In Hollywood, black lives don’t matter if they come at the cost of performative wokeness and white celebrity.
Nor do the lives of gay men.
The celebrity class is happy to try to destroy the career of comedian Kevin Hart for some tweets and remarks from over a decade ago — which he had long since explained and apologized for — because they were insensitive and ignorant to the gay community. Yet what happens when a Democratic donor and West Hollywood millionaire is reported to have spent years doping up young black men, often recruited from the streets to become sex workers, on meth, and killed two of them? We get only radio silence from the woke lords of the Golden Coast.
The reported Gothic tragedy of Ed Buck and his victims takes place in West Hollywood, the tiny, glamorous city flanked by Beverly Hills and Hollywood proper. WeHo has been a gay and transgender capital of the greater Los Angeles area for more than half a century, home to dozens of gay bars and LA’s hottest club along Sunset Strip. It’s also home to Buck, a WeHo power player with friends in high places and a reportedly lethal fetish for drugging male sex workers.
Rumors of Buck’s proclivities have long circled around town, and progressive local journalists for alternative outlets have been sounding the alarm on Buck and government complicity in his sordid behavior for years. They say that two recent tragedies at Buck’s home aren’t accidents at all but that Buck is a predator protected by Los Angeles. As the Buck saga unfolds, it seems that they were correct.
In the summer of 2017, 26-year-old Gemmel Moore turned up dead at Buck’s apartment. The Los Angeles County coroner immediately ruled the death an accidental overdose, and because of the massive presence of meth and drug paraphernalia throughout Buck’s home, homicide prosecutors suggested that the District Attorney’s office consider murder, voluntary manslaughter, and drug charges. The Sheriff’s Department declined to charge him with any crime.
But according to Moore’s own diary entries, Buck destroyed men by design. Moore wrote that Buck pulled him out of homelessness and into effective sexual slavery, introducing him to crystal meth and getting him addicted. In his last entry before his death, Moore wrote, “If it didn’t hurt so bad, I’d kill myself but I’ll let Ed Buck do it for now.”
As reporting from Jasmyne Cannick indicated, when authorities arrived on the scene, another young black man showed up to Buck’s apartment. Even after Moore’s death, Buck still wanted to party.
After Moore’s death, writers such as Cannick and those at Wehoville scouted out more of Buck’s victims, confirming that the millionaire paid a few hundred bucks for sex from men he’d scouted on the streets and from sex websites. (Buck gave over $90,000 to Democrats including Hillary Clinton, Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Calif., and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema D-Ariz., between 2007 and 2016.)
Multiple men have alleged that Buck drugged them into submission, at times without their consent. Buck’s former friend, Samuel Lloyd, said that the prominent donor specifically sought out “men that were struggling and on the street and had no money.”
“Gemmel was scared of this man,” Lloyd said of Moore in the days before his death. “Scared that this man was going to hurt him.”
No one listened. And now yet another gay black man, Timothy Dean of WeHo, is dead. Dean, who worked on the Saks Fifth Avenue off Wilshire Boulevard, has been described as “well-liked” and “always friendly” by local media. His roommate swears that he never saw Dean on drugs. He also fit the bill, described by self-identified victim Jermaine Gagnon, of Buck’s ideal archetype: “young, black, handsome.”
Officials have not yet released a cause of death. If 2017 was any indication, they’ll chalk it up to an accident. But the real pressing question is why.
Many conservatives have rightly pointed out that Clinton, who received thousands of dollars of donations from Buck, has remained silent on the issue and has not agreed to return the money or donate it to a charity for, say, sex-trafficking victims or gay youth.
But past the donations and photos with Clinton, Lieu, Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., and a few others, Buck’s ties seem more local and evocative of a more pervasive problem in progressive hierarchies.
WeHo is meant to be a beacon of liberalism, a rainbow-streaked city championing inclusivity. But in practice, who benefits from Hollywood royalty? Buck faced public hits after the first death at his home. He had to resign from the eminent Stonewall Democratic Club Steering Committee. But how many strings behind the scenes were pulled to keep Buck out of prison?
Buck had friends in high places, not just photo-ops with Washington mainstays, but close ties to quiet power living in the Hills. LA County Assessor and former West Hollywood mayor Jeffrey Prang described Buck as “a leader in the West Hollywood community and civil affairs for L.A. County.”
Buck donated over $10,000 to the WeHo mayor over the past few years, and he donated to the very district attorney who chose not to press charges. Just one City Council member, Lindsey Horvath, publicly denounced Buck prior to the second death. The rest gladly accepted his money.
Eric Bauman, the chairman of the LA County Democratic Party at the time of Moore’s death, was called upon by Democratic delegates to denounce Buck. Bauman refused. He since became the chairman of the California Democratic Party, but he was forced to resign following sexual misconduct allegations of his own.
It seems the people in charge were willing to ignore Buck’s misdeeds. Complete with photographic evidence and emails proving correspondence, Damar Love alleges that Buck drugged him at his apartment, leading him nearly to overdose after Buck paid him for sex. Love says he woke up to realize that his arm was “tied down and it was red.” He says he escaped using a taser on Buck’s table and contacted authorities in WeHo, Hawthorne, and Inglewood to report Buck to the police.
According to a report by Cannick, the West Hollywood Sheriff’s Station threatened to arrest Love for being under the influence, even after he said that he believed he had been drugged. They allegedly told Love to leave.
Moore was dead four weeks later.
“The death was shocking news, but not that surprising news,” said former West Hollywood City Council member Steve Martin to the WeHo Times. “You can quote me on that. If there was ever anybody in West Hollywood whose bed you expected a dead body to turn up in, it was Ed Buck.”
