A message from Dr. Gorka!
#SebastianGorka #GORKA #JamesAdomian #ChapoTrapHouse
Immensest gratitude to the choral knights of @semitoned!
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A message from Dr. Gorka!
#SebastianGorka #GORKA #JamesAdomian #ChapoTrapHouse
Immensest gratitude to the choral knights of @semitoned!
Somewhere maybe someday.
The music that plays during this part kills me every time
Katya is just the best.
I cannot believe models still shoot with Highcastle. Shame. Shame. Shame.
http://fishnethousepet.tumblr.com/tagged/highcastle
In case anyone forgot. Be careful out there, models.
Models are still shooting with him? I don’t even bother to check his blog. Do they know? If they know then they can all fuck right off. Terrible.
I've had several women message me asking me if he's dangerous, so at least the word seems to have spread. All we can do is be open and try to inform others of his abusive behavior. I try and remind myself that I don't know what situation the models are in that continue to work with him. The blame lies with him. I would urge anyone working with any photographer to ask for references and do research. Please stay safe out there.
finally had time to upload my @lifttoexperience photos from the Tehuacana show. (at Old Trinity University - Texas Hall)
Sure, accusation is not proof
But if enough people accuse you of the same thing, best to reflect and see whether you’re in the wrong.
There’s nothing new and innovative about being a manipulative asshole with no apparent remorse.
I always have something inside me that wants to hope and believe people can change. However, Highcastle is not one of them. Whatever hope I had was squeezed out of me after our relationship. Reading all these other stories, especially Zenkitten's solidified it even more.
If any change happened at all, it was for the worse. I honestly hoped that he would move on to treat the next person he dated better. Sadly, I now know this wasn't the case.
Maybe if he actually bothered to analyze his behavior for once. Maybe, just maybe he'd see that he's fucked up. His tired display of playing the victim is old and false. Having an unfortunate past does not give him clearance to treat everyone else like shit.
Grackles are so weird. It's great. #grackle #gracklesofinstagram (at Thinkery)
he tried to contact a few times when i made my initial post saying “i’m sorry for whatever i did to you, i don’t know what i did wrong” and such BS, but hasn’t said anything since.
i’d be lying if i said i didn’t have nightmares in the last few nights about him showing up at my house/outside my post office here in Minnesota.
THIS IS A LEGIT FEAR FOLKS. he stalked a woman from Texas to NYC. after asking him not to contact her, he sent zenkitten a birthday present TO HER MOMS HOUSE containing a book titled “until i find you”. let us not forget this.
You know what? Honestly though.
I’m fucking sick and tired of having nightmares. I’m sick and tired of having triggers that are unavoidable because they remind me of shit he has done to me.
My biggest fear when I left was that he was going to hunt me down. He’s smart enough to never have hit me, but he’s over 6 feet tall and 300 lbs, he’d trap me in corners and yell at me. I was shooting with a photographer who is a safe friend and ended up being trapped in a narrow kitchen with him blocking my way, and I had a fucking panic attack.
I still have issues riding the train, because it reminds me of all of the times he would yell at me on the train. If I tried to make him stop, he’d say that I was being a baby and who cares because I’d never see those people again. Fuck, how about DON’T FUCKING YELL AT ME.
Oh, the one time I’m sure everyone thought I was going to get murdered was the last straw. We lived in a really way out of the way part of Brooklyn, and it was the norm for homeless people to beg at the counter in this one fast food place. Nobody had an issue as long as they weren’t being disruptive. All good. Jes fucking YELLED at this man to get a job and stop offending HIM, a paying customer. He stormed off and went to sit down by the front door and told me to sit down, NOW. I was fucking livid, and asked the homeless guy if I could get him something. The cashier gave me the “oh god, you’re gonna die” face, the 3 guys with face tattoos took a good look at jes and me to remember what we looked like.
I was so terrified after that. When I get really distressed I literally lose my ability to speak, and for 3 months I had gotten to that point at the drop of a hat.
What an irony, coming from someone who begs for money on the Internet.
He used to talk about how people treated people in the service industry, as we both were working retail when we were together. He used to saw how awful it was people treated people in retail and restaurants like they were less than.
I can’t tell you how many times I saw him yell at service industry people over NOTHING. I often would end up apologizing for him or following behind him like a puppy with my tail between my legs. He never changed. Everything you write feels so visceral. Hugs to you.
I thought you were really close with Jesse Perez? In an interview in 2012 he said you were his best friend and collaborator, what changed?
…this is ridiculous and an incredibly naive question. And very specific to cite that random interview that was on one random site.
jesse was always far more serious about our friendship than i was, and many people know this. regardless, 2012 was a long while ago and a lot can change in that amount of time. he and i grew apart over the last few years/i distanced myself from him a bit over the last few, lessening communication and such - and i’m quite glad for it now.
with this new outpouring of information about him over the past few days, i’ve learned that nearly the entirety of whatever friendship we did have was based on lies and manipulation. literally from the very start. i was naive, tricked, told countless tall tales, and always made to believe he was the victim.
what changed? in the past 72 hours he has been outed as a stalker, an abuser (both to humans and animals), a master manipulator, and a serial “groomer” of vulnerable models (and non-models he also found on the internet). he solicited underage girls numerous times, and used the same incessant-text-message-tactics on countless girls/models in attempts to get them to “divulge secrets” or whatever else.
that’s what fucking changed.
YES. Please don't place blame on anyone other than Highcastle/Jesse himself.
It’s got to go somewhere
Possible trigger warning for emotional/sexual abuse:
I kept a lot of my feelings inside about our relationship for a long long time. Sometimes, I don’t even really know why. I was done protecting you. You hurt me, you degraded me, you stole from me and you drove a wedge between me and the people I was closest to. That’s the way you wanted it. You had someone all to yourself. All to yourself to ignore when you wanted, take money from when you wanted, yell at when you wanted. Sure, those things weren’t always happening 24/7 but they happened plenty.
Did I care about you? Somehow, yes. But it dwindled. It morphed. It became something different. I felt like I both hated you and needed you at the same time. You made me believe that. I was in such a cycle of abuse that leaving it felt scary. It was normal and routine to live in fear. You were scary, our relationship was scary, but so was leaving. Which, is often the hardest part for people to understand or believe. I don’t care if they believe me or understand anymore. I know it was true and no words you can say can make me doubt that.
You made me feel ugly. You actually said this to me once: “Maybe there is some primal part of me that doesn’t want to have sex with you because I know you can’t have children.” Do you know that I have never forgotten that? Do you know that I never will? Do you know that as much as I know that that is total BS that if haunts me. I wish I could say it doesn’t but it does.
You wouldn’t let me do anything alone. Going out with friends, visiting family, taking photographs. You drove a wedge between me and my family. My Nana. My Nana who is now gone. Who you kept me from seeing for some of the last years of her life. You. You made sure you were the focus at all times. Your opinion mattered. What you wanted to eat was what we were going to eat. What you wanted to do in bed was what we were going to do. My voice shrunk to nothing. There was no point.
You pushed peoples boundries. You used the same approach with them as you did with me when you were trying to date me. “Tell me a secret.” or “Lets play truth or dare.” On one of our last shoots together, the model said upfront that she didn’t want to do bottomless photos. I said ok, that was totally fine. She had a corset that you wanted her to wear for a shot and she said, “well I don’t really have underwear that go with it.” And you said “well just go bottomless then.” You hesitated. I saw it in your eyes. I said “wait a minute, I think I bought a pair of underwear we never used for a shoot, and sure enough I still had the small black underwear, brand new from a shoot that didn’t end up happening.” I remember you looked at me like you were going to kill me. You yelled at me after she left that I don’t push people, that I ruin shoots. That was it. If I had known all the shit that was going on behind my back, I would have called off shooting with you at the very beginning.
You breaking up with me was the best thing you ever did for me. The way you did it was completely fucked up, but I do have to say, thank you for leaving me. When we went on our trip to Chicago, I was actually considering leaving you. I had for a few months at that point. I told myself, “if he’s shitty on this trip then thats it.” And you were. But I didn’t leave.
No, instead you broke up with me. You broke up with me and then got back togeher with me at week later. In that week you managed to do an amazingly fucked up thing. You took me on a photoshoot. A photoshoot that was of the woman you had been talking to for over a year behind my back. That you were telling you loved on a regular basis. I didn’t know this during the shoot. We all hung out. We went to the movies, dancing, to watch the bats fly out from under the bridge. She was nice. It was fun. And then, she left. And boy, did you get really really mean.
Do you know what it’s like to wonder if you’re going to be yelled at all the time? No, I guess you don’t. I do. If I misplaced my keys, you blew up. If I didn’t want to watch what you wanted to watch, you blew up. Anything. I never knew. I just waited. You never did dissapoint though I guess. I wish I could say it was like this only that week. But it wasn’t. It was all the time. In public. At the grocery store, at shows, in front of friends, in front of models. Wherever you damn well pleased. But that week, it was extra bad. I felt like I couldn’t move without making you fill with rage. So I finally said “what’s going on? You obviously aren’t happy.” And you admitted as such. I guessed it was someone else. You said “you don’t want to know.” But that was where you were wrong. Fuck you, I do want to know. And I guessed. And I was right. So, I moved into the other room. (Thank god we had a two bedroom.)
But you insisted that some things didn’t have to change. You told me, “you can still cuddle me and kiss me and sleep in the same bed with me. I still care about you.” And at first I did. I didn’t know what else to do. I would lay in that bed and cry and cry because I knew I shouldn’t be, but you asked me to. When I think about how helpless I felt it makes me ill. I am not that helpless anymore, and that was an incredibly fucked up thing of you to do to someone who was that mentally unstable and sad. To abuse that power. To have your fucking cake and eat it too.
Finally I stopped. You suddenly wanted alone time. I could hear the sounds of phone sex coming from your room and I would put on my headphones and listen to music for hours hoping to escape to someplace else. Months went by like this. I finally went on a date. And of course, you freaked out. You swore up and down you wouldn’t. But you did. I didn’t bring him home. He just dropped me off and you ran at his car like a possesive maniac.
You decided to go to New York. On your fucking epic bike ride for love and art or whatever. You took my grandfather’s camera with you. I asked for it back. Repeatedly. You said you would. You didn’t. And then it got stolen. Thanks for that.
I tried to still talk to you as a friend for some fucked up reason (although not after I found out about the camera, that was pretty much the last straw). I remember occasionally we’d be talking about something and it would lead into our relationship and I would defend myself and say, “well, you were this way or that way, etc” And you would tell me, “Please don’t remind me about how awful I was to you, I feel bad enough as it is.”
No you don’t. Not even close.
Why I have been silent for so long
This is a stream-of-consciousness, flying by the seat of my pants post.
Especially in the microcosm of the art world, models are always told to “be professional”. Show up on time, camera ready, to not be a diva. So many other nuances that aid in keeping models silent, docile, and a “good model”.
I was worried that if I said anything, that would risk libel, and if I ever found concrete things that could be considered evidence, I would somehow “ruin it” if I talked about it. So many people have told me that the best thing to do would be to try and move on with my life, I’m sure with the best intentions. How does one move on with their life after this?
Yet, so many people ask if things were so bad why I never said anything. Well, compound living in a society that encourages silence with feeling like what you went through wasn’t “as bad as it could have been”. No, you never physically hit me, but the psychological warfare and emotional abuse was elaborate and thorough.
I have been so concerned with not hurting YOU. Still. To this day. You build yourself up to be this pitiful, abused, needy person. I still feel guilty making this post as I am writing it, because I don’t want to risk hurting you. But, what about ME? What about the other people you have hurt?
You wanted me to remain isolated, dependent on you. You never allowed me to be involved with conversations you had with models we were both supposed to shoot. You told me, over and over, that it would cause my social anxiety to worsen if I had to socialize with more people. You told me I couldn’t handle the types of conversations you had with people, because you wanted to get to know the “real them” before shooting, and if I were involved, the model (or usually non-model) would hold back what she would reveal to you.
You told so many potential models that I was socially anxious, I know one for a fact that you told I was somewhere on the autism spectrum. If you believed that, why would you plan shoots involving me behind my back? Why would you speak FOR me, and not encourage me to speak for myself? Because you didn’t actually want that. You wanted me to be silent, alone, confused, self-destructive. I was much easier to control that way.
You planned shoots that involved me as a model with other models. You discussed in detail what you wanted to happen; most of these shoots did not occur since the other model was not comfortable with the fact that I was not involved in the conversation, but two shoots did occur.
Both of those models assumed that you and I talked about what type of shoot we would be doing. I went into each shoot thinking that maybe we would pose together, but never did you ask if I would consent to sexual acts. I thought that it was a spur of the moment thing, that we were all starting from the “oh, well, if we’re all comfortable with it, could we do xyz?” I didn’t want to be the downer that stopped the shoot.
It sickens me that you probably go on and on to people now that I have left you that I was so cold and distant, and how hurt you are. That’s what you did to me. You went on and on about how other people wronged you, how other people hurt you. I realize now that that is your “in” with people who have been abused or hurt, they feel sympathy for you. I opened up to you way more than I wanted to. The things you did were so subtle, and so similar to tactics you employed on other people.
I will never stop talking now. I am not broken.
I hate that Zenkitten had to go through this. I hate for anyone he has made to feel less than, violated, or abused. I wish I had come forward sooner to say something, but I appreciate everyone who has come forward to talk about their experiences. We are not being quiet anymore. You’ve had it easy for too long. Maybe you didn’t physically harm us, but it doesn’t make what you did less bad or more forgivable.
*jesse muniz not perez
Right, he goes by both. Legally he is Muniz but he keeps telling everyone his name is Perez. I am going to edit the post so that it has both just in case he is telling different people different things.
Models, please read. Alert!
So, this is going to be a bit long but in light of recent things I have been reading, I feel I have to post something in a public forum. Highcastle Photography/Jesse Perez (Also goes by Jesse Muniz) is not a safe person to work with. Please, if you are a model and are considering working with him, message me first.
I feel genuinely sick about the testimonies from various models coming forward to talk about the things he has said and done. I wish I had said something sooner. All I can hope for now is that this might stop someone else from ending up in an awful situation. Jesse is an abusive person. He was abusive in our relationship and he acted extremely unprofessionally with the models we worked with. When we began taking photographs together, he was mostly fine. He put me down a lot in front of models and sometimes bugged people to do things more than he should but it wasn't where it is today. He is manipulative and prey's on people who he feels are weaker than him (wounded birds he called them). And he is good at it. I left the relationship feeling like I didn't matter and that I had no self worth. He told me things that I will never be able to forget no matter how hard I try. He should not be allowed to take advantage of anyone else.
After one of our lasts shoots I told him I no longer wished to shoot with him because I felt he was putting extreme pressure on a model who had already made clear what her boundaries were for the photo shoot. He blew up at me.
While Jesse never hit me, he has an extremely large temper and is unpredictable. I had several women tell me whom we worked with that he continued to bother them through texts on the side after they had already told him they were not interested in whatever idea he was proposing. Another admitted he had taken pictures when she wasn't looking with his cell phone of her and was sending them to someone else. I warned those we had worked with but I never went public. Apparently, he has gotten much worse and his abuse more extreme. It is not ok. And I can't not say anything anymore. I am a stronger person now and am in a much better place in my life and I don't want any of these things to happen to anyone else.
If you have worked with him and want to talk, if you are thinking about working with him and want to talk, please don't hesitate to reach out to me. And again, I am sorry for not doing this sooner.
Please share this post. I don’t want anyone else to have to deal with this abusive individual.
I didn't think I was going to get to see @handjobacademy this SXSW which bummed me out. But thanks to a rad boss lady I got to catch their set. They're seriously good people, and put on a super fun show. Special shout out to @clarabiznass for being so cool and fighting the crowd to get me some merch. Anyone that references Tudors Biscuits in a song is beyond cool with me. Thanks for a magical sxsw experience, ladies. <3
Just got my tickets for @sleater_kinney 's Austin, TX show. It still doesn't feel real. The first time I saw them I was so excited I couldn't eat all day. Once I was finally at the show I got so worked up that I dry heaved into my plastic water bottle out of shear unbridled joy and anxiousness. I was a mess, they were amazing. The second time I saw them was at SXSW but it was a private party. I got there three hours early hoping someone who worked there would take pity on me, as I did not have the required badge. A very nice man agreed to let me in just to watch the band. It was the least crowded show I will probably ever see them at, and it was amazing. It felt like a private show. The third and fourth time were their two final shows in Portland. I managed to fly out there to see them. A group of folks on the SK message board bought extra tickets for those of us who couldn't get them and sold them to us at face value. SK fans are wonderful folks. The shows in Portland were perfection. I danced and jumped while the crystal chandelier swayed back and fourth above the crowd. The wood floor bouncing with us. And during the final song I sobbed like a baby. Fast forward a few years. After a particular hard year, I put on The Hot Rock on a train ride home for the holidays. It reminded me how much SK's music has helped me. Been their for me. So after Christmas, I got this tattoo. And now, I wait for the new album, for April, and to see my favorite band in the whole world play again. #sk #sleaterkinney #carrie #corin #janet @corintuckerband @carrie_rachel @theejazzzhand
@bigdipperjelly and his incredible backup vocalist Shauna looking and sounding amazing at #BraundSound (at Braund Sound)