(Chuck Muth) – My friend and late Nevada State Assemblyman Dennis Hof died almost seven years ago. But that hasn’t stopped the “Hof Haters” from trying to “p*ss on his grave.”
A&E is about to run a 6-part series titled, “Secrets of the Bunny Ranch.” And according to promos and news reports, the series will include a number of allegations of sexual assault leveled by a handful of former prostitutes who worked for Dennis.
Of course, Dennis is no longer with us and can’t defend himself.
But a number of these politically motivated attacks came up during his campaigns for the Legislature in 2016 and 2018. And as his campaign manager, I worked with Dennis to set the record straight and swat away the unfounded attacks.
The same attacks that apparently A&E is about to resurrect. In other words, nothing new.
Indeed, Dennis himself addressed them in his campaign, which are still archived on his website. So here’s Dennis responding, “from the grave.”
“Nobody knows better than I that sex sells,” he wrote on his campaign blog about an allegation from 2007.
“So I understand why the media likes to report on my business life as the owner of several legal brothels in Nevada,” he continued. “Editors are titillated by it. Reporters have visions of Pulitzers dancing in their heads. And publishers see dollar signs ringing up their cash registers.”
Dennis added: “I adamantly deny sexually assaulting anyone. . . . The accusations are false. They’re politically motivated. And they’ve been thoroughly investigated by law enforcement authorities and have been dismissed.”
But that’s not stopping A&E and others in the media from dredging them back up again.
A Las Vegas Review-Journal article on Monday featured one of the accusers, a disgruntled former employee named DeAnne Holliday.
According to the article, Holliday claimed to be “a registered nurse” who was “getting burned out on nursing” at the time she heard about Dennis and “relocated to Mound House” – where the Bunny Ranch is located.
But, um, that’s not true.
According to Bunny Ranch management, Holliday was actually working at the nearby Kit Kat brothel as a prostitute when Dennis bought it in 2012. She conveniently left that part out. I wonder why she would lie about something like that?
Her excuse: “We all had Stockholm syndrome.” How convenient.
According to the RJ article, Holliday also worked as Dennis’ “publicist and personal assistant.” And if you don’t think she’s a disgruntled ex-employee, consider this text messages she sent to Dennis…
“Hey Dennis! When’s the last time you been in mainstream media? Not since I was there! LOL You are a loser and a has-been!”
Then, after she was replaced by a black woman, Holliday began sending Dennis racist texts, including a photo-shopped image of his general manager, Suzette Cole, in “black face” and referring to the new publicist/assistant as “Mammie.”
“Try getting ‘mammie’ to book you on CNN and MSNBC. Good luck! You going to need it! LOL”
An obvious racist. And this is who A&E considers a reliable source in order to smear Dennis posthumously?
Then there’s Jennifer O’Kane, who claims Dennis sexually assaulted her repeatedly, and that when she tried to escape “she was pulled out of her rental truck by some of her co-workers, beaten under orders from Hof, and hospitalized.”
Dennis responded to the “absolutely phony allegations” in April 2018 – right in the middle of his campaign.
He pointed out that O’Kane was not only a disgruntled former sex worker but was a competitor – until she lost her own brothel. Suddenly . . . ”rape.”
In addition, Dennis noted that the alleged incidents “occurred in 2011” but “weren’t reported until October 18, 2016 – FIVE YEARS after the fact and just three weeks before Election Day.”
Because, you know, a lot of people who are beaten and hospitalized wait half a decade to say anything about it. The election was just a coincidence.
Yeah, right.
Nevertheless, law enforcement launched a full investigation, but no charges were ever filed.
“There were no witnesses and no physical evidence in this allegation,” wrote Detective James Brainard at the time. “Jennifer refused to offer any names of potential witnesses.”
He added, “There could be some political motivation.”
O’Kane also reached out to Jody Williams of Sex Workers Anonymous, who had over three decades of experience “working with women who have been horrifically abused, attacked, trafficked, raped, exploited, etc.”
However, shortly after the two began discussing O’Kane’s allegations, Williams sent her a “cease and desist” letter.
“Your story started changing,” Williams wrote. “In fact, it changed three times into entirely different stories. . . . In all my years I’ve done this work, the ONLY time I’ve ever seen anyone ‘change their story’ has been when their story wasn’t true.”
Later in the letter, Williams declared flatly: “You lied to me.”
O’Kane continued trying to recruit allies, including Diana Grandmason.
But First Amendment attorney Marc Randazza, who had worked with Dennis on free speech issues, wasn’t having it. He wrote on Twitter:
“I think the entire story is implausible. I think anything that comes out of Diana Grandmason’s mouth should be deemed as presumptively untrue.”
When O’Kane responded, “Wow, why?” Randazza didn’t hold back…
“She’s batsh*t crazy. Like 1000 layers of batsh*t. Batsh*t that compresses into stone, and then has more batsh*t on top of it, for generations until it makes an island of batsh*t. I know nothing of your experience. But I think any woman who does porn WITH HER CHILD is already batsh*t.”
Meanwhile, FOX News did a story on Monday featuring another of the accusers, Rebekah Charleston, who was also involved in an unsuccessful ballot initiative to shut down Dennis’ legal brothels in 2018.
To say her allegations should be taken with a grain of salt would be way too generous.
She has zero credibility, as detailed in this article I wrote in February 2019 after she filed a lawsuit trying to overturn Nevada’s only-in-the-nation legal brothel law.
“While (Charleston’s) now claiming she was a brainwashed victim of sex trafficking, the public record related to her arrest and conviction paints a very different story; one of a willing, conniving and deceitful accomplice.”
That includes getting busted for “money laundering and tax evasion” and “opening a checking account using a false Texas driver’s license and false Social Security number.”
Totally trustworthy. Her word should be taken as gospel, right?
Charleston and an accomplice were accused of depositing $684,541 into those bogus checking accounts and, according to the indictment, “attempted to conceal this income and failed to file tax returns with the IRS.”
Which, of course, is how they also got Capone.
And as a local CBS affiliate noted at the time, Charleston “tried to use at least some of the money to try to go legit with a pizza restaurant” called Grab a Slice and featured a photo of herself with her private parts covered by pepperoni pizza.
Subtle, she wasn’t.
More importantly, Charleston claimed she was working as an illegal prostitute in Vegas and was sent to the Bunny Ranch as “punishment” by her alleged sex trafficker.
However, no one who worked at the ranch at the time remembers her and no one can find any records of her ever working there under any of the fake aliases she used.
In her FOX News interview, Charleston crossed herself up…again.
She told FOX that while Dennis’ HBO reality show, Cathouse, “depicted the workers as earning loads of cash, it was far from the truth.”
But in the very next paragraph, she recounted that she originally started working at Dennis’ Love Ranch brothel – where she “wound up earning a lot of money, enough to be moved over to the Bunny Ranch,” which is where the top earners worked.
So on one hand she claims the ladies weren’t making much money, then in the same breath admitted she was making so much money that she got a promotion. Make it make sense.
The bottom line is this salacious A&E special isn’t likely to break any new ground. They’re recycling old unfounded allegations that were rejected by law enforcement and denied by Dennis himself some seven years ago.
The only difference: Dennis is no longer here to defend himself. Slime-Time TV at its finest.
