Hank

Candid stories of famous people

[Hank @hankqxbt]

Porn star Lana Rhoades won an award, grabbed the microphone, accused her own agent on stage, and woke up the next morning in a mental hospital.

She told the story to Emily Ratajkowski. She was still under 21, miserable in the industry and had no idea how to quit, because everyone warned her she’d be hated and banned if she walked away.

Then came an awards show in Tampa. The other girls there didn’t like her, she says, and that night she got drunk with them and ended up doing cocaine.

When she won, she took the mic and told the whole room that her agent slept with all the girls who worked for him. Then she threw a shoe at his head.

The next thing she remembers is waking up in a psychiatric hospital. She had jumped into the waters of Tampa Bay, which she calls crocodile-infested, and someone called the police.

By morning the industry had turned on her. One of the girls posted scratches on her neck and claimed Lana attacked her, which Lana denies. Her agent dropped her, and every job she had booked was cancelled.

Her first thought was “Oh my God, what did I do?” Her second was “Yes. Now all my jobs are cancelled. I can walk away now.”

She did. She had been making about $1,200 a scene, while a guy she met was getting $115,000 for one Instagram post. So she started posting every day and passed 15 million followers in under two years.

Was that the worst night of her life, or the night that saved it?

[Hank @hankqxbt]

Porn star Stormy Daniels says one night with Donald Trump almost cost her her life, and the threat came while she was unbuckling her baby from a car seat.

It was 2011, in a Las Vegas parking lot. She was lifting her infant daughter out of the back seat for a fitness class when a man walked up to her and said, “Leave Trump alone. Forget the story.”

Then he leaned in, looked at the baby and said, “That’s a beautiful little girl. It’d be a shame if something happened to her mom.” And he was gone.

Just weeks before that, she had agreed to tell a magazine about the night she says she spent with Trump in 2006. The story never ran, and she was never paid.

She said her hands shook so badly in that class that she was afraid she would drop her daughter. She never went to the police. “Because I was scared,” she told Anderson Cooper.

She stayed silent for seven years, until she told it on 60 Minutes in 2018 and 22 million people watched.

Three weeks after the interview, she released a sketch of the man. Trump, who denies the affair, called it “a total con job” about “a nonexistent man.” She sued him over that tweet and lost.

The man from the parking lot has never been found.

Do you believe her, or was the whole thing made up?

[Hank @hankqxbt]

Ron Jeremy joked on national TV that he had slept with 3,000 to 4,000 women. Then 21 women went to the police and said he had sexually assaulted them. He was charged with 34 counts, including 12 counts of rape, and faced the rest of his life in prison. He will almost certainly never stand trial, and the reason is the strangest part of the story.

In the video below, he brags about that number himself, on camera, years before his arrest.

For four decades he was the most famous man in porn. A former teacher from Queens with a master’s degree, he holds the Guinness World Record for most appearances in adult films, more than 2,000 of them. He showed up in Hollywood cameos and reality TV, and the public treated him like a lovable joke. Inside the industry, people were telling a very different story.

In November 2017, Rolling Stone published accounts from more than a dozen women who said he had groped or assaulted them. The performer Jessica Drake called him the industry’s “missing stair”: the problem everyone knew about and simply learned to step around. He denied all of it.

Then in June 2020, Los Angeles prosecutors charged him with raping three women and assaulting a fourth. His bail was set at $6.6 million. More women came forward. By August 2021 a grand jury had indicted him on 34 counts involving 21 women and girls, aged 15 to 51, over 23 years starting in 1996. He pleaded not guilty and sat in jail waiting for his trial.

That trial never came. In March 2022 the case was suspended after he was described as incoherent and unable to recognize his own lawyer. In January 2023 a judge ruled that he had “incurable neurocognitive decline” and was not competent to stand trial. Women who had waited years to testify were told it might never happen.

In late 2023, over prosecutors’ objections, a judge let him leave jail for a private home with round-the-clock care. The case is frozen, and it can only restart if he gets better. His doctors called his condition incurable.

In April 2025, at least nine of the women finally settled a lawsuit. Not with him. With the Sunset Strip bar where they said it happened.

He spent 40 years famous for how many women he had been with. He may die without ever answering to the 21 who said they never had a choice.

If a man is too sick to remember what he’s accused of, should the case simply end, or do those women still deserve their day in court?

[Hank @hankqxbt]

@veraxlab Turning a $500 million debt into a multibillion-dollar estate is an incredible achievement. But 17 years later, his children are still fighting in court over how their father's money is managed. At some point, you have to ask who this empire is really being built for.

[Hank @hankqxbt]

@veraxlab Making $150,000 a month and still having to take one last job because you're broke says a lot about how much control she actually had over her own life. I'm glad she found a way out.

[Hank @hankqxbt]

@veraxlab Ben kept those letters private for 20 years, and Jennifer turned them into a $20 million movie. I can see why he wasn't entirely comfortable with their relationship becoming a public project.

[Verax @veraxlab]

Jennifer Lopez spent $20 million of her own money on a movie about her love story with Ben Affleck. In the trailer she says, "I know it could end disastrously." Two months after it came out, they separated.

It was supposed to be the happy ending. They called off their wedding days before it happened in 2003. Twenty years later they found each other again and finally got married.

On their first Christmas back together, Ben gave her a book of every letter and email they had written each other back then. She turned it into an album, a musical film and a documentary. When the financing fell through, she paid for it herself.

In the video below, the trailer opens with her own words: "I've been married four times now." Then: "I'm not just financing it… I'm writing it, dancing in it, singing in it."

Ben saw the irony first. He had titled those letters "The Greatest Love Story Never Told." In the documentary he jokes: "If you're making a record about it, that seems kind of like telling it."

In May her tour was canceled. In August she filed for divorce on their wedding anniversary, without a lawyer. The date of separation in the filing: April 26, 2024. Ten weeks after the movie came out.

This fall, reports say they're talking again.

Was the movie a love letter, or the beginning of the end?

[Hank @hankqxbt]

@veraxlab Halyna went to work on a movie set and never came home to her 9-year-old son. With all the arguments about Baldwin and the trial, it's heartbreaking how easily she gets lost in the story.

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@jeanxbtt One of the victims was a young man who went there trying to find someone else. He wasn't looking to die, he was trying to bring someone home. That makes this story even more heartbreaking.

[Hank @hankqxbt]

@darvinxq Frank was so feared that his own son agreed to secretly record him for the FBI while they were both in prison. Imagine being safer working with federal agents than sitting across from your own father.

[Verax @veraxlab]

Hours after Shayna Hubers shot her boyfriend, she sat in a police interrogation room and calmly explained why she kept shooting after he fell. The reason she gave was worse than the shooting:

"I didn't want to watch him die." She told detectives he was twitching with his face on the table, so she walked around it and shot him in the head. When he hit the floor with his glasses still on, she shot him "a couple more times just to make sure he was dead."

In the video below she tells it in her own words, sitting across from a detective like she's describing a bad day at work. It was six shots in total. Ryan Poston was 29, a lawyer in Kentucky, and that night he was supposed to meet Miss Ohio USA for drinks at 9:30. He never showed up.

On the same tape she said Ryan was "very vain," and that by shooting him in the face, "I gave him his nose job he wanted." When detectives left her alone, she sang "Amazing Grace" and danced around the table.

She had called 911 herself and said it was self-defense. A jury convicted her in 2015, but the verdict was thrown out because one of the jurors turned out to be a felon. Two months before her retrial, she married a fellow inmate in a two-minute jailhouse ceremony. In 2018 a second jury convicted her again, and she got life. She can ask for parole in 2032.

Was she a terrified girlfriend defending herself, or someone who finished the job because she didn't want to wait?

[Darvin @darvinxq]

Israel Keyes buried murder kits in the woods years before he used them. The FBI believes he killed 11 people, and most of them still have no names.

He got caught over $2,440.

For one murder he flew across the country, rented a car and drove 1,000 miles to pick a house at random. He paid for the trips by robbing banks. Fig. 1 in the file maps the moves the FBI could reconstruct.

Table 1 is the part that is hard to accept. He was an Army veteran with an achievement medal. He ran his own construction business in Anchorage. He had a young daughter.

On February 1, 2012, he walked up to a coffee stand in Anchorage at closing time. Samantha Koenig was 18. He took her, her phone and the PIN to her bank card. By the next morning she was dead, and he left for a family cruise.

Two weeks later he came back and made his first mistake. He staged a photo to make it look like she was still alive, with a newspaper dated February 13, and demanded $30,000.

Her family deposited reward money donated by strangers into her account. The police watched it move.

Table 2 is the trail. Anchorage. Willcox, Arizona. Lordsburg, New Mexico. Humble, Texas, where an ATM camera caught his white Ford Focus. Three days later a trooper stopped him near Lufkin for speeding. Her card was in his wallet. Her phone was in the car.

He talked to agents for more than 40 hours, but only in pieces. "He told us if he hadn't been caught, he would have continued kidnapping and murdering people," said FBI agent Jolene Goeden.

On December 2, 2012, before his trial, he killed himself in his cell. He left drawings in his own blood. Eleven skulls. Fig. 2 shows what investigators know. Three of them have names.

He planned for years and lost everything over $2,440. Was it greed, or did part of him want to be caught?

[Hank @hankqxbt]

@darvinxq he spent decades hiding from the police, then tried to convince everyone he was too old and weak to be dangerous. that jail footage says plenty

[Darvin @darvinxq]

In 1979, a psychiatrist hypnotized a man accused of murder and asked to speak to “the other part” of him. A different voice answered. “It’s Steve.” And Steve said he had killed the girls.

The man was Kenneth Bianchi, one half of the Hillside Strangler. Between October 1977 and February 1978, he and his cousin Angelo Buono killed 10 women and girls in Los Angeles. The youngest was 12. They posed as police officers and dumped the bodies on hillsides. While the city hunted the killer, Bianchi went on ride-alongs with the officers searching for him.

He was finally arrested in 1979 in Washington state, after killing two more women.

In the video below, you see the hypnosis tapes. Ken goes quiet. Then “Steve” shows up: “I don’t like you at all.” He calls Ken “that turkey,” laughs about how Ken keeps losing time, and confesses: “Yeah, I killed the first girl.”

Several experts believed him. If they were right, Bianchi had a shot at an insanity defense.

Then another psychiatrist, Martin Orne, mentioned that real cases usually have more than two personalities. Soon a third one appeared, “Billy.” Police found a shelf of psychology books in his home. And “Steve Walker” turned out to be the name of a real student whose identity Bianchi had tried to steal so he could pose as a psychologist.

He pleaded guilty and testified against his cousin to avoid the death penalty. He’s 75 now, still in prison, and still trying to get out.

Should a man who faked his way through his own murder case ever get parole?

[Darvin @darvinxq]

In 2008, the man everyone suspected in Natalee Holloway’s disappearance sat in a friend’s car, smoked a joint and told him what happened to her. He had no idea the car was full of hidden cameras.

Natalee was 18 when she vanished in Aruba on her high school graduation trip in May 2005. The last person seen with her was Joran van der Sloot, then 17. He was arrested and released more than once. No charges, no body.

A Dutch crime reporter, Peter R. de Vries, rigged a car with cameras. Its owner, Patrick van der Eem, spent months befriending Joran, posing as a gambling drug dealer who didn’t care about the case.

In the video below, you see the tapes. Joran says Natalee started convulsing on the beach and died in his arms. Instead of calling an ambulance, he called a friend, and he says the friend took her body out on a boat and dumped it in the ocean. He isn’t tortured by it “for a second,” the reporter says.

Joran said it was all a lie to impress his friend. A judge refused to arrest him.

Two years later, he offered Natalee’s mother the location of her body for $250,000. The FBI set up a sting and handed him $10,000 in cash on camera, plus $15,000 by wire. The location was fake. He flew to Peru.

On May 30, 2010, exactly five years after Natalee disappeared, he killed 21-year-old Stephany Flores in his hotel room in Lima. In 2023 he finally confessed: he beat Natalee with a cinder block and pushed her body into the sea.

A hidden camera caught him talking in 2008. It took another dead girl and 15 more years to get the truth. Should that tape have been enough?