Alex Jordan broke into the adult business in 1992. In 1993 she won AVN’s Best New Starlet Award. Alex also was a pioneer of the gonzo genre. On July 2, 1995 Alex was found hanging in a closet in her home, she was 31 years old. The cause of death was determined to be suicide. However some in the adult business including Ron Jeremy have speculated that her death was an accidental hanging. According to Ron and others Alex’s death was an accident from autoerotic self-asphyxiation where a person partially hangs themselves while masturbating. Jeremy states that Alex was into BDSM and it has been reported that Alex had handcuffs on when she was found indicating that there may have been some kinky play at the time of her death. INXS lead singer Michael Hutchence died in a similar way in 1997. The actual cause of Alex Jordan’s death may never be known.
Ron Jeremy Interview
she was a bitch n now mst be burnin in hell so jst forget abt her
The above poster is an ignorant asshole. And one that can’t even put together a coherent sentence together at that.
Alex was a nice lady, who had some issues she couldn’t overcome. More people miss her than anyone ever will the asshole in the above post.
I have to agree, while I don’t doubt that Alex had problems I like to look for the good in people, even when they are screwed up.
Hey,
I like your site. I was a big fan of Alex’s. Here are articles regarding her death from AVN Magazine and Huster Erotic Video Guide.
Alex Jordan,
Remembered
by Gene Ross
AVN, Editorial, September 1995
“I have a very hard time making X-rated movies a part of my personal life because of what I experienced. It’s like those people didn’t like themselves and that’s why they did it. It was very disorienting for me. They were almost punishing themselves … it’s just a shame because they really are nice people doing something they really don’t want to he doing …. it’s really very sad.”
- Michelle Bauer
Alex Jordan was a very nice person, and, yes, it’s really very sad what happened to her.
Jordan, in ghoulish film noir-style, probably committed suicide. Her body was found hanging, matter- of – factly, in a clothes closet in her Marina Del Rey apartment. At least this is the scenario described and explanation offered by the L.A. County Coroner’s Office. Take it or leave it.
If you view this tragedy simply in the cliched terms of the heartless Hollywood mulching machine and the wide-eyed victim fresh off the bus, then Jordan’s death is pretty cut-and-dried stuff. But not the kind subscribed to by romantics – romantics, meaning those whose intuitions, intellectual sensibilities, personal associations with the victim, emotions or plain common sense won’t allow for facile explanations in the face of questionable evidence.
Accepting Jordan as the kind of person she appeared to be, a XXX version of Shirley Temple with the legs of a lady lifeguard and the demeanor of a welcome wagon hostess, then it stands as only natural to accept circumstances more dire, but less plausible. Suggestions of any of those lingering possibilities of foul play other than suicide, however, would read like something halfway between a murky Vince Foster cover-up and a Double Indemnity plot. Who can say at this stage, with convincing certainty, just what really happened to Jordan?
Was there a second party involved? There’s the question of handcuffs dangling mysteriously from Jordan’s left wrist. Given the physical description of the suicide, the part they would have played is either strangely ceremonial or unanswerably functional. The fact that Alex would choose a place for commission of her act far less obvious than out in the open, doesn’t seem to be in the nature of the marquee aspects of a suicide.
Depending on whom you talk to, Jordan was missing for at least six days, yet the state of body composition would have suggested time of death closer to the day she was found -July 2. And has anyone bothered to check phone records? Can someone be so despondent over a pet as to prompt a plunge into the abyss? Was it Colonel Mustard in the library with a bottle of curare?
Nevertheless, I urge you to read the account of Alex Jordan’s sad demise in this issue with an open mind and form your own conclusions.
If you knew Alex as a brisk, cheerful person and a fabulously focused sexual performer, then her decision to commit suicide is equivalent to Shoeless Joe Jackson’s throwing the World Series.
I prefer to remember Alex Jordan as a humble individual, so overcome with tearful, honest emotion at being named AVN’s Best New Starlet, that you actually thought she had won an Oscar. I remember Alex Jordan as a person so overtaken with editorial coverage of her company’s first feature, Interview With A Vamp, that she arranged for a catered surprise lunch for the magazine’s employees as a way of a thank-you. Of course, some cynics will immediately label Jordan’s from-the-heart gratuity as payola no matter what the circumstances were.
But, most of all, I remember Alex Jordan as a person who, in the adult business, couldn’t get arrested (if Simply getting on boxcovers is considered the ultimate acid test). For all her tenacity, this was an enormously frustrating situation, not only for Jordan, but a veiled slap at those critical standards which placed her on the performance pedestal she richly deserved.
Why Jordan would consistently subject herself to the indignity of rejection, why she would ultimately turn on herself, is something only she could have answered and perhaps is best explained in this editorial’s prefacing remarks made by Michelle Bauer. Those quotes appear in the Fall, 1995 issue of Fmme Fatale.
Bauer, who carved out a significant swath for herself in the B-movie genre, worked in adult films for a time under the name Pia Snow. Not that Bauer/Snow had a prolific career in the adult business beyond the fetish arena, but she points out a simple fact that never seems to get addressed in these recurring meditations on tragedy – the fact suggesting that fragile personalities really have no place in this kind of business to begin with. Then, again, it doesn’t take a brain surgeon to figure that out, but it would take one to examine the complexities that triggers those kinds of career choices.
In the sex business, no matter how convincing a persona one assumes, only brutally honest self -confrontation will reveal the real truth of sexual liberation. In other words, if you’re not the Lone Ranger, you shouldn’t be wearing the mask.
With the role call of unfortunate demises expanding, too much is at stake to be playing trick-or-treat.
ANOTHER ONE BITES THE DUST
Porn Star Alex Jordan Dead at 29
Hustler Erotic Video Guide, The Naked Truth, November 1995
Alex Jordan, 29, is the third high-profile porn star to commit suicide over the past year. (For those of you keeping stats, the other two were Savannah and Cal Jammer. Okay, Joey Stefano too. But he was doing gay porn, and we are not sure he qualifies for this competition). Late last June, Summer Knight, Jordan’s close friend and neighbor, filed a missing person’s report. On July 2, police entered Jordan’s Marina Del Rey apartment and found the body of the one time Adult Video News Starlet of the Year in the closet where she had hanged herself. The time of death determined by the L.A. County Coroner’s Office was approximately June 27,1995. The rope wrapped around her neck was tied with the same type of knots Jordan had been learning while taping and performing recent B&D scenes. At the time of her death, Jordan had traded her familiar blonde locks for a red dye-job. She left a cryptic note, which alluded to her sadness over the death of a pet bird, and specified that her worldly possessions go to her husband, porn tag-a-long Justin Case. At the time of his wife’s suicide, he was in Colorado, where the pair had planned to open a ski shop following their retirement from porn.
MR. ANABOLIC Chris Alexander, alias Biff Malibu of Anabolic Video Productions, was one of Jordan’s best friends. He shot what may have been her final hard-core scene, an anal bout with black pornstud Hercules in the months before her death. Apparently, she needed fast money. She also starred in Anabolic’s Gang Bang Girl 16. Shot last winter, the tape shows Jordan as she parachutes into the desert-and right into the middle of a prison work-detail. Alexander claims he does not know what he will do with the anal scene, and, at the time of this writing, is still editing the gang-bang tape. He hopes people will realize that he is not attempting to exploit Jordan’s death. “If some other people had done it [commit suicide], you’d say, ‘Gee, I’m surprised it took so long.’ But Alex had everything to live for.” In a bit of irony, he recalls Jordan’s claim that her father was an FBI agent assigned to combat the piracy of videocassettes, and that she once even accompanied him during a raid of a suspected video counterfeit-ring.
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No Foul Play Indicated In Death of
Adult Star Alex Jordan
by Gene Ross
AVN, Boneyard, September 1995
Marina Del Rey – Karen Elizabeth Hughes, better known to her fans as Alex Jordan, was found dead on the evening of July 2 in her first floor Marina Del Rey apartment. Hughes was the victim of an apparent suicide/hanging. She was 31 years-old.
In one twist of irony, Jordan, like Savannah who committed suicide last July, won the AVN Best New Starlet award; and, like Savannah, insecurity over cosmetic appearance seemed to be one of the driving factors that prompted Jordan’s ultimate decision to take her life.
According to the L. A. County Coroner’s Office, Jordan’s fully clothed body was discovered in a walk-in closet, suspended from a clothing bar. As the grim scene would lead one to suspect, Jordan might have used a clothes trunk from which to throw the weight of her body. Her right leg was bent, with her foot touching the top of the trunk. Her left leg was hanging straight, coming in contact with the carpet floor. Both of her arms were hanging straight down. According to the coroner’s report, no foul play was suspected.
Abrasions were found on Jordan’s neck, apparently made from a clothesline that was wrapped several times about it and knotted at the point of suspension under her right ear.
Curiously a purple dress tie was also found knotted around her throat, the knot loosely hanging under her right ear. Also discovered on Jordan’s left wrist was a set of handcuffs, one end attached to her wrist, the other dangling open.
Last seen alive, Jordan was supposed to be working a dancing engagement in San Antonio, Texas. She had left her pet parrot “Frisco” in the care of her husband Michael who was living in Colorado and moved there several months earlier to establish a ski-related business. Jordan, meanwhile, was living at the Marina Del Rey residence and was making efforts to wind down her adult career. Ironically, she had just completed her “farewell performance” in adult video – Gang Bang Girl 16 for Anabolic Video in which she parachutes from the sky above and has sex in the mud below with 10 men.
Jordan planned to rejoin her husband in Colorado at some later date, and her pet bird was to play a significant role in her death.
Jordan was expected to arrive from Texas back in Los Angeles either on June 25 or 26, but it wasn’t until June 27 that she and her husband had a phone conversation. It was at this time that her husband told her the pet bird had died, According to published reports, Jordan got “very angry” and blamed her husband for “killing the only living thing that mattered in her life.”
From this point on, the chronicle of Jordan’s activities remains a blur. Supposedly Jordan left a suicide note in which she makes reference to the pet, voices pessimism about the future and stresses over finances; but the whereabouts of the note is not specifically known.
Jordan’s body was discovered at approximately 9:30 pm Sunday July 2 by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, acting on a routine “welfare check.” Jordan’s next door neighbor, long time friend and fellow adult performer Summer Knight apparently made the call. Knight, who left for Colorado a couple of days after the incident, and is still there as of this writing, would not comment for the record other than to make the following statement in a terse, typewritten letter sent to AVN.
“We are sad to announce the death of Alex Jordan on June 27, 1995 [the surmised date of death since that is when she was last heard from]. Her funeral was a private service for family members only. Alex’s vibrant spirit and natural beauty will always be remembered by the friends who loved her and by those who admired her from afar.”
And, though Knight would not comment one way or the other, it’s suspected that she became concerned about Jordan’s welfare when she noted that her purse had not moved from a place on a table over a period of several days.
Knight, with a key to Jordan’s apartment, met with an investigating officer from the Sheriff’s department at 9:15 pm. They entered the premises and, aside from Jordan’s pet snake, found nothing significantly suspicious. It was while the officer was making out a missing person’s report and Knight was looking for a photo of Jordan that she discovered Alex’s dead body in the walk-in closet. No paramedics were called.
Positive identification was made via Knight and Jordan’s California driver’s license and other forms of photo I.D. also found at the scene.
A further search of the premises turned up the alleged suicide note found on a bedroom stand. According to reports, also discovered was a “large amount” of money. This, one might assume, was Jordan’s payday from the San Antonio gig. A diary-appointment schedule book was also discovered on the scene which, according to reports, indicated Jordan’s “frame of mind.”
How long Jordan had been dead isn’t known, but she was found in “early maroon -and-green mottled decomposition.” The thermostat in the apartment was set to “low.”
While the Coroner’s investigator collected evidence-at-hand, Summer Knight took the pet snake and phoned Jordan’s husband from the apartment in the early hours of July 3. Curiously, Knight was to host a party for the industry (read an account elsewhere in Boneyard) later that evening. In true poker face fashion, Knight would neither make reference to the incident, nor hint at it or even give remote indication that something terrible had happened to her best friend.
Via gossip, news about a suicide circulated throughout the adult business soon after. That Knight was first linked in any way to the incident might have stemmed from the comments of an on-the-scene fireman, a “Pussyman” fan, who had recognized her from the video series.
It was first thought that the then-unidentified suicide victim was “a redhead who might have been in the bondage business.” As it turns out, Jordan was supposed to have dyed her hair from blonde to red, though the coroner’s report lists her as having brown hair.
With Knight in Colorado, news that the suicide victim was actually Jordan wasn’t confirmed until July 7. How the cat was finally let out of the bag, again, is not entirely clear, compounded by Knight’s refusal to make a statement for the press. Persistent rumors, however, embellished the story, landing it in pulp fiction territory by stating that Jordan had been found bound and gagged and shot in the head – circumstances hardly indicated by the coroner’s report.
The coroner’s office, however, did raise a question about Jordan’s possible underground S&M lifestyle, an assumption raised by the handcuffs. But whether Jordan was also wearing other bondage paraphernalia at the time is not specifically indicated by the report. An unconfirmed story states that Jordan had recently attended an S&M “party” in the fashionable section of Los Angeles with a well-known dominatrix and was extremely upset when she was recognized by “clients” as Alex Jordan. On camera, Jordan had performed in bondage features for Bruce Seven and Ernest Green, and, just recently, Bon Vue released titles featuring her.
Supported by the discovery of old scars on Jordan’s left wrist and from testimony, the coroner’s report also states Hughes had attempted suicide once before, in Arizona, in the mid 1980’s. According to Knight’s statement in the report, Jordan “may have” attempted suicide within the past year and had spoken of taking her life in months leading up to her death. Reportedly she had confided to a business associate: “I don’t feel like living anymore.”
Rumors had also been going around that Jordan was pregnant but when asked about it at the performers’ AIDS awareness meeting held this past April, she dismissed them blandly.
Michael Hughes stated for the record that his wife was “at the crossroads in her life and career”; that she was “insecure” with her looks, that she was over 30 (presumably having to compete with younger women for roles) and “in a business that emphasized youth and beauty.” Hughes also states that his wife had grown to “hate the (adult) business, and wanted to get out, but did not know what to do with herself.”
Jordan had begun work on a book with Bob Rimmer along the lines of Jerry Butler’s “Raw Talent.” One can assume, given Jordan’s feelings about the business, since she had been thwarted in her professional goals, that it wouldn’t have been exactly a positive one. She had dictated two chapters of the book, but stopped when she informed Rimmer that she was leaving the industry to open a ski school in Colorado.
Alex Jordan suffered from some form of seizure disorder, had been taking a medication called “Depacote,” but had been off the drug for at least six months prior to her death. No indication was given why.
Noted for her unusually strong legs and feral sexual performances, Alex Jordan first came to prominence in the adult business at the tail end of 199 1. Her initial screen appearances came via the amateur route in the “Uncle Roy” series and amateur tapes distributed by Odyssey Group Video. But more than a sexual performer, Jordan showed a flair for acting indicated by her first full-length feature performance in Pepper Productions’ The Party, a multi-award winning video directed by Anthony Spinelli.
From there, Jordan travelled an upward career spiral and was named the 1993 AVN Best New Starlet, a decision well-supported by the critics and fans but received less-than-enthusiastically by the business end of the adult industry.
Hughes/Jordan’s spirited efforts to appear on more boxcovers and to acquire a respect via the exclusive contract route, lead to comments that she was becoming money hungry and more difficult to work with – perplexing facts totally unsupported by her sunny disposition and her serious commitment to projects she believed in. Frustrated in her professional endeavors, Hughes/Jordan, together with her husband, formed Realistic Videos, a company designed to showcase her abundant talents. The company’s first feature was Interview With A Vamp, a promising first vehicle that, unfortunately, didn’t achieve for her what Tyffany Million’s Jailhouse Cock did for Immaculate Video Conceptions.
Grossly disappointed that her Best New Starlet accolades didn’t pave the way to fame and fortune, Jordan became a scarce commodity in the features end of the business, confining her energies to bondage tapes, a genre which she gravitated toward because it tested her athletic mettle.
Before entering the business, Jordan, a physically active woman, had a career as a salvage diver, working on wrecks both off the coast of Florida and the Irish Sea. Highly sexual by nature, it was when she came to grips with her sexuality that Jordan decided to make the sex industry a career. She made the move to California and supported herself as a stripper before becoming an adult actress.
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ANOTHER ONE BITES THE DUST
Porn Star Alex Jordan Dead at 29
Hustler Erotic Video Guide, The Naked Truth, November 1995
Alex Jordan, 29, is the third high-profile porn star to commit suicide over the past year. (For those of you keeping stats, the other two were Savannah and Cal Jammer. Okay, Joey Stefano too. But he was doing gay porn, and we are not sure he qualifies for this competition). Late last June, Summer Knight, Jordan’s close friend and neighbor, filed a missing person’s report. On July 2, police entered Jordan’s Marina Del Rey apartment and found the body of the one time Adult Video News Starlet of the Year in the closet where she had hanged herself. The time of death determined by the L.A. County Coroner’s Office was approximately June 27,1995. The rope wrapped around her neck was tied with the same type of knots Jordan had been learning while taping and performing recent B&D scenes. At the time of her death, Jordan had traded her familiar blonde locks for a red dye-job. She left a cryptic note, which alluded to her sadness over the death of a pet bird, and specified that her worldly possessions go to her husband, porn tag-a-long Justin Case. At the time of his wife’s suicide, he was in Colorado, where the pair had planned to open a ski shop following their retirement from porn.
MR. ANABOLIC Chris Alexander, alias Biff Malibu of Anabolic Video Productions, was one of Jordan’s best friends. He shot what may have been her final hard-core scene, an anal bout with black pornstud Hercules in the months before her death. Apparently, she needed fast money. She also starred in Anabolic’s Gang Bang Girl 16. Shot last winter, the tape shows Jordan as she parachutes into the desert-and right into the middle of a prison work-detail. Alexander claims he does not know what he will do with the anal scene, and, at the time of this writing, is still editing the gang-bang tape. He hopes people will realize that he is not attempting to exploit Jordan’s death. “If some other people had done it [commit suicide], you’d say, ‘Gee, I’m surprised it took so long.’ But Alex had everything to live for.” In a bit of irony, he recalls Jordan’s claim that her father was an FBI agent assigned to combat the piracy of videocassettes, and that she once even accompanied him during a raid of a suspected video counterfeit-ring.
Oops, accidently posted one of the articles twice. Please excuse any typos.
For the record – Alex Jordan’s Post Mortem did find signs of decomposition. Her belly was quite distended with ‘gas’ and her gentials had swollen to ‘elephantine proportions’ and the ‘pudenda was purple-green with rot’ alex was alao ‘reeking’.
To Anonymous – you are a complete idiot!
To self-asphyxiation fans – a good reminder to play safe in all aspects of BDSM!
Don’t think she is in Hell? you better think again.
“Marriage is honorable but whores God will judge” – Hebrews 13
“The Harlot’s pathways lead straight to Hell” – Proverbs 7
Alex Jordan may have been a gorgeous woman when alive and was certainly a ‘foul mouthed ‘ Porn queen who loved getting screwed on film. She was NOT very lovely when found hanging dead in her closet in 1995. Alex had already come through the grip of Rigor Mortis and was beginning to rot when found. The lower part of her belly had turned a putrid yellowish-green and was bloating as decomposition gases built in her tummy and her badly distened and blackened genitals. She was reeking in death and her foul oder was stinking out her whole apartment. She was tagged on her left big toe Dead On Arrival as she slowly twisted on her noose and was finally taken to the morgue where she was washed down and placed in a cooler. Alex Jordan was very,very dead.
test test test
first of all i thought she was a great porn star actress no matter what you think about porn she was a great actress…only god has the right to judge her life…when anyone leaves the planet it is a loss for all of us.and check this out you guys never did anything outside of the norm or what society considers “evil”
just to find out it isn’t.as log as people are doing things that are not hurting anyone else, what’s the problem
i agree she is burning in mell for sins of the flesh