Picture Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Day by day Beast/Getty
Los Angeles-area actual property magnate Mark Handel was as soon as in a position to get state laws specifically drafted to go well with his developments, persuade the town council to offer his initiatives an interest-free six-figure mortgage, and to domesticate ties with males who would later symbolize the area within the Home of Representatives and U.S. Senate.
However in accordance with supplies from a forthcoming documentary—which The Day by day Beast corroborated by way of public data analysis and conversations with San Fernando Valley insiders—Handel, now dealing with federal fraud and money-laundering expenses, maintained a parallel profession as one of the vital infamous and misogynistic figures in hardcore porn: Khan Tusion.
One of many administrators behind the brand new movie revealed to The Day by day Beast that he first heard about Handel’s notorious alter ego whereas engaged on a film primarily based on a 2010 homicide within the grownup trade.
“Individuals would point out this man ‘Khan Tusion’—they'd name him the ‘boogeyman of porn,’ ‘the Freddie Krueger of porn’,” stated Lucas Heyne, whose prior movie Mope premiered on the Sundance Movie Competition in 2019. “He was identified for being one of the vital verbally abusive and bodily abusive porn administrators that’s ever existed.”
Handel’s legal professional didn't reply voicemails or emails for this story, and in a short telephone alternate with The Day by day Beast, Handel himself insisted he would communicate solely by way of his authorized counsel. He didn't reply to a subsequent name and textual content message detailing all the data on this article.
Heyne and his co-director, Sara Gardephe, instructed The Day by day Beast that Handel has been equally unresponsive to their overtures—although they nonetheless hope he'll conform to an interview earlier than the movie’s deliberate launch subsequent 12 months.
Khan Tusion’s movies—which have titles like Tough Intercourse and Meat Holes—are notorious for his or her scenes of feminine performers getting crushed, spat upon, stepped on, and even choked into unconsciousness. Taglines referred to the ladies he labored with as “jizzmops” and “the nastiest whores who like to be handled like nugatory items of meat.”
In accordance with stars interviewed for the documentary, titled Pariah after Khan Tusion’s manufacturing firm, the cruelty and degradation that got here from the person behind the digital camera wasn’t an act.
“Tons of girls have been abused by this one man,” actor Taryn Thomas asserts in a single clip shared with The Day by day Beast, recalling how she agreed to what she believed would solely be a tough intercourse scene in Meat Holes 3. “No one instructed me that I used to be going to go to a porn set and I’m going to be verbally abused, spit on, have any individual’s foot placed on my vagina, OK, or something to that extent. And I’m going to have to consider the issues this douchebag stated to me for the remainder of my life. No, I shouldn’t have needed to put up with that, and that wasn’t within the contract.”
A performer who previously used the identify Regan Starr described to The Day by day Beast a Khan Tusion-orchestrated encounter so excessive that its distributor determined to drop the title solely. Starr stated that the director instructed her solely that she would seem in a “rougher intercourse scene,” and discouraged her from utilizing a “secure phrase” that an actor can deploy once they need to halt filming.
“He was type of telling me in his personal manner, that there wasn’t going to be a secure phrase, as a result of even when I used it they weren’t going to cease,” stated Starr, who turned distraught whereas recalling what occurred on set.
Looking back, Starr stated she didn't imagine Khan Tusion ever instructed the male actor contracted for the scene that there was a secure phrase in any respect—and when she shouted it, in rising ache from her counterpart’s blows, Khan Tusion saved recording.
“He motioned to the second cameraman, the movement to maintain rolling, hold rolling, hold rolling,” she stated. “His eyes received actually massive and he received excited. It was like he was in a trance, a pleasure trance type of factor. I’d by no means seen something prefer it.”
Lastly, as Starr broke down in a panic—fearing, she instructed The Day by day Beast, that she had unwittingly signed up for a snuff movie—the scene minimize abruptly brief. It quickly turned infamous within the porn world, at the same time as its director denied her model of occasions in trade publications.
What notably disturbed and intrigued Heyne, and his co-director Sara Gardephe, in regards to the brutal, menacing director is that he by no means confirmed his face and appeared to have labored to hide his identification.
Lucas Heyne attends the Mope premiere in the course of the 2019 Sundance Movie Competition.
Jerod Harris/Getty Photos
Moreover the pseudonym, Khan Tusion used a voice distorter on movie and by no means let himself be photographed or proven above the shoulders at trade occasions. Within the 2001 British documentary Hardcore, the director pressured the filmmaker to maintain the digital camera pointed at his torso, as he insisted he had a “completely different life” as a “pillar of the neighborhood” that he wanted to protect. He claimed he made the movies not for cash however to achieve a excessive he described as “higher than medication.”
However Heyne and Gardephe found it was an open secret that Khan Tusion was in reality the politically wired property developer Mark Handel, the brother of widespread however controversial radio host Invoice Handel. Invoice Handel instructed The Day by day Beast he's estranged from his brother, and maintained the 2 have had virtually no contact in recent times.
“The factor that first caught my eye was that this man was simply speaking to those ladies for almost all of the movies,” stated Gardephe, who beforehand directed a documentary about incels known as Shy Boys: IRL. “We ended up uncovering a very insane story.”
Within the interview with Thomas, the performer identifies a photograph of Handel as Khan Tusion. And a clear paper path immediately connects Handel’s respectable enterprises with Khan Tusion’s empire of humiliation and ache.
Federal data present that the now-defunct logos for Khan Tusion’s signature properties, from his manufacturing home Pariah Footage all the way down to titles comparable to Frank Wank and Piss Mops, all belonged to an organization known as MNP Enterprises LLC. California incorporation data present that not solely did Handel register this entity in his personal identify, however even used the identify and Calabasas tackle of his actual property agency, MWH Growth, on the submitting.
Insiders, most of whom requested anonymity to talk freely, described the San Fernando Valley as each the epicenter of the American porn trade and a locus of political energy in Southern California. However the two circles not often overlap, they stated, as elected officers discover the refracted glare of the set lights unflattering for his or her public picture.
Marketing campaign finance data present Handel poured 1000's upon 1000's of dollars into the electoral efforts of native politicians—most notably, now-Rep. Tony Cardenas (D-C.A.) and Sen. Alex Padilla (D-C.A.), whom Handel has backed since their days on the Los Angeles Metropolis Council. Tight native legal guidelines capped donations, however sources instructed The Day by day Beast that Handel served as a liaison for Cardenas to the bigger Los Angeles actual property neighborhood—permitting him to garner donations from an array of builders.
Rep. Tony Cardenas (D-CA).
Patrick T. Fallon/Getty Photos
Handel’s 2020 federal indictment, for allegedly concealing revenue and enterprise dealings amid chapter proceedings, additionally asserts he engaged in this sort of exercise, although it makes no reference to Cardenas or some other particular official.
“Defendant Handel additionally solicited giant quantities of donations from his enterprise associates and others to be paid to politicians, which defendant Handel described as being a ‘bundler’,” reads the charging doc, which might internet the mogul a jail sentence of as much as 120 years. “Handel did this, at the least partly, to profit his actual property initiatives by getting access to and having affect over politicians.”
Public data additionally present that Handel shaped a number of company ventures with one of many San Fernando Valley’s most essential energy brokers—James Acevedo, considered the political godfather to each Cardenas and Padilla. Handel’s agency, MWH, would later make use of a prime aide of Padilla’s from his time as metropolis council president. And Padilla’s protégé, former Assemblyman Felipe Fuentes, was the legislator who penned the state invoice to permit an embattled MWH mission to proceed. Fuentes didn't reply requests for remark.
On the town council within the mid-2000s—across the identical time as Khan Tusion was cranking out sequence like Hellfire Intercourse and Butt-Licking Anal Whores—Cardenas and Padilla helped push by way of Handel’s actual property initiatives of their districts, even over native opposition.
Cardenas declined to remark for this story. Padilla and Acevedo didn't reply to repeated outreach from The Day by day Beast. It's thus not possible to determine whether or not they knew about Handel’s alter ego.
Assemblyman Tony Cardenas (far left), Los Angeles Metropolis Council President Alex Padilla (heart speaker), and State Senator Richard Alarcon (Padilla has his hand on his shoulder).
Anne Cusack/Los Angeles Occasions through Getty Photos
What is for certain is that they accepted his assist regardless of his extremely publicized 1996 arrest in an underage prostitution sting, by which he and one other of his enterprise companions—a then-L.A. Constructing and Security Commissioner—allegedly paid for oral intercourse from a 17-year-old woman. Handel was initially discovered responsible and was sentenced to jail time and probation, though he later received the conviction reversed on enchantment.
One other beneficiary of Handel’s political and private largesse, former metropolis and state lawmaker Richard Alarcon—an ally-turned-enemy of the Acevedo-Cardenas-Padilla group—maintained he was unaware of Handel’s twin identification till fairly just lately.
“I had no thought in any way, and you realize, we labored on housing initiatives,” Alarcon instructed The Day by day Beast, including that he regarded the group of lobbyists Handel labored with to advance his developments as “very respectable.”
Alarcon discovered himself entangled in the newest, and maybe most sordid, chapter of Handel’s story, which performed out in 2018 and 2019 and which types a central episode in Pariah.
By then, Cardenas was within the Home, Padilla was California’s Secretary of State, and Handel was enmeshed within the chapter case that will in the end culminate in his arrest. “Khan Tusion,” in the meantime, had mysteriously vanished from the porn world following the 2010 launch of Midnight Prowl 17—coinciding with the steep decline of the San Fernando Valley scene in the course of the web period but additionally, Heyne famous, with the rising accessibility of public data on-line.
Nevertheless it was at this second that the sleazy underside of Handel’s life got here closest to publicity.
In April 2018, an nameless plaintiff filed a civil go well with in Los Angeles Superior Courtroom alleging an unnamed native official had groomed after which groped her as a teenage woman. The criticism was lodged towards a “John Doe,” however Cardenas rapidly got here ahead to determine himself because the accused and to disclaim the allegations. His legal professional characterised the claimant as “the daughter of a disgruntled former worker” and a possible “sufferer of manipulation.”
The case began to crumble after Alarcon, who had challenged Cardenas for his seat in 2016, revealed that a person he believed to be the daddy of the accuser had approached him providing filth on the incumbent in alternate for a job. The plaintiff’s legal professional dropped the case in 2019, and she or he in the end withdrew the declare. The choose dismissed it with prejudice, which means it could by no means be refiled, and Cardenas cheered his “complete vindication.”
However there was one element within the go well with that seems to have by no means been contested, and which Cardenas’s group explicitly declined to handle when questioned by The Day by day Beast—the accuser asserted that Cardenas had organized with Handel for her household to relocate from a trailer park to a four-bedroom home the developer owned utterly freed from cost.
Handel even appeared to substantiate the declare to the Los Angeles Occasions, although he maintained he had put the household within the house to maintain it freed from squatters forward of its deliberate demolition.
The developer’s “nom-de-porn” even featured in a letter the accuser’s legal professional penned to the Workplace of Congressional Ethics.
“Mr. Handel was allegedly also called ‘Khan Tusion,’ a hardcore porn producer,” the missive reads.
Fortunately for Handel, this assertion appeared to get misplaced within the welter of scandal across the case, and he saved himself out of the headlines till his arrest final 12 months.
He is because of seem in federal court docket in Los Angeles the morning of Feb. 21, 2023.
However Heyne and Gardephe stated they discovered that the infamy of Khan Tusion’s identify, and the aura of worry surrounding it, nonetheless lingers within the seamier corners of the Valley.
“Individuals actually have been scared to speak to us. It took a number of time,” stated Gardephe. “Their impression of him was that he was a robust man, that he had a number of politicians as associates.”