to understand that.
[Marc Wallice] Sharon Mitchell exposed
my medical records without my permission.
Sharon Mitchell...
Sharon Mitchell broke the law
and she'll be prosecuted for that.
That was an evil thing to do.
I hung him by the balls.
My job was to get him in there to get that fuckin' blood...
To tell the industry what was goin' on.
Marc Wallice was fucked
[Luke Ford] once Sharon Mitchell said
"We think he's patient zero."
From then on he was, he was fucked.
I mean, you need to have an unbelievable
public relations team to try to turn around that narrative.
I've got four and five chicks crying
because they were unaware that they were at risk.
And that's just as fuckin' ugly, isn't it?
I get so nervous, you know. I'm so scared--
[Sharon Mitchell] I had to tell these women,
"I'm sorry...you got HIV."
I'm sorry.
Are you, like, a real doctor?
[woman] Don't be so scared,
it's alright.
Um, you know what?
-Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you. -Fuck you...
[Mark Kernes] After it was discovered,
he was HIV positive
and it seemed pretty likely
that he was patient zero,
he became incredibly defensive.
I don't exactly know why.
I walk out the door and I realize
"Shit! Everybody knows I'm HIV positive,"
when that's supposed to be a private diagnosis.
I don't know what you're sayin'. So I can't answer you back.
You know what? Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.
At one point he claimed that he probably got it
from Tricia Devereaux, the first person
who showed up HIV positive, but that I think was ruled out
by tracing the genealogy.
He said "I think, maybe, you know, maybe the girls
gave it to me."
I haven't done nothin'.
It's part of what made the industry hate him.
[Jim South] All of a sudden,
people didn't like Marc.
This rumor was going around.
That rumor was goin' around.
And he sort of disappeared for quite a while.
He became vilified and-and he, he withdrew.
He, he hid for a while.
I just didn't know what to do.
What else... what would you do?
-Amaze. -Amazing.
What would you do if you were
famous or popular?
Just wanna thank everybody involved in the movie
and of course, Ms. Serena.
Then you're in the limelight and everybody knows who you are
and everybody loved your work...
Yes, I would especially like
to thank my buddy, Marc.
And all of a sudden this guy infected...
all these girls.
Holy shit! It was a dream.
[Tom Byron] All these questions started
coming out and it was just,
it was fucked up, man.
And the thing that made me have to cut off contact with him
was his tests.
In 1998, there was a male actor who was HIV positive
who was going to county health clinics and forging his tests.
I discovered that this man gave six women HIV.
People were still tryin' to figure out what was going on.
And one of the reporters from AVN was very diligent
about saying this doesn't make sense.
When Marc Wallice was discovered to be HIV positive
with PCR DNA, he showed Sharon Mitchell
and other people in the industry
a copy of an ELISA test that he had.
He had this test from, uh, early March
that said he was HIV negative.
"Look, here's, here's my HIV test.
I'm not positive. I'm not infected."
So, is Marc, like, modifying his test results?
[Mark Kernes] His test looked okay,
but it was from a testing organization
that virtually no one else in the industry used.
And when myself and my then editor, Mark Logan,
went over to, uh, that testing facility
and spoke with the doctor,
we got a look at the original test.
It said, he was a woman.
It said he was a 49-year-old female.
And on the test that Wallice showed us,
it said he was a male.
So that test had been altered.
He was faking his tests.
[instrumental music]
It was like a fuckin' nuclear blast.
[instrumental music]
It was a complete fuckin', like... What?
Is Marc a monster?
I was chilling. I almost shit my pants.
They look at his tests and it says
he's a 49-year-old female.
And the address for the testing center i-is wrong.
[Mark Kernes] Wallice's test had the clinic's
old address rather than its current address.
The clinic had moved from there a year before Wallice's test.
So the test that Wallice had been presenting was different
from the one that the clinic had in its files.
That, of course, raised even greater suspicions
and we got the test directly from the doctor
who was running that clinic.
So there's no question that the test
that we saw was the legitimate one
and apparently it had been altered by Wallice.
[instrumental music]
[Tom Byron] I knew the guy
better than anybody
and I'm going...
I-I didn't believe it.
I never changed the results of any tests.
It was clearly forged.
[man] Do you remember
what part was forged?
Yeah, uh, where it says negative.
I changed the female to male
because I didn't want to show up with a test
that said female on me and I didn't even think that
"Oh, wait, it's got my name on it."
That's just a typo.
I researched it. I called the doctor.
I did background work
It was a forged test.
I'm telling you, they were forged results.
I'm absolutely positive.
I never changed the results from positive to negative
which is what people say I did.
Hindsight is a motherfucker, man.
Because probably a year earlier
he got busted.
He had changed the date on a test
and somehow he got called on it.
[Luke Ford] In 1996,
he was written up in AVN
for changing dates on his HIV test
for VCA and De Renzy productions.
He could have been doing this for two years prior.
It's unbelievable, man. Geez.
[Marc Wallice] Every 30 days,
you need a new test
and I had to work tomorrow.
Grab my test, grab my wallet, and today...
Oh, shit. It's a day late.
And I remember somebody gettin' turned away
from a job because their test was two days old over date.
So I just changed
the-the one to an 11,
just added a number to it.
So I was able to work on that day.
And then got a new test the next day.
He was not fictitiating his results,
he was fictitiating the date the test was taken.
It's bad, if he's saying he was altering his tests,
because it's just bullshit.
You know what you have to do.
You oughta know what you have to do.
You have to make sure you're current.
I said, "Dude, that's not good.
You know, why'd you do that, you know?"
And he said "I didn't have money for the test."
which kind of was weird.
I was kinda like, "Whoa, dude
the fuckin' test, what's it's $35. I mean, what the fuck?"
I couldn't even think of changing the...
You know, I mean, it was I'd miss the job.
This was unheard of, this was not something
that I know anyone else doing.
I couldn't give you an example of anyone else
to change the dates on their test, I'm sure it happened.
I mean, I-I-I hadn't heard of it. I'd never done it.
Did that mean he was doin' it all along?
-I don't know. -Actually, proactively...
-That's weird. -Go in and change a test.
To even take that hack... Man, it's bad.
[Tom Byron] If I didn't have the money
to go get a test, I'd go
to my agent and say, "Jim, front me $35
so I can go get a test, so I go get a test."
You know what I mean? So, altering, I...
No, I don't think anyone ever did.
Forging test is fucked.
Shouldn't be ever forging tests, period.
To even go there, you're way off the line, man.
You're way off the line.
I didn't give it a second thought.
I didn't think I was doin' anything wrong.
I just changed the date on a negative test.
However long he was forging his tests
and apparently HIV positive, he knew he had somethin'.
No one forges their tests.
No one would even want to be questioned.
They... You're-you're thinking,
I hope they don't see it. I hope they don't see it.
You better have something to say for yourself,
you fuckin' scumbag.
No one else was forging tests. I never forged a fucking test.
I was, like, working as much as anybody back then.
I'm not defending Marc, but God bless him
he stayed so screwed up on drugs.
I'm not excusing if he did what they say that he did
but anything is possible with him
as screwed up as he used to be.
[instrumental music]
[Mark Kernes] It came out that
he was a gay escort
and essentially prostituted himself.
He had done gay porn.
I knew he liked to walk on that wild side.
[Marc Wallice] No, no fuckin' way.
A gay out call? No, no.
What for? What for?
[Jim South] With the amount of money
Marc made,
I mean, I kept this guy busy.
That's why it doesn't make sense
about the out call stuff.
[Tom Byron] He disappeared
for days at a time
and would come back where I knew
he had been gettin' high.
And when you do cocaine and you do crystal meth,
you do things that you would not normally do.
And I also knew that he was fond of shooting cocaine.
[instrumental music]
[Marc Wallice] I did dabble with needles
maybe three times
and that was with coke, not heroin
and that was on my own.
Never with anybody.
[Herschel Savage] What's the difference how
he contracted it?
Either way, he was not
living a smart life,
just leaving yourself open to that kinda debauchery and shit.
I mean, your body's truly your temple if you're a porn star.
You gotta be clean, man.
[Mark Cromer] He never seemed to suggest
directly where he thought he got it,
which I thought was interesting.
He never said, "You know, I think I got it from X."
He never did.
[instrumental music]
[man] How do you think you
contracted HIV?
I don't know.
[man] You must've been curious.
I didn't think about it. I didn't want to think about it.
How he got it? I don't know.
But he certainly did have enough behaviors
that he could very easily have contracted it.
So, on the one hand, uh, you know,
I'm as compassionate as anybody else for somebody who has HIV,
but on the other hand, I'm aware that he faked a test,
that he, you know, tried to deflect the possibility that
he was patient zero, he tried to deflect that completely,
he blamed other people for this,
when I think he knew that he was HIV positive
or at least suspected it, and that's why he faked his tests.
Marc said that he never knew that he had HIV,
that everything on the test, of, it's saying that
he was a 44-year-old woman,
the fact that he went to a clinic
that didn't even exist anymore,
that all of those things are a complete coincidence.
That, him not going to get a DNA test
was simply because he couldn't be bothered to.
Well, that shows how much he cared about our family.
[instrumental music]
He betrayed the rest of us.
He was blowin' people's lives away, man,
left and right.
That's so fucked up.
The narrative was...
he was a monster.
There's nothin' like the presence of evil
to shake a few bricks loose
from a solid foundation.
He knew that he was positive and...
he fuckin' worked anyway.
And he fuckin' infected all these girls.
People were after him and Marc
was absolutely fuckin' terrified.
It was like "Frankenstein."
With a fuckin' torch and there
chasing the poor fucker up
that castle, you know?
There he is!
[Sharon Mitchell] I just felt like that was Marc
running up that tower,
being scared of the fire
and Marc just thinking...
"Fuck, it's just me. Marc."
[upbeat music]
[gunshots]
Can we point now at Marc and say
"This is a man of such unfathomable evil?"
And that's what the industry did.
They went from Marc is our friend
to he is not one of us,
and he is the one responsible
for wreaking havoc on our beautiful industry.
The film generated a lotta money for a lotta people.
[Luke Ford] If it wasn't for Marc,
everything would be blowjobs and lollipops.
[gunshots]
[instrumental music]
You have to realize this man was absolutely
fuckin' terrified.
[Luke Ford] The dominant view
was that he was a sociopath,
that he knew he was HIV positive
and that he was passing it along to girls in the industry.
[Herschel Savage] How the fuck do you
do that, man? What are you sayin',
maybe she won't get it?
What the fuck is wrong with you, man?
[upbeat music]
You have to fuckin' have a line!
Or, like, I'm fucking her life up.
And if you don't have a line, you have to, like,
displace your personality and just
become a zombie, emotionally and say
I gotta cover myself, I gotta cover myself!
[Bill Margold] He was being bandied about
as a criminal, as a murderer, as an assassin.
-Don't shoot me! Don't shoot me! -Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!
He was just infecting girl after girl.
He's a serial killer just trying to get away with it
for as long as he could.
[Bill Margold] If he had been all
of those things, and one of the girls
had found out that he absolutely knew,
one of those girls could've easily made a phone call
to some boyfriend who woulda blown Marc's brains out.
[Ron Jeremy] If any of the girls were Italian
you would not be talking to Marc on this documentary.
I made my bones while you were sniffin' out
your first piece of pussy.
[Sharon Mitchell] I know people wanted
to hang the guy.
It was ugly.
[gun firing]
[upbeat music]
[gun cocking]
[gunshots]
[audience cheering]
I watched an entire industry turn their back
on someone who was a huge,
huge, huge influence in the adult industry.
To this day, his name is not spoken in this fuckin' business.
I can't take this anymore.
[Mark Cromer] He seemed so stunned
that the industry could turn on him.
He'd just been cast out from...
a group of outcasts.
What'd you guys just win for here?
-Couple sex scene. -It was real.
It's a hard pill to swallow
when you've made as much money
for so many people as Marc did...
Alex Jordan, "Body And Soul."
[Sharon Mitchell] To be ridiculed
and humiliated.
I haven't been close to anybody like this in so long.
I cut off communication with him, 'cause I, I...
It was hard to deal with the fact that your...
Your friend had a potentially fatal disease,
and because I was so closely associated with him,
I was sort of being dragged into
what he was going through.
The sense of betrayal was very clear.
I just cut off contact.
He-he called my answering machine.
He said "I just want to hear it from you."
I didn't call him back. I didn't have the balls.
They haven't... I haven't talked to him since.
[Ginger Lynn] I don't know if you've ever
been in a position
where you're so down,
you're so depressed, you're so lost,
you have no money, you have no food, you have nowhere to live,
everyone's turned their back on you.
What do you do?
Marc Wallice disappeared.
He went into a-a downward spiral.
[Marc Wallice] After I found out I was
HIV positive,
I packed a bag, called a cab,
checked in a hotel.
[instrumental music]
Yeah, it was rough.
He was a man on the edge and he understandably
had a suicidal impulse, you know.
"Let me just end my life."
[Marc Wallice] I spent the next
month and a half doing
as much coke as I could,
just never running out.
Scoring every couple days, havin' it delivered,
and just hoping I wouldn't wake up the next day.
But, uh...
that didn't work.
[man] Do you feel that you
betrayed him?
How can I not?
You know...
Uh... I... Of course I should've been there for him.
He was my friend.
[woman on TV] Choose adult entertainment
24 hours a day.
Adult entertainment 24 hours a day.
Adult entertainment 24 hours a day...
Adult entertainment... Adult entertainment...
-You look fabulous. -Adult entertainment...
Adult entertainment...
Adult entertainment 24 hours a day.
-Money. -Money.
Shut...
[Tim Tritch] Marc Wallice may indeed be
patient zero for all these people getting infected.
But, and this is a big but...
I know for a fact that neither of those tests
are forgeries.
I came in with AIM around 2001.
And-and it was through AIM, and talking with Sharon Mitchell
that I'd learned about all of this.
One day, she told me, you know, the whole story
of what prompted the whole beginning of AIM.
And she told me about this guy forging tests
and I kinda realized,
"Hey, this is that thing that happened
when I was working at TCL
and MSI and Bio Cipher."
And I began to look into it myself from then.
And I went, "Hey, these were, tests weren't forgeries."
The 49-year-old female day was just
part of that thing that happened one day
when I had to put that whole crew together
to fix all these reports.
And then, I looked at the other report
that said the location was different.
And I said, "Yeah, that's when they closed their location."
And we took all the stuff over to the other location.
These are not forgeries.
On the Lord above, I'm tellin' you the truth.
I did not want to get bad news about Marc 'cause I liked Marc.
But the doctor himself's a forgery.
There's a couple things that don't fit.
Perhaps now that I look at it.
But I saw that this was done, so I thought, "Oh, wow."
[Tim Tritch] One of those tests had
information on it that said
he was a 49-year-old female.
There was a mix up of papers in our laboratory that night.
The person inputting information made a mistake
and they'd flipped over two pieces of paper at one time,
and without matching up the numbers,
simply put in another patient's information.
And as a result,
34 patients that night
got the wrong patient information
put into the computer system.
One of those patients was Marc Wallice.
[instrumental music]
I did personally see Marc Wallice's original test
which we obtained at the clinic.
I asked the doctor.
I said to the doctor, "Can there be any other mistake?"
And he goes, "No, no. That had...
This test is the problem."
[Mark Kernes] Again on the original test,
it said he was a 49-year-old female.
Actually, I know the name
of the 49-year-old female.
I-I know her name because I was the person who was in charge
of fixing that whole mess.
[Bill Margold] I can't tell you how many
females came back as males,
and males came back as females.
-But it was common. -It-it wasn't uncommon.
Let's put it that way, there were mistakes.
[man] Can you explain why Marc's
test would have had the address for a clinic
that had closed a year earlier?
Uh, North-East Valley Clinic had three clinics at one time.
Each clinic had a separate account number,
so that all of the results would go back to the proper clinics.
When one clinic closed,
they took all of the laboratory supplies that were in there
to one of the other clinics.
They also took the requisition slips,
and eventually, someone used those slips
with that address on it.
When that location closed,
the laboratory updated their computer system
so that any outstanding result
from that account number and from that location
would go to one of the other locations.
So it was actually just a simple thing of
the requisition slip for the laboratory from that location
being brought over to one of the other locations.
How did they fuck up this one guy?
How does that fuckin' happen? What...
I mean, talk about a...
That's a weird thing to happen, don't you think?
You know, because of who he is.
[Tim Tritch] He fit in the genealogies,
he had a past history of altering that test.
I think that was a real big factor in it,
and so they thought this is a smoking gun,
he used an old test or something
and forged the dates on that again.
And I believe that past bad act
had a lot to do with people
assuming that he had done it again.
I don't understand how he would've gotten away
with his tests for two years.
[Tim Tritch] He had to be showing tests
to work in all of these previous shoots.
And I assume they were all showing he was negative.
-You've been working a lot or... -Yeah.
These were ELISA tests at the time.
The initial ELISA can have a false negative.
[Tim Tritch] It's rare, but Marc Wallice
might've just been one of those people
who may have indeed been HIV positive,
but his body just did not develop the antigen
that would make an ELISA test show positive.
[man] This is called
a False Negative test result.
[instrumental music]
[Luke Ford] It is entirely possible that
Marc Wallice might've had some ELISA tests for HIV
where it showed up negative when he was in fact positive.
It's very, very rare that a person
who has HIV would not have sero-converted yet.
Um, so they would not be coming positive
on the ELISA tests that they were doing.
Oh, yeah, he could've gone six months
with negative tests without knowing.
[instrumental music]
[Tim Tritch] A routine window
for this ELISA test
they say can be up to six months.
And if they say it's up to six months, well...
it can be possibly, in some people,
be even longer than that.
I think it's still really unclear
when Marc Wallice was actually infected.
Marc Wallice was a very active performer in 1997 and before.
So what about all the other women who worked with Marc?
[Ron Jeremy] Barbara Doll claims that
she got HIV, uh, from Marc.
Hi, there. I'm Marc Wallice.
Hi. I'm Barbara Doll.
It appeared to me that he was the most likely source
for Barbara Doll's infection.
-She requested us. -Yeah. Specifically.
[Luke Ford] She was infected in 1995.
But HIV is very difficult to transmit.
-She likes us. -And...
[Luke Ford] So it doesn't surprise me
that Marc could work with women
and they not get HIV.
[man] Having a low viral load
decreases the risk
that you will pass HIV through sexual contact.
[Tom Horowitz] Is it possible
for one encounter
to cause an infection? Yes.
Is it possible for there to be
hundreds of contacts and no infection? Yes.
The person who has a non-detectable viral load
is much less likely to transmit the virus.
It's possible that he had a viral surge
and then being a healthy man
could have went down to a normal level for a while
and not infected anyone and resurge.
So it is possible.
Is it possible? Yes.
Add in the whole wrong age, wrong clinic
all the waffling and change the stories about what happened
and it definitely brings up a lot of red flags in my mind
about had he seen a test that said something different.
[Tim Tritch] According to Marc Wallice,
he never started HIV treatment
until after that PCR test with Sharon Mitchell.
Boy, you'd think someone would have started treatment for it.
He was an adult, if he had HIV, he was gonna get treated.
Unfortunately, nothing works.
You wouldn't have a miracle drug on you by chance, would you?
[mumbles]
I don't think that the possible explanations
explain his behavior.
If he had gotten his HIV test when everybody else did,
Brooke wouldn't have HIV, Caroline wouldn't have HIV,
Kimberly wouldn't have HIV from him.
So he was still negligent, and his behavior is not excused.
I can tell you, I can tell you
from the bottom of my heart,
I did not infect these women...
knowingly with HIV.
Whether or not what he says is true,
the amount of selfishness could only come from a person
who just has no humanity.
And I'd never had a word
said to me from him,
certainly not "I'm sorry this happened."
Um...nothing. Not a single word.
That-that--that's an indication of guilt to me
in not taking responsibility for something because
to not have that sense of remorse
except to feel "Woe is me," um... "Poor me.
Fuck...my fucking life, you know?
Fuck these..." It's just, it just shows a...
a lack of humanity and...
Just think about being a victim
and never being apologized to.
Just to live with the fact that this guy
fuckin' infected them with HIV
and he never fuckin' said I'm sorry.
Look at the fuckin' health issues I got now,
look at the meds I have to take.
You don't think these people are thinkin' about that?
Believe me, every fuckin' day of their lives.
I honestly believe Marc never conscientiously worked
knowing that he was HIV positive.
[man] And that's just a gut feeling?
It's a gut feeling
that if Marc had realized
he was HIV positive,
realized that his life was over,
he would've ended his life.
I think Marc woulda killed himself.
I can't deal with this anymore.
I need to get out, and I have something.
I absolutely believe that
Marc Wallice is responsible for my HIV infection.
[instrumental music]
[woman] When you came in, was there
something unexpected that,
like, surprised you?
Um, I was real surprised at how much I liked everybody.
I mean, I wanted to sorta hang back
and just treat this as a business and that's it.
But I liked everybody, so I moved out here,
and I never wanted to do that, but I did.
He absolutely deserves every bit of karma
that will come to him someday.
[instrumental music]
[man] Do you think that he knew
he was HIV positive?
[Tricia] I do think that, most likely,
he knew.
[man] So you think that he was
intentionally infecting women?
I don't know. I don't know.
I know that he was in denial for sure.
In one way or another, in denial
that he wouldn't get caught, or in denial
that I can't possibly be the person.
But like I've said a few times,
I know that there are at least three girls
that would not have HIV today
if he had not been in denial about something.
[instrumental music]
I-if it's true that he really didn't know and this happened,
he would be devastated,
and not for his own personal misfortune,
but for theirs. And to me
that's the greatest indication of guilt,
because it's your behavior post blow up
that shows who you are and, and what you did.
[Mark Kernes] Is there definitive proof that
Marc Wallice was HIV positive
and faked his test in order to conceal that?
I don't know for sure,
but it certainly seems likely
considering, you know,
the entire concatenation of events
that took place around that time.
You gotta understand there's a, there's a tremendous
emotional quotient here.
A tremendous emotional quotient.
And it has to do with shame,
and shame is something that's a reality
within all of us to a degree
in the adult entertainment industry.
Could I have done better? Could I have been a real actor?
Could I have been different?
Shit, I did a few gay movies
to pay the rent? Do I have to hide anything?
Oh, my God. Fuck. I've got HIV.
I can't, I can't let this out. I can't.
They'll blame me, they'll hoist me on a petard.
I'm going to be the "Frankenstein" monster.
We have to remember where my friend Marc was at.
He was at a fuckin' dark, scary place.
And he knew it.
Um...
Ah, once you're called patient zero in HIV
outbreak in the heterosexual porn industry,
I mean, sure, you can fight it,
but, I mean, you know, you're fucked.
[scoffs] You're fucked.
[man] Where would you be today
if you had never contracted
the HIV virus?
I would've been...
[scoffs] I'd have been doin' really well.
I would probably have
if not a million, a couple million in the bank.
I'd be running my own company,
like a lot of my peers
are right now.
And instead, I'm living in a trailer park,
on disability and...
by the 25th of the month, I don't have a penny left.
[Herschel Savage] You know, in reality,
if somebody does something
so fucked up to other people,
and they have to live out their whole life,
maybe a worse sentence than death.
But did Marc know he was sick? That's the question.
[instrumental music]
[Bill Margold] People who get sick, get sick,
and there's a defense for all of that.
And if you get sick, and you're not even knowing
what's going on, how can you be blamed?
And I think that the adult entertainment industry
was running out of people to blame
for all the problems we were having.
We didn't know how exactly to cope with it
and Marc was easily a scapegoat for it
because Marc was fragile and Marc couldn't fight back.
The industry had every incentive to say
there was one rogue performer
and one bad guy
and he was responsible for what happened here
because they knew that this was the type of thing
that could blow up and shut down their honeypot.
[man] Regulation may be needed
in the industry to make sure that people are safe.
We've got this thing under control,
we don't need more government intervention,
we don't need more government regulation,
we don't need more scrutiny from the mainstream media,
we don't need any bad news.
This is just one rotten apple.
It was such an un-unforgettable year,
both tragic and exhilarating.
E-everybody was looking for a source to blame,
so we could close the book on it.
[Jim South] Do I feel that the industry
threw him under the bus?
Absolutely, and stepped on the, the accelerator.
They hung this dude out to dry, man.
[man] Today's adult industry
is still hypersensitive
about what it perceives as fascist attacks
on its first amendment freedoms.
[instrumental music]
Our nation is in desperate need for healing
and repentance from sexual sin.
Animals have more protection in the making of films
than porn performers.
[man] Porn is now a hard-lobbying
political force
no less than GM or RJR Nabisco.
[indistinct shouting]
The industry was coming under a lot of scrutiny
for this going on and they needed to get it over with.
And if they could say, "Hey, we found the guy who did it,
he's no longer performing,
we're all good to go now,
everything is safe again."
That's what the industry needed to do and...
without really looking into,
without really asking the right questions,
they weren't able to clear Marc Wallice,
therefore they found him guilty.
He could be completely innocent,
or he could not be.
Nobody knows but him. I...
That's the bottom-line.
[Mark Cromer] Whether or not Marc Wallice
intentionally thought he was exposing
any of the girls that he's accused of,
I, I'm not convinced of that.
I think the truth is somewhere in the middle,
I think the truth is a lot closer to
he had his own sets of worries, his concerns
and my sense of it is, he probably didn't know
that he was infected with HIV,
but he kinda didn't want to know for sure
until he could no longer get out of taking additional tests,
and, and then it-it hit him like a-a ton of bricks.
[instrumental music]
There you are. I found ya.
I'm not saying his actions weren't reckless.
We'll, we'll never know.
No one can tell you except Marc Wallice,
what he knew, and when he knew it,
and he has to live with that,
and, um, hopefully he can.
[instrumental music]
♪ Well she's on the dance floor ♪
♪ At your local juke ♪
♪ Tryin' to sweat a bunch of fools ♪
♪ She done already took ♪
♪ But when that gal gets down ♪
♪ You can't help but stare ♪
♪ 'Cause that frame's lit smokin' ♪
♪ Like a signal flare ♪
♪ She's on fire ♪
♪ Ooh she's on fire ♪
♪ Lord that girl is smokin' ♪
♪ On fire ♪
♪ Light 'em on up she's on fire ♪
♪ We tried to look away we all tried to be cool ♪
♪ But she had an ass ♪
♪ As thick as an army mule's ♪
♪ She asked out for a drink just a battin' those eyes ♪
♪ We all was reaching for our wallets ♪
♪ Man she's a light she's on fire ♪
♪ Ooh she's on fire ♪
♪ Oh that girl is smokin' on fire ♪
♪ Light 'em on up she's on fire ♪
♪ That girl is on fire ♪
[instrumental music]
♪♪♪
♪ With a smooth proposition ♪
♪ She's got you in hand ♪
♪ I hear you say you don't care boy ♪
♪ Are you a man she's on fire ♪
♪ Ooh she's on fire ♪
♪ Ooh help me she's on fire ♪
♪ She's on fire ♪
♪ Ooh she's on ♪
♪ Fire ♪
♪ She's on fire ♪
♪ That little hussy's on fire ♪
♪ She's on fire ♪
[indistinct chatter]
[instrumental music]
[laughing]
[laughing continues]
[indistinct chatter]
♪♪♪
[laughing continues]
[woman] Did I mention we don't take up
much space on the road?
[laughing continues]
[woman] Yeah, did you mention that?
[instrumental music]
♪♪♪