Adult industry veteran and fan favorite performer Mr. Marcus admitted on Tuesday, August 22 that he altered his STI test result that showed he tested positive for syphilis. He told XBIZ that he is "very sorry" for his actions. Marcus claims that he only worked with the "altered" test because his doctor assured him that after taking a shot of penicillin (and waiting at least 10 days before any sexual activity) that he wouldn't be contagious. He admitted to making "mistakes" in recent weeks, but he never once thought he was endangering anyone else's life by performing three times between July 24 and August 8.
Mr. Marcus: "I have to live with this, no one else does. I'm sorry. I'm very sorry. I did not think that this would come out like this. I'm sorry. All I can do is try to make some good happen. That's it. I can do that. I can stand up. I've been taking a lot of shit. I can take it."
The veteran performer made his first public comments at his San Fernando Valley office with Free Speech Coalition Executive Director Diane Duke and FSC board member / general manager of Evil Angel Productions Christian Mann by his side. Both praised Marcus' "courage" for coming forward publicly. They've been working closely with Mr. Marcus ever since Saturday, August 18, when a record of who he's worked with both after and before first testing positive was initiated by FSC's Adult Production Health & Safety Services (APHSS).
As of Tuesday, each of the female performers he had worked with since testing positive for syphilis had thus far re-tested negative, Marcus said. He has also been in communication with all of them. Duke and Mann confirmed those remarks.
Mr. Marcus underwent a test with his personal physician on July 11, 2012 that came back positive for syphilis on July 12. After being notified of the diagnosis by his physician, Marcus received a shot of July 13.
Mr. Marcus: "My personal doctor doesn't know what I do for a living. So his thing was just don't have any sex for 7-10 days. Once I did that shot, I felt pretty confident. Every doctor I talked to up to that point had said get the shot. That's it. If you've had the syphilis in your system a lot longer than that, then you need three shots. But based on what he was able to determine from my blood, and looking at my symptoms, he had said the one shot was good enough. So I did the one shot. I didn't have to do anything else. There was no follow-up."
Following the initial visit to his personal physician, Mr. Marcus took five additional STI tests, two with his doctor and three with the adult industry testing lab Talent Testing Services (TTS).
Mr. Marcus: "I just didn't understand what was going on."
His first test with TTS after receiving the initial positive diagnosis was on July 21. He didn't know why his test continued to show "reactive" for syphilis when he'd already gotten the penicillin shot and waited the 10-day period. On top of that, the TTS test continued to show the number figure for his Rapid Plasma Reagin (RPR) level (which is used to track the progress of the infection over time).
Mr. Marcus returned to TTS during the first week of August because the production company he was scheduled to work with required a new test from all of the performers. He was told that the numbers were still there by a clinician.
Mr. Marcus: "The syphilis thing was still reading, and I looked at them and they looked concerned, and they said, 'Maybe we can omit it from the actual test. When we submit your blood, we can just not have them test for that'. And I was like, 'Can you do that?' [They said] 'I think so.' And so they sat down at the computer and started clicking on things. And I didn't see what they were clicking on, but I saw that they were clicking on something."
Marcus alleged that a TTS clinician told him that they could remove the "reactive or non-reactive" for syphilis part of the test, because "it's always going to be there."
Mr. Marcus: "I get over there to pick up my test and they told me that the numbers were still there, and they gave me the printed copy of my test without the syphilis. It was omitted. We can remove it because it's always going to be there. The look on my face was just kind of like, 'Oh, I still gotta deal with this and she was like, 'Well is there anything that we can do in the computer to like omit it.' And he said, 'Well maybe when we send the blood in, we can ask them not to test for that.' But, they tested anyways. They were doing it anyway. So when the blood came, they tested it like they normally do, but when they printed out the test it was omitted. But still, that number was on the bottom. That number was always going to be there. That was there, but the syphilis reactive part was gone. There's a man and a woman there. And the guy was the one that sat down at the computer and started trying to change it for me. To try to make it so that that's not tested for."
Sixto Pacheco (president of Talent Testing Services) categorically denied Mr. Marcus' claim that his test had been altered by someone who works at his lab on Wednesday.
Sixto Pacheco: "Our system does not permit the altering of test results. Our system does not allow that to happen."
Mr. Marcus claimed otherwise. He alleged that the male and female clinicians at the TTS office thought they were helping the veteran performer.
Mr. Marcus: "You wouldn't do anything unless consciously, you feel like you can still live with it. I think with [the TTS clinicians], I had been treated. I took that shot. That’s all you can do."
In addition to that, Mr. Marcus said he did alter his TTS test from July 21 by making a photo copy of the test results after folding it in half. The only person he gave his altered version to was Mark Blazing from Blazing Bucks. Blazing noticed a discrepancy with the test on August 7.
Mr. Marcus: "When I got the test on the 21st, I didn't really know what to do because it was still showing up. What I did was I folded the test and made a copy of it with that part omitted, the reactive. OK, the number was still on the bottom. And I made a copy of it, and I just had that. I didn't use it. I just had it. I just wanted to see if I could do it. And when Mark asked me to bring in a copy of the test, I brought in that copy. I didn't want any questions asked, I didn't want to get into this. And he took it. And then he called me, maybe it was a week later, or less. And he asked me, 'This test doesn't look right. Do you have another version of it?' And I said, 'Well, I do.' The way it went down was kind of like [Mark said], 'Marcus, I need another test from you. This test is not right. I gotta let somebody know that you altered this test. It looks altered. It doesn't look right. I'm going to get [LA Direct Models owner] Derek [Hay] on the phone.' We were going back and forth. I didn't think that was necessary. But he was adamant. So Derek gets on the phone and says, 'You're altering tests and I've seen it. And you've got this fake test.' [Adult Talent Managers owner] Shy [Love] was supposedly on the phone, but she never said a word if she was. He said, 'We need the original copy.' And I said, 'OK, I'll email it to you. And when I did that, I also scanned in the copy from TTS to show him my test and their test side by side, and that they had omitted it. Because I had asked them to. But I had omitted it because I was trying to avoid that discussion, that inquiry as to why it was reactive. For the longest time in my heart I really thought I was doing the right thing by omitting it and moving forward and not admitting it. But I eventually had to just admit that I changed that test."
Mr. Marcus claimed that by folding the test and making a photo copy of it, the results looked "identical to what TTS did and the way I did it."
Mr. Marcus: "Where it says reactive, I just folded it, and I lined it up perfectly where it would be covered. Ultimately, it's the safety of the performers. I exposed a loophole. I've shown you that the way it worked for me, probably somebody could do it 10 times worse. Not everybody's running around showing [their tests]. We're dealing with syphilis now. And we're dealing with it in our industry. And I'm the guy. I didn't want to be the guy, but I'm the guy. Because of who I am, oh yeah, the guns are out. But the learning curve, what I found, was huge. A lot of people in this industry didn't know, were totally unaware how syphilis works. How this test reads it. I tried to cover it up. I didn't want to have to share that part. Because I said it was like the scarlet letter. It's the word. Syphilis, whoa. Mr. Marcus, syphilis? Mr. Marcus, the one I worked with? The one that everybody works with? The one that's been in this industry forever?"
The first scene Marcus did after the positive syphilis test was filmed on July 24.
Mr. Marcus: "I figured I'd give the medicine enough time to work. And I had lost work. I canceled stuff, so I decided to come back."
After his July 21 TTS test came back "reactive" for syphilis, he canceled the shoot he had scheduled for July 23.
Mr. Marcus: "Actually I was fine, but I didn't know that. I went and called my doctor up, 'What’s going on?' and he said, 'It's going to be in your system. It's going to stay in your system. It's going to read in your system, because that's how syphilis is.' And I was like OK. At that point, I felt OK that I can continue to work because he said it's just always going to read that way."
The next day, Mr. Marcus went ahead with performing in his first scene since the initial positive result because he believed based on what his doctor told him that the medication had sufficient time to work and he was not contagious. The veteran performer said that because he's so well known among directors in the adult industry that they typically don't ask him for a copy of his STI test when he arrives on the set, and that was the case on July 24.
Mr. Marcus: "I show up on set most of the times and it's really between me and the performer. That specific shoot didn't ask for the test. They just wanted to see something visual, so I had it on my cell phone. I showed it. But the way I showed it was, I showed, you know, my HIV was clear. My gonorrhea and chlamydia were fine. You didn't see the syphilis part of the test because of the way I showed it. And I did that on the 24th and then I started shooting at that point. This is where my mistake came in. This is where I made the big mistake. I just didn't want to have to explain that part of the test. I knew that I had tested and been treated and this was always going to be on the test. I didn't know how to explain it. And there were no protocols. I had never had a test like this before. I knew I had been treated from what I researched but, I didn't know how to explain that. I wanted to keep that to myself. The stigma with syphilis is, you get it and you're always going to infect people. You're always going to be infectious, and it's not true. You get that shot, it's penicillin. It's like [treatment for] chlamydia and gonorrhea, it starts to work in seven to ten days. Every doctor, from doctors in this industry, to my personal doctor, says seven to ten days. That's allowed that medicine to work. Then you're fine. Then you can proceed. Then you can go on. That was my mistake. If I had known better, I could have educated other people in the process. I could've told them. This is what happened to me. This is what I did. I've already been tested. Here's my medicine. Here's the day I took it. And I could explain that. But it's in hindsight that's 20/20."
Initially, TTS didn't know that Mr. Marcus had already seen his personal physician and had been diagnosed and treated for syphilis.
Mr. Marcus: "Unfortunately, the way this industry works and the way this testing starts to unfold, there was no doctor at TTS to talk to. You're dealing with two clinicians. And I had this rapport with them that was very casual, very conversational, like, 'Hey Marcus, here's your test. You might want to do something about that.' Well I did and it's always going to show up like that. So they can't really help me. I took three tests and it kept coming up and I was like what the hell. I kept waiting for the medicine to wipe it out completely. So the third time around, they gave me this card and said you might want to contact this doctor. But I was already dealing with my own physician. Any time I had any questions or anything, I would call him, 'Like what's going on with my test. I took this and I went and re-tested and my blood is still showing that it's in there.' And then I asked him about side effects. I asked him, 'Is there anything that still shows I have it in my system?' He said, 'You got the one shot, you're fine.' And that's pretty much the attitude that every doctor that I talked to [had]. I even went back to the place where I got the medicine and I got the shot. And the place where I saw the doctor are two different places. And I even went back to the medicine place to get another shot because I thought it wasn't working. And that doctor says, 'You don't need another shot. You're fine.' So I walked out of there without getting another shot."
Mr. Marcus told XBIZ that he doesn't deserve the blame for bringing "syphilis into [the adult] industry", and believes he was infected on a set, not in his personal life.
Mr. Marcus: "I didn't give it to myself, No. 1. I had no symptoms. I had been testing frequently like everybody else."
Marcus wants to continue "doing business" in the adult industry.
Mr. Marcus: "I wish I would've brought up my personal medical records first-hand, and used that to show the steps I'm taking or took. I just would've handled it differently. That's it. I just would've done things differently. I didn't have nothing to be ashamed of, but I instantly felt it. I felt like this is something that I can't share with anybody."
~Papi Chulo~
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