The Strange and Disturbing Trial of Anand Jon

It was, perhaps, only a matter of time before Sanjana — a recurring figure in prosecution testimony — commanded the court’s spotlight. As a defense witness, she is barred from sitting in court during testimony but spends hours waiting in the hallway, dressed one day in a neo–Carnaby Street fashion with high white boots, and the next, exotically draped in a silky wrap. During breaks, she enters the courtroom, trailing a scent of rose oil, smiling at her brother, only to leave with the jury’s return.

“It’s hard for me to hear about these charges,” she says of Jon’s predicament, “because I know the truth of what really happened.”

A.P. WideWorld

A.P. WideWorld

"I am my own god," Anand Jon allegedly told one witness

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• Anand Jon
• Frances Young
• David Wesley
• Crime and Law
• Trials

“Some of those girls are actually hookers,” another family member said of the witnesses.

In the middle of one afternoon, Frances Young is questioning Holly G, asking her to identify pictures of Anand Jon’s filthy Palm Drive apartment. A photograph of Jon’s refrigerator, its freezer packed helter-skelter with Grey Goose bottles and Häagen-Dazs cartons, takes on its own appearance of a crime scene, made all the more sinister with the jarring juxtaposition of vodka and ice cream.

Prosecutors claim that one orderly area in Jon’s world was the “conquest list” they say he maintained on a computer. This inventory, written in text-messaging shorthand, curtly describes his encounters with the fair sex:

 
Fkd ass finally. blo no swallow

Cindy: live model of Parsons gave it to her good/violent. Fst fkd.

Rosie: 15. fkd lincon car bkst ... big brsts/blond white trash classic.

Jenna, great sex 17, blowjob good — swallow very well.

 
It’s in the detailing of theseencounters that prosecutors Young and McIlvain hope to convince the six-man, six-woman jury that Jon is guilty. It’s also where Jon’s high-priced lawyers plan to find enough loose ends and inconsistencies to prove Jon’s accusers to be liars. Jon’s attorneys have done most of their damage by asking the alleged victims why they didn’t immediately flee Jon’s filthy apartments — with all their cockroaches, vodka bottles and tossed tampons — at the first opportunity, and why so many of them kept in touch with him later, instead of reporting his alleged crimes.

By far the shakiest prosecution witness has been Holly G, who’d been modeling since she was 12, and had responded to a 2006 casting call to model Jon’s jeans at his New York studio when she was 18. You knew Holly G was going to have a rough time on the witness stand when she blew her anonymity by blurting out her last name while being sworn in. (The “G” does not stand for Golightly.)

Holly had not been at Jon’s Manhattan pad for long before, she says, he invited her to sit on his bed and look at his press clippings.

“Are you a bad girl like Paris Hilton?” Holly testified he asked her. “Only bad girls make it in this industry.”

There followed a massage, a kiss — and then, “He pushed my head down on his crotch.”

Moments later, Jon dropped the charm, Holly told jurors.

“He said, ‘Never tell anyone or you’ll never work in this industry. I have all the power.’ I was so scared — I didn’t think anyone would believe me.”

The fear of not being believed, or even of Jon somehow being able to crush her career, could be understandable in a situation in which nothing made sense to Holly. But how to explain what followed?

Holly said she wanted to leave the apartment but stayed. She “watched TV, relaxed.” She would’ve called her parents or friends, but her cell phone battery was dead. Later, she accompanied Jon on a walk to a church, on whose steps he appeared to pray. Then he took her to his apartment building’s gym, where they worked out and he offered tips on doing sit-ups.

By then, Holly says, “He acted like a friend.”

In fact, they went back to his apartment, where he suggested she cut up a pineapple. This, however, was followed by two familiar suggestions: that Holly might want to change into pajamas and that she have some orange juice.

Fatefully, she agreed.

“After I drank it,” she said, “I felt really, really tired, and, like, dizzy.”

The next thing she knew, Jon “stuck his penis in my anus. [It felt] horrible.”

Holly said she awoke the following afternoon to find Jon in the living room making business calls, “as though nothing had happened.”

Holly’s contact with Jon did not end there. Several months later, he allegedly called Holly and invited her to accompany Sanjana and some models to India as, ironically, part of an AIDS-awareness tour in his homeland. Incredibly, Holly leaped at the idea. After the tour, Jon magnanimously announced to Holly, then living in New Jersey, that she had “proved herself in India” and he offered to set her up in a Beverly Hills apartment so she could study acting.