‘What The Hell Was I Thinking?!!’ - Confessions of the World’s Most Controversial Sex Symbol (33 page)

He’d gone crazy with it by this point too: demanding I go and have every site on the internet that had ever run a news story about me, or posted a picture, that made any mention whatsoever of my adult film past, be taken down. He was obsessed, to the extreme of wanting me to find some way for eBay to cease the selling of anything of mine — whether I had ownership of it or not. Fans of mine trade my memorabilia all the time on eBay, and I see nothing from it financially, but Matt was so threatened by the existence of any of it that I had to lie to him and promise I’d try. I guess by that point, the emotional abuse he was putting me through had pushed me to a desperate place of trying to do anything to keep us together. He was drunk all the time, and whenever I tried to talk to his mother about it, she would suggest it was because he couldn’t handle my past. I’d come home and find him rooting through my personal belongings, ranting on about how he had to know who he was marrying — all based on his mother terrorizing us with phone calls questioning my past on a daily basis. I was VERY alarmed at the psychotic and paranoid way Matt was acting as a result, but I just kept telling myself that once we got to England, away from everything where he could focus on his music with no distractions, that things would improve between us.

In early September, we left for London for Matt to begin his collaboration with Mark Powell, who had played prior thereto in Cradle of Filth and My Dying Brides, and their friend, James McGilroy, who was also formerly of Cradle of Filth. The collaboration looked really promising, and the plan was for the three of them to write and record a demo that we would shop later in the fall after we got back to the States. I had EVERYTHING riding on our relationship at that point, considering I’d liquidated over a hundred thousand dollars total from my IRAs to support us over the next couple years while Matt’s music career got back on track. I believed in his talent, and was betting everything on him because I was so madly in love. One thing I found ironic was he had no problem with the gamble I’d taken to finance our bohemian artist lifestyle — even in spite of the fact that I’d earned that money from my adult film years. That made him a total hypocrite in my eyes, but I felt as though when two people commit to one another on the level we had for better or worse means just what it sounds like. Things had already been at their worst for a while, and with this trip, I was investing my life savings in the prospect they would get better once Matt’s new band was on their feet. On top of everything else, I was also juggling a litigation battle with my mother over control of the inheritance my father had left to me when he passed.

When we landed in England, Matt was so happy and excited to be making music again that my hopes brightened considerably about our turning things around personally in the same time that they would professionally. We were staying in London, and the band was recording in Sheffield, so we spent our first few days vacationing around London. When we arrived in Sheffield, we were initially booked in to this SHITTY, seedy hotel, so naturally I got us moved — on my dime of course — into a charming Bed & Breakfast that was actually owned by Def Leppard drummer Rick Allen’s family. While Matt would spend his days writing with his new group, I would sightsee around the countryside, trying to make it as much of a vacation as I could. Matt and I went to see Stonehenge together, where Led Zeppelin had recorded
When the Levy Breaks
, which was pretty cool. We also got to see one of my favorite metal bands, Opeth, live while we were over there, which was a lot of fun. So being in England was truly a refuge of sorts for me, in spite of how expensive it was turning out to be.

Matt and his band were making progress, still, as happy as I was for him, not once did he stop to thank me for the amazing level of support I was giving him to make this trip possible. One night it came to bother me so greatly that I called him out on it, and told him: ‘It seems like you take this for granted, I’m here standing behind you and took all my money out to support you,’and he still didn’t seem to get it. Responsibility always seemed to be lost on him where money was concerned, and toward the end of the trip — in spite of how vocally happy I was about the progress his band was making with their demo — quietly I was beginning to feel I’d been used. That was a horrible feeling to have in my gut, and in the face of my still being very much in love. I dealt with it, but as we headed back to the L.A. from England in early October, my uneasiness continued to grow, even as our wedding date was fast approaching.

In October, my birthday rolled around, and Matt bought me a gift at Tiffany’s — using a credit card of course to pay for it. But he really showed his class act a few days after, when he found some old nude slides from some shoot years earlier I’d forgotten I still had buried in my closet. He used that as an excuse to begin bitching at me again about my website, which was out of my hands because of the debt I was in to the webhosting company. One thing about my husband-to-be that had always bothered me but more recently, had begun to outright alarm me was the fact that he had such a little grasp on the real world in terms of money. His naiveté was STUNNING at times, and I was only able to ignore that concern because of how deeply in love I was with him at that time. He’d even told me he’d rather starve than live off of porn money — which may sound ideal but wasn’t realistic at all given his lack of ability to bring in any income whatsoever. The only job he seemed willing to take was as a bartender at the very bar he wasted most of his days getting drunk at, which didn’t seem like a smart idea to me given the alcoholic symptoms he was already displaying in our relationship.

It was very confusing at times because here’s the love of my life professing he wants to be with me and take care of me for the rest of my life. Can’t he man up enough to go out and get a temporary job on his own to bring in any money? On top of that he had the balls to question how I put a roof over my head. It just seemed CRAZY to me! Still, for better or worse, I was crazy about him, and I was about to take the former vow very literally as our wedding date fast approached. Rather than contribute ANY money toward that union — which I was paying for entirely on my own — Matt threw another monkey wrench in my confidence in him when he bought a brand new guitar in late November. He had just gotten a new credit card, and the last thing he — or WE — needed was a new guitar when he had 8 others, mounting debt, and he had no source of income. I made him return the guitar, which he pouted about, but since I was paying both his and my bills, I felt it was my right.

We went up to Seattle for Thanksgiving. I’m sure you can figure out I wasn’t really looking forward to this. We stayed at the W Hotel in downtown Seattle. Naturally I paid for it because his parents hadn’t invited us to stay with them, even though Matt said they had plenty of room. On top of that, rather than have us over for any kind of watered down congratulations party/traditional sit-down Thanksgiving turkey dinner, Matt’s parents instead met us at some Thai restaurant downtown for lunch. The whole thing was insulting frankly, and they didn’t even offer us a ride back to our hotel afterward, they told us to take a TAXI!! I felt like I wasn’t wanted, and they had done a very good job of making me feel like absolute shit, which I deduced was part of their strategy of trying to make me so mad that I would call off the wedding. Unfortunately for them, all it did was make me more determined to make my relationship with Matt work. That much harder — I did toward that end.

As our marrying date approached, Matt continued to harass me more and more intensely about my website, almost as if he was becoming obsessed. My hairdresser Debbie — who was my confidant for much of my roller coaster ride with Matt — warned me that between the pressure from his family and the jealousy over my past that was consuming him more and more each day, I would regret going through with the wedding. I was so in love with Matt though that I was willing to forge on, even though she also told me he was also not the man I wanted to have my children with — and she had four. I thought it was cute that Matt and I were always together. Attached at the hip like Siamese Twins, I didn’t have a problem with that, but friends of mine tried to point out — correctly in hindsight — that for Matt, that behavior was part of his possessive side come fully to life now that we were engaged. I hadn’t been engaged before to anyone, so I had no idea how men were supposed to behave, and I know my status as a sex symbol caused him some legitimate insecurity around other men. But he’d started to let his paranoia extend as boundlessly as the internet, which I had no control over. I knew this much: he wanted control over me, and at times I was so blindly in love with him that I guess I had no problem giving it to him.

We spent Christmas in L.A., and I’d spoiled him rotten on gifts, but on Christmas morning, Matt had climbed into bed to awake me — not with a kiss — but rather with some new rant about a section of my website he’d been obsessively stalking and prowling around the night before! I saw red and lost it, pushing him to the floor, yelling for him to get out of my house and my life: ‘That is not how you start a Christmas morning, get out of this house NOW!’ Here I’d gone out of my way to buy all these gifts for him, and this is what I was waking up to Christmas morning? I’m surprised I didn’t beat the fuck out of him, because I bet any other woman reading this would have. I just slapped him and kept yelling ‘Get out, I can’t believe this is Christmas and all you have to say to me is the same old bullshit about a website I don’t even control?!’Nothing was ever good enough for him, NOTHING, and I’d at that point given him just about everything I had to give.

He kept telling me he didn’t know what he’d done wrong as I pushed him out the door, and it was the saddest thing for me that he’d pushed me to that extreme, but all I wanted was to have a peaceful Christmas with my fiancé, but he’d ruined it. He called me an hour afterward crying about how he’d wanted to make me breakfast-in-bed, and all I could think to say back was ‘Yeah, but you probably would have been bitching about where the money to buy the eggs came from!’ I was done letting his shit slide, and it was only six days before our wedding date, so part of me was convinced the engagement was off. He came crawling back on his knees to me later that day with roses, crying and apologizing for his behavior, swearing he’d never go on the site again. I took him back because I loved him, but he’d still ruined Christmas, which is one of mine and many peoples’ most treasured holidays of the year. Even today, I still feel he deserved my rage, but I felt my hands were tied at that point because I was so in love and would have done anything in the world to keep him.

We were married on the 31st of December 2005, almost a year after we’d first met. It hadn’t been a fairytale engagement, but nothing in my life has ever been that easy, and I have always felt any real relationship requires hard work, so it didn’t scare me. I wanted to have a nice wedding, but it seemed like too much to plan, so we decided to go to the beach and just keep it simple and beautiful with the ocean as our backdrop. Matt’s mom had even surprised us by offering to make a wedding dress for me, but backed out at the last minute, which I should have seen coming. It was a shitty thing to do. Not only did they not bother coming to the wedding, but they didn’t even send a card, nothing. When my mother had expressed reservations about my marriage to Matt, I’d done the adult thing and stood by my husband. I said to my mother, ‘If you don’t want to be part of our life now, maybe you will somewhere down the line,’ but he wasn’t even standing up to his parents in my defense. I guess I made my peace with it in the moment because he was going through with the wedding in spite of his family’s objections, which was the most important thing. Thankfully, I had family and friends on my side, but his were nowhere to be found.

It was definitely a wedding pulled off against the odds: it was pouring rain the day of the nuptials, we had a small ceremony with close friends and no family, but we were still the happiest couple in our little world. Afterward, I heard Matt’s mom was crying on the phone when the ceremony was over, but not happy tears and that made me love him even more, knowing he’d gone through with the wedding anyway. I knew I had married a mama’s boy, but I never wanted anyone else but him, he’s the only person I ever wanted to be with. I was proud to be married to him, in spite of his alcoholism, jealousy and possessiveness; his nutty, overprotective mother, and lack of ability to bring in an income of any sort. I was willing to do anything to make the relationship work because as much as I might be able to fight with him, I couldn’t fight the love I felt at the time, so I decided to walk the line, as they say, for both of us. Needless to say, with that decision, my list of New Years resolutions was pretty loaded for bear headed into 2006. Still, the bottom line above anything and everything else was, I was determined to make my marriage work.

After we married, Matt began to become more possessive than ever before, to the point where he tried to regulate my autograph signings by demanding that I not sign anything ‘Jasmin St. Claire!’I felt like asking him, ‘Who the HELL are you to be doing any of this?’But then I would remind myself I had taken him as my husband, so in his twisted mind, he probably felt he did have a right. Our marriage was complicated right from the start, and it didn’t get any simpler as the year approached its close. He’d throw shit in my face like ‘What’s more important to you: ME or porn?’as though I were still in a business I’d worked my ass off to get out of as quickly as I did and still remain as popular years later. He had no appreciation for the work involved in getting anywhere near the level of popularity I had, from the sacrifices to the ways in which those sacrifices could continue to pay you back years after they’d passed if you played your cards right. Matt had no idea how to play that game, the only ones he liked to play were with my head, and I was getting sicker and more tired of it with each day that passed.

On top of that, NOTHING was happening with the demo I had financed his trip to Europe to write, and we were steadily sinking further and farther into debt. I kept asking him: ‘When are you going to start shopping a record deal?’ And he finally explained the band would have to take the demo they’d tracked in England and re-record it into a more proper Label-Quality demo, and enlisted veteran producer Bob Kulick for the task. I was excited for Matt because Bob Kulick’s resume included stints as Kiss’s unofficial guitarist in the late 70 and early 80s, as well as with such rock legends as Meatloaf and W.A.S.P. Naturally, I was once again the Executive Producer on the project, laying out all the money for

That same month, we attended the N.A.M.M. show, which gave Matt a chance to promote his new project while I did my Coffincase and B.C. Rich booth signings, as well as a Coffincase-sponsored Fashion Show. For a change, Matt actually acted like he was proud of me, for the day anyway, but as soon as we were home and away from the public, his jealous side reared its ugly head right back up again. He was still on me about taking down my website,
www.jasminstclaire.com,
which I no longer had control over, and therein no ability to remove it from the web.That only provoked him to make the even creepier suggestion that I sue the site owners or try to buy them out with what was left of my life savings that we were living on at the time.

Matt’s jealousy and naiveté were becoming more and more expensive for me by the day. We were in the middle of a lawsuit; he wouldn’t work a day job, and from what I could tell, spent most of his days waking up at noon, playing his guitar, talking on the phone for hours at a clip to his mother. When he wasn’t doing that, he was bitching at me about his paranoid delusions over my porn past, and I really felt like he was morphing from obsessed into possessed. I felt a real sense of disappointment in the way he was acting, one I’d never quite felt before, likely because I’d never invested so much faith and love in a man before. He was letting me down, one sad notch at a time. Sinking lower and lower with each day’s grilling over where I was hiding the rest of my non-existent porn merchandise in our apartment or how much of my professional name, ‘Jasmin’vs.‘Jasmin St. Claire’I was signing to a fan’s autographed still. He even got so crazy with jealousy one day that he bought a subscription to my website so he could poke around in the members-only section. I had no control over what the webmasters posted there for download, and didn’t make any money whatsoever from it. Matt’s behavior was costing me money, and in a former life, I would have dragged his ass out into an alley and beat the shit out of him for taking food out of my mouth, but my love for him made me feel helpless. I felt that much more considering the fact that there was NOTHING I could do to change my past and that Matt’s obsession with it was slowly costing us our future.

I think the biggest problem had to do with jealousy on Matt’s part NOT over my past only, but also over my continued success as a figure within the entertainment business that was in demand where no one was knocking on his door. Yes he had his new project, but he’d walked out of a much more popular and established band, in part to be with me, so that made me more tolerant of his behavior than I might have been with any other guy. I was getting plenty of press from my metal veejaying and modeling — from
Metal Edge
to
Metal Maniacs Magazine
, if I appeared in a two-piece in an ad that would set him off. By the end of February, things had gotten out of hand between us over it: if he’d had it his way, I’d have been dressed like one of those Iranian Muslim Women cloaked from head to toe except for the eye slit. I had gotten so frustrated by that point that whenever we argued, I was just yelling back at him, no longer trying to reason. His jealousy had reached almost the point of insanity, and routinely he would storm off out of the apartment, down the street to his favorite local bar, and proceed to drink it off.

He was a full-blown alcoholic by that point, and it got so bad that night-after-night, I would sleep on the floor of my walk-in closet because I couldn’t take another night of his badgering me about my past:
‘What was it like when you did it?’ ‘Why did you sleep with so many guys? ‘Aren’t you the queen of gang bang? Yes or no, answer me!’
Every day he would ask me that and it just hurt me so bad, worse and worse. It was all he talked about from the time I woke up in the morning till the time I fell to sleep at night, and I know one thing: my marriage DEFINITELY skipped its ‘honeymoon’ period that spring. I felt like I was on trial, or being put through a trial of some sort to test my heart’s deepest depths of resolve. Regardless of how deeply he continued to hurt me, I couldn’t bring myself to walk out on him, not so soon after we’d taken the vows to one another we had. I hope it’s obvious how seriously I took them in how much I did to support Matt — through EVERYTHING that hell could possibly have thrown at me. Sadly, it would only get worse as the spring wore on.

By Easter, Matt had gotten so paranoid that he suggested I change my professional name, right as I had begun working as a host for a T.V. show in L.A. called
Metal Scene T.V. Show
. He knew that would never fly in reality, and it was becoming clear by such retarded suggestions that he was growing increasingly jealous of not just my past, but my continued celebrity where he wasn’t getting any fan attention. He would come with me to shows of the various bands I was profiling for the T.V. show, and I think deep down, when he was at these shows, he was saddened watching all these bands at the place he wanted to be, but wasn’t. Sadly, rather than

use my position to his advantage in terms of networking, he would sit there drinking all night and usually most of the next day after he awoke from yet another hangover. His whole life was a hangover as far as I was concerned. By that point I couldn’t find a way to pull him out of it.

He attended the comic convention with me in New York that April, and I finally think it hit me how deeply out of control his jealousy was spiraling. The first sign of storms to come began at the airport after we landed, when he lost it after watching me sign an autograph for a random fan. In the photo, I was wearing a dress, not even a 2-piece, and after the guy had walked away, Matt lost it with me: ‘You can’t sell that photo at the convention, if you sell that photo, I’ll leave you right now and fly home to Seattle.’ How could I feel good about relationship where my sense of security was constantly being shaken, where I couldn’t get any shelter? I actually felt shivers run through me at that point, and finally caved, agreeing not to sell that print at the show. Matt went as far as making me throw them in the airport trash, which made me furious because at these conventions, you make your money from autograph signings. Sure enough, I was right to be worried, because once we did get to the convention booth, Matt spent the entire day mad-dogging my fans as they asked for personalized autographs. For instance, I had one fan that drove all the way in from Connecticut, dropped about $300 on my stuff, and wanted me to sign an old nudie magazine, which Matt stepped in and stopped. His reason to the fan: ‘She can’t sign that, she doesn’t endorse that.’ I tried to maintain my composure as anger rose through me like a rocket launching, I was that red with fire, but in the calmest, sweetest voice I could muster, I said ‘Matt, be nice honey.’ And rather than getting my hint, he continued his protest, ‘No, she doesn’t endorse that.’ I lost probably $1000 from his behavior at that show.

He was fucking with my bottom line, and ignoring the fact that I couldn’t put on my advertisement in the convention lobby/promo materials that Jasmin St. Claire — sex symbol
international
 — ‘DOESN’T SIGN NUDE MATERIALS OF ANY SORT.’ Could you imagine that? It defeats the whole purpose. It wasn’t just on business trips either, at home I dealt with this type of manic jealous misbehavior all the time, and I’d find myself
CRYING
all the time because it was so frustrating. My friends hated seeing what I was going through, and they all tried to help in their own ways: one even sent me $2000 on the sly to help out because things were continually getting worse and worse financially. Matt was putting a stranglehold on my ability to earn a living, and when he wasn’t bitching about my inability to support the both of us according to his strict moral standards he spent the rest of his time wining about missing his mommy in Seattle.

By the summer, what life we had left together had become a living hell. He would drink every night away at this neighborhood bar, and stick me with these $250 and $300 bar tabs due at the end of every week. If I threatened not to pay them, he’d counter with a threat to leave me. Even when he would admit he had a problem with alcoholism, he’d blame me, claiming his drinking habit was a coping mechanism for dealing with my adult film past. Then he’d run back off to the bar with his buddy Kaleb, who’d flown down from Seattle. I could tell, in addition to his usual griping about my past, Matt was equally as bothered by the present state of my celebrity. Traction had begun to gain with my new gig hosting the
Metal Scene T.V. Show.
He would HATE it when people recognized me in public, especially when it was a fan that had begun following me during my years in adult film. I couldn’t win for losing with him, but couldn’t imagine my life without him either. Not yet anyway. I just didn’t know where he was going with all of this, but it didn’t feel right in my gut, I was just too confused to know what to do at that point.

The only thing I could think to do was support him in his quest to get a new band off the ground, so all through that summer, I drove him back and forth to the Valley while his band was recording with Bob Kulick. In addition to the costs I’d already laid out for the demo — almost $3000 — I paid all the gas, bought and brought lunch to him at the studio every day. This was mainly because the loser didn’t know how to drive a car, so I had to chauffer him not just to and from the studio, but EVERYWHERE. That’s probably for the better because he was drunk so much of the time he likely would have wrecked my car in a DUI if he had had his license. I was the most supportive person of his music career out of anyone close to him, and its sad thinking back about it now how little his behavior reflected any thanks for that. Looking back, I also see now what a very self-centered guy he was — and many musicians are — but they usually have FANS to validate that egocentricity. On Matt’s end, there were none, so I never understood why he felt entitled to act like a prima donna. I was his BIGGEST fan — and arguably only visible one at that point, including his family, so I guess I felt entitled to a little more than what he was giving me in the way of love and appreciation.

Amid the battle I was waging to save my marriage on the West Coast, back home on the East Coast, I was also fighting with my mother in court over inheritance money my father had left me that she wouldn’t give up control of. She already didn’t approve of my marriage to Matt, but then again, she had never approved of any guy I’d dated since high school so I was trying not to rock that boat as settlement talks between she and I went on. Still, Matt was constantly asking me to meet her, an introduction I DEFINITELY did not intend to make given how uncontrollable his O.C.D. blathering about my adult film past had gotten. I had kept that from my mother entirely, and didn’t intend to give dipshit the opportunity to rat me out to her with the litigation still hanging over us.That was just common sense, which Matt clearly had none of.

By the fall, things hadn’t improved between my loving, supportive husband and me —
what a shocker! —
But I was doing my best to hang in. I could never understand what I had done wrong as a wife, but Matt still had this talent for mind-fucking me into believing all of his possessive jealousy and verbal abuse was my fault. He was always challenging me to prove how much I loved him, draining me of energy and the funds to keep our life going at the same time. Every day, he would make me feel shittier and shittier about myself, and I kept apologizing, but it never seemed to make a difference. Nothing was ever good enough for him, and it FINALLY sparked a glimmer of light where I’d been blind from love to the question of: Was this guy possibly using me? It sure felt like it at that point, and once that possibility had started dawning on me, it made things like his buying my birthday present that year at Tiffany’s on a credit card I eventually paid off, that much harder to ignore. It was a habit on his part that was becoming harder and harder for me to afford as well which made the news that his Himsa settlement check was coming in soon that much more welcome. It was the first money he would be bringing in during the time we’d been married, and no sooner had he gotten the news, in his head he was already spending half of the roughly $8000 he was due, on a new guitar!!!