A rape case in the world of kink asks which of actor's many lovers should be believed

The character letters submitted to a Los Angeles judge were not the customary expressions of support, especially for a man accused of rape.

“He taught me about a world of intimacy which was beyond my experience,” one woman, a physician, wrote of sexual encounters with an actor named Gabriel Olds.

“We would incorporate choking and other painful acts, and we frequently videotaped ourselves too,” another who dated Olds explained.

“He was such a gentle ass slapper[,] I told him he could go harder,” a third lover recalled.

“It was the best sex I have ever had,” a fourth wrote of what she called their “situationship.”

The testimonials offered in an effort to reduce his bail gave a much different view of Olds than a 12-count felony complaint brought last year in Superior Court. It accused the 52-year-old of rape, sodomy and other sexual offenses in what prosecutors said was a string of terrifying assaults on six romantic partners. In the view of those women, a deputy district attorney remarked at a December hearing, the defendant was no talented lover, but a predator with “an insatiable appetite for this violent type of sex.”

A journeyman actor who appeared in shows such as “NCIS: Los Angeles” and “Boardwalk Empire,” Olds long pursued nontraditional sex and relationships. His unfolding prosecution has the potential to put the subculture of BDSM — bondage, discipline, dominance and submission, sadism and masochism — on trial in an era in which the “Fifty Shades of Grey” books and movies such as “Babygirl” have made it increasingly mainstream.

Though the case is still in its early stages, proceedings and filings have already touched on ethical nonmonogamy, sadomaschochism and the rising popularity of choking female partners during sex. Olds maintains he is innocent of the charges because his alleged victims agreed to everything he did to them, raising the prospect that a jury will have to decide what consent looks like in a world of bondage and domination.

Olds’ attorney, Leonard Levine, has defended about 100 accused sex offenders in five decades as a lawyer. He said the mores and practices illuminated by this case were so outside the norm that he retained a sociologist who studies alternative lifestyles to, as he wrote in a filing, “educate both counsel and the Court in the world of kinky sex.”

Friends, former lovers and even the lead investigator described Olds, a Yale graduate and son of a renowned feminist poet, as charming and highly intelligent. He established long-running relationships with an overlapping group of women he met on apps such as Adult Friend Finder and in entertainment industry circles.

At least 24 have been drawn into the case: The six former lovers he is charged with assaulting, another half dozen who alleged to authorities that he pressured them into violent sex they didn’t want and a dozen more who insist he is incapable of harming women and are aiding his defense. At some hearings, a cluster of female supporters shared the spectator’s gallery with women who accuse him of violating them.

“I do not believe that he did any of these things,” one supporter said. She dated Olds for a year and a half and has gone to court for five proceedings. Like many women connected to the case, she spoke on the condition of anonymity citing personal and professional ramifications.

She added, “ I know him, and this is just not who I know him to be.”

***

In January 2023, a television producer who had met Olds online went to the Santa Monica courthouse for a restraining order.

“We had sex and he began to choke me. I asked him to stop and he didn’t. I tried getting out and I couldn’t. I blacked out. I think he slapped me to wake up. I then got very sick and vomited,” she wrote on a form seeking a restraining order. She had photos of the marks he had left on her neck, she wrote, adding, “My therapist said I have PTSD.”

Olds hired a criminal defense lawyer and negotiated a confidential settlement with the producer. Under the agreement, a copy of which was later filed in his rape case, the actor admitted no wrongdoing but agreed to pay $2,700 for the producer’s medical expenses. The restraining order was sealed, the producer told The Times in an email. (The newspaper does not generally identify sexual assault victims without their consent.)

She reported the incident to the LAPD, but the district attorney’s office declined to pursue assault charges. The specific reasons were redacted from a memo the district attorney’s office provided to The Times, but a prosecutor wrote in the memo that he had consulted two colleagues who specialized in sex crimes and a third who worked in domestic violence and determined, “This case cannot be proven beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Asked about the decision, Det. Brent Hopkins, who took over the Olds investigation later, said, “He-said, she-said cases are very tough to prove, and often they don’t get filed on.”

The producer was not deterred. According to a defense filing and interviews with Olds’ supporters, she connected with other sexual partners of Olds with posts on Facebook and a site called “Are We Dating The Same Guy?”

Eventually five other women told police Olds had choked them during sex against their will, according to a defense filing regarding bail. Three of them said Olds strangled them to the point of unconsciousness as they begged him to stop, according to a prosecutor’s court filing. Two of the incidents occurred in 2013, and the others in 2021, 2022 and 2023.

Olds did not respond to an interview request relayed through his lawyer. His defense has characterized the producer’s efforts as “a crusade” in which women who had not previously complained were talked into believing they were sexual assault victims.

“It is hard to ignore the fact that not one of the allegations, except for [the producer], was made contemporaneously,” Olds’ lawyer, Levine, wrote in a filing last year.

Hopkins, the LAPD detective, acknowledged the producer was “very motivated on this because she’s upset she was a victim.” But he said the alleged victims in the complaint came to his attention through other means, and the claims of women she did track down were thoroughly vetted.

“It wasn’t like we all got in a room, and she said, ‘All right, ladies, let him have it,’’’ Hopkins said.

Olds was arrested at his Studio City rental in August. Jennifer Adams, a platonic friend of 25 years, said that, when he learned the identities of the women accusing him, “he was genuinely surprised.”

***

Olds’ defense is that his accusers asked him to choke them.

If that sounds crazy, you’re probably old, or have been married for a long time.

Over the last decade, sexual choking has become what Indiana University researchers call “a frequent, normative part of consensual sex” among young adults. Some 58% of women in a 2021 survey of college students said they had been choked during sex.

Also known as erotic asphyxiation or breath play, choking is supposed to produce more intense climaxes, though less than half of the women surveyed by Indiana researchers reported the choking experience as “very pleasurable.”

The trend seems driven at least partially by the expectations of men consuming online porn, where algorithms prioritize extreme scenarios. In 2000, less than 1% of pornographic videos depicted choking. A decade later it was 28%, according to research cited by Debby Herbenick, of Indiana’s Center for Sexual Health Promotion, and her colleagues. It’s become so normalized in recent years that HBO’s “Euphoria” and “The Idol” showed female characters being choked during sex.

All of this has happened despite the risk of death and serious injury, including brain damage, that accompany cutting off someone’s air supply. Established BDSM organizations deplore the practice, which they view as infiltrating kink from the outside, and have banned it from their sex parties as unacceptably dangerous.

“It drives me crazy when I read yet another very trippy article that says, ‘Yes, you can kill somebody when you’re choking them, but here’s how to do it safely.’ It’s like, ‘No, no, no, no, no,’” said Susan Wright, executive director of the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom.

Data collected by Wright’s group indicates an uptick in police reports about sex choking, and there have been deaths, including a 19-year-old New Jersey woman whose partner is facing manslaughter charges.

“People are doing it without adequate negotiation. They are freaking their partners out, and they are not aware of how incredibly dangerous it is,” said Elisabeth Sheff, the sociologist Olds retained as an expert witness.

She works on a handful of criminal cases each year for both prosecutors and defense attorneys and said in an interview that what made the Olds case stand apart was “the volume. Most kinksters are maybe not as successful at dating as Mr. Olds. He — for whatever reason — has been able to have many, many partners.”

***

Olds started working in Hollywood before he graduated from college. He got some bigger roles, playing televangelist Pat Robertson in the 2021 indie film “The Eyes of Tammy Faye,” but he appears to have mainly scraped by with guestwork on series including “Law & Order” and “Charmed.”

Mary Tyler Moore and Gabriel Olds in “Like Mother, Like Son: The Strange Story of Sante and Kenny Kimes” from 2001.

(CBS)

His annual income was less than $30,000 in the five years before he was charged, according to a letter submitted by a longtime friend. What he did have was a fancy East Coast pedigree. He often talked about his Yale education and his mother, Sharon, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet whose work resonated with many women.

Once called “the laureate of sex,” she wrote in a confessional style about intimate topics, including her 6-year-old son’s genitals, which she described in a 1984 poem as “pointing straight ahead, leading him as if by the nose into his life.”

Sharon, 82, did not return messages requesting comment. Her son’s friends told The Times she is ill but has had phone calls with him in jail.

Adams, his longtime platonic friend, said Olds was open about being a nonmonogamist, including in conversations with his mother, and picked sexual partners who were age-appropriate and successful.

“He likes very intelligent women,” said Adams, who has met many of the women he dated. “Usually very strong women.”

Some former lovers supporting Olds have said their relationships were about more than sex. In letters to the judge, one wrote that they cried together when his cat died. Another recalled playing Wordle in bed with him the morning after a liaison.

“When you’re not having sex with him, he’s like, ‘Do you want a cappuccino?’ … He’s just like a really lovable person,” one former lover said in an interview.

That view of him was far from universal. Four days after Olds was arrested, a poster created the subreddit “GabrielOldsSurvivors.”

“Okay — I’ll go first,” the poster began. She wrote that she had dated him on and off a decade earlier and was not suprised by his arrest. “He was a monster.”

Others joined in, including one who called dating Olds in 2015 “the worst relationship of my life.”

“He made me feel as if I were a prude for not enjoying being choked to the point of passing out,” the poster wrote. “I hated it, but I’m a people-pleaser and wanted to be considered an open and liberal/liberated person.”

One woman told the group Olds’ arrest was causing her to reevaluate their five-year affair.

“I never saw him be violent though,” the post read. “I even thought there were times I said no and he stopped. Did I make that up? I believe everyone who has accused him so then I doubt myself.”

The Reddit conversation has been referenced in a defense court filing and Hopkins, of the LAPD, posted on it, encouraging women to contact him if they had relevant information. The sex crimes detective has conducted interviews with dozens of women, dating back to Olds’ college days, and he said they painted a picture of a man who didn’t always respect “no.”

“There’s nothing wrong inherently with the things he likes to do,” the detective said. “But for him, it seems that some of the thrill comes from continuing when people say ‘stop.’”

LAPD detective Brent Hopkins has conducted interviews with dozens of women who were once involved with Olds.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

Olds has denied violating women’s consent.

Many women remarked on what Hopkins called an “unusual charisma” that led them to ignore the messiness of his home and vehicle and his body odor and, more seriously, intimate behavior that left them feeling violated.

“They describe it as, ‘I knew it was bad. I knew what he was doing to me was wrong. All my friends were telling me, you got to get out, but I was just drawn to him,’” Hopkins said.

Some women who accused him of assault in New York in the late 1990s or early 2000s were referred to authorities there who ultimately determined the alleged offenses fell outside the statute of limitations, an L.A. prosecutor told a judge last year.

Six others described upsetting encounters in which “they were pressured by the Defendant to engage in violent sex acts that they did not consent to, but they were too afraid of him to express their lack of consent,” Dep. Dist. Atty. Jeffrey Megee wrote in a filing last year about bail. He opted not to press charges in incidents when “no” wasn’t expressly communicated.

“The question is not kink or erotic asphyxiation,” the prosecutor said at a December bail hearing. Instead, he told a judge, the central issue was a “clear lack of consent expressed and ignored by the defendant.”

***

Olds has been in county jail since his August arrest. He used savings to pay Levine’s bills, the lawyer said, but he lacks funds for his $3.5 million bail.

A selfie taken by Gabriel Olds in 2017.

(Gabriel Olds)

In November, his defense rounded up character letters from about 12 former lovers who said they had positive experiences with him, according to his longtime friend Adams. His defense filed six in court to equal the number of alleged victims, redacting or otherwise concealing most of their identities to avoid what his lawyer called in a related filing “scorn and criticism by other women on social media.”

Four told the judge in the letters that they had direct experience with the central issue in the case: consent and choking.

“If I felt I couldn’t breathe or he was becoming too rough for my comfort level, I would push on Gabe’s shoulders and he would let go,” wrote a woman named Ashley whose last name was redacted.

“When he placed his hand around my neck, I felt safe,” a letter signed A. Crisci read.

“He always stopped when I prompted him to,” wrote former lover Jill Tizekker.

The letters did not move Judge Cathryn Brougham. She declined to lower his bail, citing among other things the sentence he faces — 93 years to life in prison.

“The fact that there are six different victims that have come forward is very compelling to the court,” Brougham said in delivering her Dec. 19th ruling.

Even if released, his lawyer acknowledged in a filing last year, it is not “practical or feasible” for him to return to acting.

In Men’s Central Jail, Olds does not have reliable access to the internet or even a pen. He spends his days writing screenplays with a pencil he sharpens with his teeth.