The Rialto Report

It’s 1978, and Jamie Gillis is one of the most famous sex film stars in the world. Not just that, but he has a well-known girlfriend too – the high-profile restaurant critic for New York magazine, Gael Greene. Their relationship has opened the door for Jamie to New York society – elegant events, exclusive nightclubs, and most importantly for Jamie, the best restaurants. On the face of it, they’re well-suited: their business is sex and their passion is food. Or is it the other way round? And does it even matter?

Jamie is at his peak, darkly handsome, deeply sexual, aloof, and mysterious – but shunned by polite society. Gael is the opposite: a cool blonde, ten years older, and well-regarded in cultured circles.

Gael believes in Jamie and encourages her famous well-connected friends to hire him as a legit mainstream actor: people like super-agent Sue Mengers, or writer Peter Maas, author of Serpico, who is casting for the lead role of the film adaptation of his book, King of the Gypsies.

Gael was obsessed by Jamie’s sexually wanton lifestyle and she decides that she and Jamie will write a book together – and the source material will be a series of audio diaries that Jamie will record detailing his life. She thinks it should be named, ‘The Prince of Porn is a Happy Man.’

There is one problem: Jamie’s isn’t particularly happy, and his life is backsliding.

You see, his age weighs heavily on his psyche, as does a feeling that a fulfilled life is getting away from him.

Sure he’s started therapy sessions with Robert Firestone, a clinical psychologist – but Firestone pursued him to be a client after spending hours admiring Jamie’s pornographic film appearances in Times Square theaters.

Jamie loves the theater and is a regular at Broadway plays, but that also serves as a reminder that he’s an anonymous and failed actor – even though he’s recognized every day on the street as a porn star.

And so, his life goes on: by day, he continues to appear in the city’s low budget sex films, in the early hours he can often be found in the city’s underground poker games, and in between times, he listens to piano concertos, gazing out of his apartment window on West 48th Street at the hookers, pickpockets, and street life.

And then there’s the sex. It’s an all-consuming hunger in his life. He’s recovering from a failed love affair with Lorey Sebastian that had promised so much but went sour so quickly. Now he’s returned to casual hook-ups with a vengeance and an unquenchable desire. A bewildering variety of partners, some including Nelson, a Puerto Rican rough trade boyfriend, who was often his wing-man partner in carnal adventures.

Needless to say, most of these sexual escapades are without Gael. After the initial thrill of their union, Jamie is increasingly conflicted by their relationship: he recognizes that she provides security, safety and opportunity – it’s just that he isn’t sure he really values those qualities. Above all, he’s dissatisfied with Gael sexually, admitting that he needs the added stimulation of a men’s magazine when he’s with her.

It all leads to a spiraling turmoil of self-questioning with occasional flashes of optimism and happiness. And these innermost feelings, thoughts, and reactions are documented in these tapes made almost 50 years ago. They’ve been hidden away for decades, unheard until today. These recordings, after-hours reflections, candid, honest, and unfiltered, are presented here for the first time. Needless to say, turn off now if you’re liable to be offended.

This is Part 3 of the story of Jamie Gillis and Gael Greene in 1978: Backsliding Into The Dark.

You can listen to Part 1 of the series here, and Part 2 here.

This podcast is 37 minutes long.

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The post The Porn Star and the Foodie: Jamie Gillis & Gael Greene in 1978 – Part 3: Backsliding Into The Dark – Podcast 178 appeared first on The Rialto Report.

Tina Marie straddled two completely different worlds: by day, you could find her behind a desk in a Beverly Hills legal office or by the pool of the senior living community she found her way into. On nights and weekends, she was Bad Tina – an adult film star and high-end call girl whose image was plastered across men’s magazines and movie screens.

Tina was conflicted and wanted out of the business, but the bills kept piling up. Then she met aspiring porn producer Mark Carriere who traveled halfway across the country to find her. They built an adult industry empire together that earned them plenty of money – but how much is enough when all you really want is to be Good Tina.

In this second part of her story, Tina Marie talks about transactional sex, the price of a deathbed promise, and what happens when you finally decide not to be ashamed anymore.

Tina Marie calls it an exorcism. I call it an affirmation.

This podcast is 58 minutes long.

Listen to the first part of Tina Marie’s story.

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with Richard Milner

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The post Tina Marie – Good Tina, Bad Tina – Part 2: Podcast 177 appeared first on The Rialto Report.

When you think of adult video vixens in the 1980s, you may think of Ginger Lynn, Christy Canyon, or Traci Lords. But they weren’t the only fan favorites on the scene.

Take Tina Marie: she was like a Robert Crumb goddess come to life. She started out in men’s magazines and sex loops in the early 1980s, and quickly moved on to starring roles in feature films before stepping behind the camera to produce and direct adult movies with her husband Mark Carriere. 

It wasn’t the professional path Tina imagined for herself growing up as the daughter of a fundamentalist Samoan minister in New Zealand and Trinidad. And while it was a career that introduced Tina to many things she prizes to this day, it was a job that came at an existential price: how do you reconcile the idea of yourself that you grew up with – the dutiful daughter, the spiritual sister, the good girl – with the adult industry powerhouse you became?

In this first part of her story, Tina Marie talks about growing up as a preacher’s daughter, finding and starting to question her identity, getting her start in porn, and the wild party scene that wrapped around the adult industry. 

This podcast is 64 minutes long.

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The post Tina Marie – Good Tina, Bad Tina – Part 1: Podcast 176 appeared first on The Rialto Report.

A look back at Ray's controversial life and work in his last years, in light of the investigation into the disappearance of several women.

After the death of his wife, Ray Horsch returned to the world of adult film.

A few years after first meeting Ray Horsch, I returned to his home in Philadelphia to film an interview with him.

It was there, and in subsequent visits, that I met a number of people who knew him: filmmakers, artists, a number of women who moved into his house for varying periods of time.

I also met his former wife Amy McHale with whom I corresponded for a while.

It was only this year, I learned that Amy had disappeared in 2016.

At the time of this recording, what happened to her remains unresolved, and her disappearance has become part of the wider investigation now involving Ray’s former Philadelphia home.

Ray Horsch talks about his life as a forger – of banknotes and Picasso etchings, being a wholesale manufacturer of illicit drugs, and becoming a fugitive from the law.

If you know any information that may relate to the ongoing investigation of Ray Horsch or his son Eugene, please contact Detective Joseph Murray, at the Homicide Division of the Philadelphia Police Department, at 215 686 3334.

Please note that all unauthorized reproduction or use of the video or audio published by The Rialto Report is strictly prohibited.

When I first visited Ray Horsch at his home in Philadelphia to interview him, most of the conversation was about New York in the early 1970s. More specifically, Times Square. The adult movie theaters. The live sex shows. The people who worked in them. The strange, seedy ecosystem that flourished there long before Times Square became the Disney-fied tourist destination we know today.

Ray had been part of that world. And in talking about it, he also talked about himself – about performance, transgression, sex, violence, art, and the persona he had spent years constructing.

Listening now, the question running beneath much of it is one I could never have anticipated when I recorded it: Where did the performance end? And where did Ray begin?

If you know any information that may relate to the ongoing investigation of Ray Horsch or his son Eugene, please contact Detective Joseph Murray, at the Homicide Division of the Philadelphia Police Department, at 215 686 3334.

You can listen to the first part of this series here.

Please note that all unauthorized reproduction or use of the audio in this podcast is strictly prohibited.

This podcast is 35 minutes long.

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I first visited Ray at his home outside Philadelphia almost twenty years ago.

It wasn’t the house on West Chew Avenue that has since become the focus of the ongoing murder investigation. At the time, Ray lived in Chalfont, a quiet suburb some thirty miles north of the city. His was a large, comfortable three-bedroom house, with a big yard and an extensive basement.

I’d tracked him down because I’d started documenting the history of the beginnings of the adult film business in the 1960s and ’70s. On the face of it, Ray was a relatively minor figure in that story. He’d directed only one theatrically released adult film of note, back in 1973, The Erotic Memoirs of a Male Chauvinist Pig.

But when I looked for him, in the early days of the internet, he was unusual in that he had his own website. And it was the way he described himself there that caught my attention.

It read: “Alternately an artist, filmmaker, composer, former Sesame Street program maker, writer, porn performer, drug smuggler, political activist, art forger, counterfeiter, pot grower, air show pilot, army deserter, fugitive, sociopath, ex-convict, and all-out villain, Ray Horsch’s life has been as colorful and obsessive as his art.”

I had no idea how much—if any—of that was true at the time. But it certainly made me curious. So I contacted him.

Over the phone, Ray was polite, friendly, and humble, and he invited me down to Philadelphia to spend the day with him and talk about his life.

The first thing you noticed about Ray was how he looked. You couldn’t really notice anything else.

He was in his sixties at the time, with long black straggly hair and an intense, piercing stare. He dressed entirely in black. And to complete the effect, he sometimes wore an eye patch—which, as far as I could tell, served no practical purpose whatsoever. It simply made him look more menacing. For Ray, that was probably reason enough.

Because Ray enjoyed playing the villain.

You’ll hear that repeatedly in these conversations. He wanted to provoke. His appearance did it. His photographs did it. His writing and films did it. Shock wasn’t incidental to his work; it was central to the persona he had constructed around himself.

Ray maintained that all of this was performance—that he was an artist who wanted to challenge and disturb, not simply through the work he produced, but through the character he presented to the world. Privately, though, he insisted that this front was just that: a character. A game. A practical joke that he played on you, and on the world.

At the time, I took him at his word. Today, inevitably, that claim is harder to hear in quite the same way.

And yet the curious thing was that the Ray I encountered in person seemed at odds with the character he had created. He did look frightening. But he wasn’t frightening to talk to. Over the many hours we spent together, he came across as soft-spoken, thoughtful and patient. He was intelligent, articulate and self-aware. And over the years, I was able to verify many of the seemingly tall tales that he told me about his extraordinary past.

Today, however, I find myself thinking less about what Ray told me than about what he may have chosen not to tell me.

And that is one of the uncomfortable aspects about presenting these recordings now.

Knowing Ray does not mean that I know what happened at West Chew Avenue. Spending time with him does not give me any particular insight into the investigation that is continuing today. And I don’t want these conversations to be heard as though they contain some hidden solution waiting to be discovered.

They were interviews with a man talking about his life as he wanted me to understand it.

But I am also very conscious of something else: Ray spent much of his life seeking attention. He created an identity designed to provoke people, disturb them and make himself difficult to ignore. By putting his voice back into the world now, there is a danger that I allow that persona to dominate this story once again.

And it shouldn’t.

Because whatever eventually emerges from the investigation, at its center are real people. Women whose lives matter independently of Ray Horsch. People who are missing or may have been harmed. Families who are still living with uncertainty and waiting for answers. They are not supporting characters in the story of an outrageous man.

That is something I want to remain conscious of throughout this series.

So where these recordings are disturbing, I don’t want to include something simply because it shocks. And where they raise questions that I cannot answer, I don’t want to pretend that I can. What I can do is present the conversations as they happened, with the context we have now, and allow the distance between those two things to remain unresolved.

That first day, though, I knew nothing of what would come later.

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The post Unknowing Ray Horsch – Episode 2: Performance, Podcast 172 appeared first on The Rialto Report.

Today the Rialto Report re-visits our relationship and the various interviews with Ray Horsch, the subject of a ongoing murder investigation.

This isn’t a normal Rialto Report series: needless to say, much of it is disturbing. If this isn’t for you, we get it. We’ll return to more typical content soon. You won’t have to wait long, we promise.

In the meantime, If you know any information that may relate to the ongoing investigation, please contact Detective Joseph Murray, at the Homicide Division of the Philadelphia Police Department, at (215) 686 3334.

Please note that all unauthorized reproduction or use of the audio in this podcast is strictly prohibited.

This podcast is 32 minutes long.

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Let’s start with the facts.

June 19th, 2026, and a seemingly routine traffic stop in Philadelphia.

U.S. Park Police pulled over a black BMW driven by 44-year-old Eugene Horsch. Inside the car with him was a female passenger. She appeared terrified, and told officers that Eugene was going to hurt her.

The officers searched the vehicle and found two loaded firearms with obscured serial numbers, roughly $8,000 worth of narcotics, and a counterfeit DEA badge featuring Eugene Horsch’s photograph.

The frightened female passenger gave police her ID card that turned out belonged to another woman, Blair Tonzelli, who’s been missing for over three years.

The woman admitted she didn’t know Tonzelli but that she feared Eugene had harmed people. She told police she was afraid of Eugene because he’d bragged about knowing how to use chemicals to dissolve human remains.

Armed with this evidence, Philadelphia Police raided Eugene’s home on West Chew Avenue later that day. They reportedly discovered a second illegal firearm, an FBI badge with Eugene’s picture, and an extensive indoor marijuana-growing operation. They also found five urns filled with cremated remains and a 55-gallon drum directly connected to the basement plumbing.

An expanded joint local and federal law enforcement raid followed. While the initial investigation targeted Eugene Horsch, detectives uncovered a mountain of graphic evidence that traced directly back to his father, Raymond Horsch. This included hard drives containing over 600,000 images and 70,000 videos, which allegedly link several missing women to the house on West Chew Avenue where Raymond and Eugene lived. In late August 2026, investigators revealed that one of the videos allegedly showed Raymond strangling an unidentified woman to death inside the home.

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I knew Ray Horsch. Or at least, until recently, I would have said that I knew him.

I first contacted him because he directed an obscure, cult adult film, The Erotic Memoirs of a Male Chauvinist Pig, back in 1973. I visited him at his home in Philadelphia. I spent time with him. I spoke with him at length, on and off microphone, I corresponded with him, interviewed him on several occasions over a twenty-year period, and filmed him at his home. And it is extracts from those conversations that I’m sharing here in a short series of podcasts.

Ray Horsch died in 2025 at the age of 82. He was an artist, a photographer, a filmmaker, and a relentless provocateur. Much of his work existed deliberately at the uncomfortable intersection of art and pornography, fantasy and autobiography, lust and violence. Some people admired it. Some found it exploitative or misogynistic. I know I often found it extremely difficult to look at.

None of his work was a secret. What may have been secret is something altogether different and more sinister.

In the summer of 2026, this extraordinary police investigation began unfolding at the Philadelphia house where Ray and his son had lived. The investigation is continuing. An enormous amount remains unknown.

This series is not an attempt to solve that investigation.

And these interviews are not evidence of Ray Horsch’s guilt – or otherwise.

They are something stranger, and perhaps more unsettling.

They are conversations with a man I thought I knew, recorded before I had any idea that allegations like these would one day be made about him.

Listening to them again now is a different, and disturbing, experience.

There is a temptation, when something terrible comes to light about someone we have known, to reconstruct the past so that everything suddenly becomes a clue.

The peculiar comment we didn’t think much about.

The story that now sounds different.

The joke that suddenly seems sinister.

The moment when a follow-up question was left unasked.

Memory becomes contaminated by what we know now. And hindsight can make the unknowable seem as though it should always have been obvious.

I want to resist that temptation.

I don’t want to pretend that I understood things then that I didn’t. I don’t want to turn every sentence Ray spoke into a confession, or every disturbing element of his work into evidence of something that has not been proven.

But neither do I want to pretend that these recordings sound the same to me today as they did when I made them.

They don’t.

And that leaves me with questions that extend beyond Ray Horsch.

How well do we ever really know another person?

When someone tells us who they are, what exactly are we being shown?

A confession?

A performance?

A carefully constructed persona?

Or simply the version of themselves that they have chosen for us to see?

Ray was particularly complicated in this respect. He delighted in obscuring the boundary between fact and invention. He cultivated an extreme persona deliberately designed to offend, and it was often difficult to differentiate between Ray the transgressive performance artist and Ray the man. If indeed there was a difference.

When I met Ray, that ambiguity was part of the fascination of talking to him.

Today however, it feels very different.

But there is another consideration that is far more important.

At the heart of the investigation surrounding Ray’s former home are not stories, photographs, films. or provocative artistic ideas.

There are women. Real women who are unaccounted for.

There are families who have lived for years with absence, uncertainty, and grief, many still waiting for answers.

I’ve been horrified at what the investigation has found – and the continuing revelations that emerge on an almost daily basis. Horrified for the victims and their families. And horrified that anyone could be capable of such depravity. I’ve been in touch with the Philadelphia Police Homicide Unit detectives in order to turn over all materials relating to Ray that may be helpful to their enquiries.

I am conscious that turning this story into entertainment—or treating those women’s lives as scenery in the story of a possibly murderous man—would compound a grave injustice.

I’ve also asked myself whether releasing these interviews gives Ray exactly what he always wanted: another audience, another opportunity to shock, another chance to make himself the center of the story.

Perhaps it does.

But suppressing these conversations would create its own kind of falsehood. They happened. They are part of the historical record. And heard carefully, rather than sensationally, I think they reveal something worth confronting: how partial our understanding of another person can be, even when we believe we know them well.

So I wanted to return to them—not in search of a revelation hidden between the lines, and not to force the past into a story that has yet to be proven.

I wanted to hear the man I knew then through the knowledge I have now, and confront the uncomfortable space between the two.

I thought I knew Ray. Now it feels like I’m unknowing him, undoing the process of knowing him, and replacing it with a new perception.

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The post Unknowing Ray Horsch – Episode 1: Youth, Podcast 171 appeared first on The Rialto Report.

The concluding part of Brandy's story - and tales of Buttman, John Stagliano, People's Court, being blacklisted, and the infamous flame wars.

Over the years, Brandy Alexandre always seemed to have a habit of turning up at unexpected times and in unexpected ways.

For example, she went to work in the adult film industry – after being raised a Mormon. Even more surprising – she was already familiar with sex movies due to a string of inappropriate older boyfriends who’d introduced her to adult theaters: the result was a teenage curiosity for the sex industry and a sizeable crush on John Leslie.

She became unlikely roommates with sex film guru Bill Margold, and, despite his attempts to dissuade her, she took the plunge and became a porn actress.

She became close to John Stagliano – both professionally and romantically – at the beginning of the huge success of his Buttman series and Evil Empire production company. And then, incongruously, she popped up on television on People’s Court, where she sued John for lost earnings.

Shortly after that, she disappeared from the business believing she’d been blacklisted from the industry as a result of the court case. A few years later, in the early days of the internet, she suddenly showed up again, this time involved in online flame wars in Usenet groups. That drama led to her being stalked, harassed, and losing her job – as well as being featured on television news shows.

Now, after two decades of silence, Brandy has re-surfaced, this time on Instagram, where she’s been sharing a remarkable collection of photographs and memories from her adult film years.

I had so many questions, and was keen for her to set the record straight in her own words.

This is Part One of Brandy Alexandre’s story.

This podcast is 47 minutes long.

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Brandy and her dad

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The post Brandy Alexandre – 2000 Days, Part 1: Podcast 169 appeared first on The Rialto Report.