LOS ANGELES — Los Angeles County prosecutors filed additional sexual assault charges Wednesday against disgraced adult film star Ron Jeremy, with some of the new allegations stretching as far back as 1996.
Jeremy, who was first arrested in June and charged with assaulting four women on the Sunset Strip, has now been criminally charged with attacking 23 women over a quarter-century and faces 34 criminal counts including rape, sexual battery and forcible oral copulation, authorities said.
Jeremy has denied all wrongdoing and pleaded not guilty to the new charges in a downtown courtroom Wednesday. He is due back in court in mid-December. A call to his attorney, Stu Goldfarb, was not immediately returned.
The new charges include an allegation that Jeremy raped a 19-year-old woman during a photo shoot in the San Fernando Valley in 1996 and that he assaulted a 17-year-old girl at a Woodland Hills home in 2008. News that some of Jeremy's accusers were in their teens comes after prosecutors filed a raft of new allegations against him in August, including a charge of sexually assaulting a 15-year-old girl in Santa Clarita.
Dozens of women have come forward to accuse Jeremy of a wide array of sexual misconduct, from groping to violent rape, since his arrest in June. Within three days, prosecutors said they had received an additional 25 allegations of misconduct against Jeremy. From June to August, the Sheriff's Department interviewed 50 additional women who said they had been victimized by Jeremy. Six women also came forward to the Times in August to make their allegations of rape against Jeremy public for the first time.
Not all the allegations can be charged — the district attorney's office said Wednesday it declined to prosecute 14 additional cases because the statute of limitations had expired — but older claims against Jeremy could still be used against him at trial.
In court filings earlier this year, prosecutors indicated they might call so-called prior bad acts witnesses who can testify to similar, but uncharged, criminal behavior involving Jeremy. A similar strategy played a key role in Harvey Weinstein's conviction on rape charges in Manhattan earlier this year.
