This article originally ran in the February 2010 issue of AVN.
Photograph by Earl Miller
If you’d Googled the terms “Janine,” “Sandra Bullock” and “custody” around the beginning of December of last year, you’d have seen more than 20 pages of links to articles like, “Jesse James, Sandra Bullock Win Custody Battle With Porn Star Janine Lindemulder” and “Porn star loses visitation rights battle with ex-husband Jesse James” and even “Miss Congeniality wins”—and that’s not counting the dozens of foreign news media who reported the case as well.
At the heart of the dispute is Sunny James, the product of popular adult star Janine’s one-year-plus marriage to motorcycle enthusiast and Spike TV star Jesse G. James, who divorced Janine in 2004 when she was seven months pregnant and married 45-year-old Hollywood star Sandra Bullock shortly after—but the custody battle has spilled over to affect nearly all corners of Janine’s life.
Most adult movie fans are familiar with Janine, a former Penthouse Pet who got her start in the movies with Andrew Blake’s award-winning 1992 lickfest Hidden Obsessions, then parlayed her fame into a contract with Vivid Entertainment Group, which quickly cast her in Paul Thomas’ courtroom trilogy Blonde Justice. Janine was also a hit on the dance circuit with then-partner Julia Ann as “Blondage,” and the pair also starred in movies based on the partnership.
By 2000, Janine had severely cut back her on-screen performing, but during her semi-retirement, a “celebrity sex tape” surfaced starring her and paramour Vince Neill, which she eventually contracted with Vivid to release.
After her divorce from James, she returned to Vivid, this time taking on both men and women sexually in Maneater, and she later starred in the big-budget Digital Playground/Adam & Eve spectacular Pirates, before she once again retired to take care of her son Tyler and infant daughter Sunny—without, she says, much help from her ex.
“It’s been three years and neither of them have shown any interest in being part of her [Sunny’s] life even after I made contact,” Janine told AVN in an exclusive interview. “I said, ‘Look, she’s walking; her teeth are coming in.’ I made him baby books and stuff like that. So after three years, I don’t know. He wasn’t there. He had no part of her life for the first three years. Two days after she was born, he came to the hospital for about 20 minutes, and for the next three years, zero. He was on his new relationship with Sandra, which blossomed in December of ’03, so he was off doing that, and by the time my daughter was six months old was when I decided to move to Oregon, and I packed up my family and—both my kids and moved to Oregon, and I asked Jesse, ‘Do you mind if I go to Oregon, because you’re obviously out of the picture,’ and he said, ‘The further the better.’ And that’s all he had to say.”
“I’ve not had access to their private conversations; I don’t know how it occurred, but maybe he just had a change of heart and wanted to be a father again; maybe it has something to do with their not having a child of their own. I don’t know,” Janine continued. “It has been reported what I’ve said: I believe she’s wanting custody of Sunny because she can’t have a child of her own. I don’t know if that’s the case. It’s sad, but I don’t know; I couldn’t tell you. I feel sad for any woman that wants to have a baby and can’t. The other thing is, I think Jesse has painted such a horrible picture of me and put me in such a negative light, without her even meeting me herself—I mean, she has views about me without even meeting me.”
Janine’s situation is not unusual, as over the past two decades, several adult performers have had their former spouses or other relatives use their adult work against them in legal custody battles. For example, Lacy Rose, who left the business in 1997, once had to fight her mother in court for custody of Rose’s daughter. However, judges have usually been amenable to recognizing that adult movie acting is a legitimate profession and not harmful to the child.
Repeated attempts by AVN to obtain comment from both James and Bullock were unsuccessful, and the pair have rarely spoken directly to the mainstream press about the custody suit.
But that doesn’t mean they haven’t expressed their views about Janine to a court.
“For a brief time in 2003/2004 I was married to Janine Lindemulder,” James wrote to Judge Thomas Coffin, who presided over Janine’s 2008 trial for failure to pay federal income taxes. “The marriage was not a great experience. It was filled with violence and culminated with assault on me by Janine. Janine’s problems with the IRS became very clear prior to our marriage in 2003. A prenuptial agreement had to be crafted by my lawyers to keep her preexisting IRS liens and levees [sic] from attaching to my bank accounts. Upon our divorce in 2005 Janine asked for $182,000 to ‘Pay her taxes’. I agreed and wrote her a check. She cashed the check and No money went towards her tax dept [sic]. Over the last several years I have pleaded with Janine to become gainfully employed, and start chipping away at her tax dept [sic]. My suggestions have always been met with discontent.”
That’s not the way Janine remembers it.
“I knew I had back taxes that I had to get a grip on, get a hold of, and it was going to pinch,” she said. “When we got married, it was understood that I was going to stop working in the adult business and were going to pursue having a child together. So before getting married, we had a sit-down with three of his lawyers, no lawyer for me, and I signed a pre-nup. He was covered on everything. The few things that I asked for was, you know, please help me with my taxes if you intend on me not going to work anymore ... and help me get my son into college. He said, ‘No problem.’ Unfortunately, that never got into the paperwork, so 10 months or so into the marriage, we [Janine and Sunny] were asked to leave, and they also gave me back this big wad of [tax documents]. Nothing had been done on it, and it had become a bigger mess, so now I found myself in a rental home, with a huge thing of taxes, not knowing what to do for work. He claims that he gave me money to pay off those taxes. Actually, it was money to allow me to get into another home, because I had to move to another home. But see, I had my daughter. He wasn’t there.”
Eventually, Janine pled guilty to violation of 26 U.S.C. §7203: Willful failure to pay income tax, for tax years 2004 and 2005, with a similar charge for other years dismissed as part of her guilty plea. The star was sentenced to spend six months in the Satellite Prison Camp (SPC) at Victorville, California, although after four months “inside,” she was transferred to a halfway house. She was also detailed to spend one year of supervised release (probation) after completion of her incarceration.
But her ex was not exactly supportive of leniency for the then-retired porn star.
“In closing I believe Janine should not be shown any leniency in her sentence,” James wrote. “She has been given every opportunity to take care of her problems, including the $182,000 to pay her debt. She has chosen to use [the] money to support her lifestyle of drugs and living outside her means. I strongly believe some time in jail will show Janine that there are consequences to her actions. It will also teach her that being a ‘Parent’ means making sacrifices for the sake of your child’s future.”
“They can take a little bit of information and totally twist it into something that it’s not.”
Janine takes strong issue with James’ claims, even as she admits that she hasn’t always made the best choices in her personal life.
“All I can say is what I know, and there was a time when I dabbled with drugs,” Janine acknowledges. “I tried meth, I tried cocaine, I tried marijuana, I’ve tried mushrooms. I’ve been there, done that. It’s not something I’ve lived my life by, that I need to function. When they portray me as this drug user, that I’m drugged out on the couch while my daughter’s outside playing is just an absolute fabrication. What apparently is going on is, they’ll take a little bit of information from my five-year-old and then they take and run with it. So they can take a little bit of information and totally twist it into something that it’s not.”
Janine was apparently referring to claims contained in Bullock’s letter to Judge Coffin, wherein she wrote, “He [Jesse] had hoped Janine would stay in the out patient drug treatment program, the court asked her to participate in for 2 years, but to our knowledge she did not ... While in Janine’s care, sometimes Sunny is left alone during the day, while her mother is asleep from drug use. Sunny has been told by Janine to go upstairs to the neighbors if ‘Sunny can’t wake her mother up’. I asked Sunny if she does this and she said, ‘no, because the neighbors moved’. I then asked what she does while her mother is ‘asleep on the couch’ and she answers ‘I paint mommy pictures or I go play outside by the fountain.’”
But Janine’s longtime friend and employer, Marci Hirsch, says she’s never seen any evidence that Janine has a drug problem.
“Never once have [Janine’s] problems had anything to do with drugs or alcohol, ever, and they’re making her out to be like a drug addict, a drug dealer,” Hirsch told AVN. “The problems were, she didn’t know how to save her money—I know that’s a shock—and she used to book personal appearances and then try to get out of them a week before. Those were the problems we had with her. But her sex scenes were always—she always gave 100 percent in her scenes; that was never a problem. She was late, but seriously, what women aren’t? But she never came to the set drunk, she was never incoherent, and even when we had parties and stuff, she was never an embarrassment. She never did any of those things. It bothers me that they say that stuff about her.”
Janine maintains that Bullock has gotten all of the “information” about her from Jesse and, to a lesser extent, Sunny.
“I think Jesse has painted such a horrible picture of me and put me in such a negative light, without her [Bullock] even meeting me herself—I mean, she has views about me without even meeting me,” Janine charged. “All the opinions came from him, and it’s a shame because if she took a moment and got to know me, for the sake of the child—we all love Sunny and we can learn from one another—that would be the best thing for Sunny. But unfortunately, that has never happened.”
Unlike her criminal case, where she was able to hire an attorney to defend herself, Janine has been entirely on her own in Orange County Family Court, where James had petitioned for—and got—temporary custody of Sunny while her mother was in prison. After her release, however, James sought sole custody of the girl for himself and Bullock, which was granted in early December.
“[W]hile Lindemulder was set to regain custody after completing her prison sentence, James went before a judge to determine whether she was a fit mother,” reported ABCNews’ Eileen Murphy. “According to a court declaration, James asked that Lindemulder prove that she could provide a safe environment for their child that included keeping her away from pornographers, drug addicts, guns and firearms, felons and other unsafe environments.”
Janine was later granted some daytime visitation rights, but she had asked Commissioner Thomas Schulte to allow Sunny to spend some nights with her as well. That request was denied, but Schulte did allow Sunny to visit with Janine from 4 p.m. Christmas Eve to 6 p.m. Christmas Day ... a visit that never materialized due to Janine’s health taking a turn for the worse.
“Unfortunately, I had a couple emergency room visits, so I wasn’t prepared for Christmas Eve,” Janine said, “so it was a sad decision to make, but I thought it would be best for her to stay with her dad since they had everything already arranged for the tree and decorations and tree and presents.”
“I was in a lot of pain; I had gone into the emergency with severe head pain,” Janine explained. “I don’t get migraines; it was just the type of headache where I could not raise myself up; I had to lie flat, couldn’t sit up, couldn’t walk; I was dizzy. And so we waited a little bit but then after a couple of days it wasn’t going away, and that’s when we checked it out and they saw something with the CAT scan that led them to believe I had a stroke; they weren’t sure when. It shocked me, but they said it was small; I didn’t feel it, but then they also said that something else is giving me the headaches. They said I have arthritis on the side of my neck, along with a slipped disk. With that, I wasn’t really prepared. It would have been just Sunny and I for Christmas Eve, and I really didn’t want to dump that on her for Christmas Eve, so I thought it would be best that she stayed with her dad and Sandy.”
“People ask me, why did you get married 25 days after getting out of prison, and I really don’t have a good intelligent answer for that.”
But even if Janine had been healthy enough for Sunny’s Christmas visit, another part of the commissioner’s ground rules might have caused a problem: Sunny was not to be allowed any contact with Janine’s new husband, Jeremy Aikman, whom she met while both were residents of a halfway house.
“People ask me, why did you get married 25 days after getting out of prison, and I really don’t have a good intelligent answer for that,” Janine admitted. “I know it was quick, and I don’t regret it. I love him dearly, but I think I would have waited. I think it’s caused me a lot of grief and it’s going to cost me time away from my daughter, and I don’t think I was thinking straight. You know, you get out of prison and your whole life has been turned upside down; you don’t know which way is up, and I think—I don’t know; maybe if I could do it differently, I would, because they’re putting him through the wringer being that he’s a felon, and his name is all over the internet, so that didn’t do him any favors.”
Indeed; condition number 14 of Janine’s Oregon probation states, “The defendant shall not knowingly associate with any persons engaged in criminal activity, and shall not knowingly associate with any person convicted of a felony, unless granted permission to do so by the probation officer.” But Janine’s P.O. never gave such permission, and her association with Aikman, who had previously been convicted of selling methamphetamines and was just finishing up a sentence for being a felon in possession of a weapon, caused her to be kicked out of one halfway house.
“My husband and I were caught on the outside having lunch,” Janine explained. “We had lunch together, and when you’re at a halfway house, the big thing is accountability of where you are [and] exactly what time you’re there, and we made the mistake of having lunch and somebody there saw us and reported what they saw and that was enough to kick me out. They put me into another halfway house, and then that halfway house is claiming that I lied about a certain tattoo job that I had, which is totally false, and I have the proof to prove that. So they kicked me out, thinking that I didn’t have a job at a tattoo parlor, which in fact I truly did, and that will be brought up in court. Those are the things that got me kicked out and for now, I’m just waiting for trial and see what’s happening next.”
Sadly, “what’s happening next” may very well be that Janine will be spending more time behind bars.
“I’m supposed to appear in Oregon the 20th of January for my criminal hearing,” she stated. “Right now, my P.O. in Oregon is asking for an additional six months in prison, basically because I got married; they weren’t happy with my signing a legal document. I don’t know what to expect for January 20th. I could be back in prison; I could be forced to live in Oregon; I don’t know. I could be under house arrest; I could be back in a halfway house; I don’t know.”
Prison “was humbling and it was absolutely fabulous, and it really makes you appreciate the outside world and what you have.”
AVN asked Janine about the time she’s already spent behind bars, and she said that going in, it was her objective to make the best of the experience.
“In prison, you can go one of two ways,” she explained. “You can go in kicking and screaming and pouting and crossing your arms and saying you’re not going to abide by any of the rules and really make it tough on yourself, or you can just kind of submit and see what kinds of programs they have and what you can do to better yourself and really turn it to your favor—and that’s what I chose to do. The first thing I did when I got there was get started on my GED [General Educational Development test], and I got that, and there’s other classes; there’s money management and parenting classes, and we also did yoga.”
“It’s called a working camp and everybody has a job,” she continued. “My job was cleaning about 40 toilets a day. I was a women’s orderly, and that means, in the morning, I’d put on my greens—all the women wore green—and I would go in there and I would clean the toilets and the sinks and the mirrors. It was humbling and it was absolutely fabulous, and it really makes you appreciate the outside world and what you have, and hey, I put my headphones on; I had music, so I would be dancing around cleaning toilets and it just makes you appreciate—and it was not bad at all.”
But ... but ... but ... what about the hot lesbian sex she once claimed she’d write about while behind bars?
“No, no, no,” she laughed. “You know, it was very tempting; very, very tempting at times, but the problem is, if you get caught, you get a shot [inmate report to staff], and not only that, they can send you to [a higher security facility in] San Bernardino, and that’s tough.”
“Especially with me, they thought that I was going to be this nympho, that I was going to want to be a brat, so I was already being watched,” she added. “But there were some cuties; there was this girl that had this porcelain-like skin and this beautiful long hair, and she was a little fireball, and close to the time of my leaving, she came up to me and said, ‘I want you to be my first—a part of a ménage a trois.’ And she’s 19 and here I am, 41 now, and I could be her mother. I said, ‘Oh, honey, I’m so flattered,’ so I said, ‘Thanks but no thanks’—but at least I have this wonderful visual in my head. That’s as far as it got. But I do have a few of those types of friends; I do have some girls that, when they get out, we are hooking up.”
“So from all this bad shit, I have learned that I’m a really big fan of the whole S&M thing, and it’s better than any antidepressant I can take.”
But though she doesn’t know what will happen to her after her probation violation hearing, that lack of knowledge hasn’t stopped Janine from making at least some plans for the future.
“I’ll be doing another movie for Vivid,” she bubbled. “It’s just in the stage where I’m talking to [B. Skow]; [B. Skow] will be shooting it. We’ll be starting the 15th, 16th and 17th of January, or around that time, and then I go to court, and then we’ve got two more days after that, so I’m hoping that they don’t whisk me away in handcuffs at court because I won’t be able to finish it. But they don’t usually do that, especially for a misdemeanor. I’m hoping that I will go to court, they’ll give me what is going to happen to me, and then I will go back, finish the movie, and—all I know is, it’s going to be big. It’s what I’ve waited for my whole career, and I’ll finally be doing what I do here at home, which is, I’m a huge anal lover; it’s part of my normal sexual life and I now want to put that on film, and my husband and I are just going to be doing all the wild things we do in our own bedroom; we’re going to put it on film and with the girl/girl stuff, this is going to be kind of an anal extravaganza.”
But while Janine fans may have to wait for that as-yet-untitled movie’s release to see her getting her ass reamed, subscribers to amateur XXX site Streamate.com can enjoy seeing her getting it on with Jeremy in other positions.
“I still have my webcam going,” she said. “He and I are on about five times a week over at Streamate. We usually go on between 7 and 9 o’clock at night; we’re on about two or three hours and that’s been fun. I still have a website; I still have freejanine.com, and we’re working on another website. Right now, I’m looking for somebody to start another website for me, so I’ve got a lot of stuff going on.”
Looking further into the future, Janine says she’s discovered another side to her sexual personality.
“So from all this bad shit, I have learned that I’m a really big fan of the whole S&M thing, and it’s better than any antidepressant I can take,” she chuckled. “What people need to remember is, this is a misdemeanor; all this drama will be done sooner or later and I will be back making movies. I just hooked up with Nina Hartley and I’m happy to say I believe her and her husband will be shooting my second film, and I’d like to kind of go into the S&M type. I’ve found a new recreation here at home that has released a lot of stress, and my husband and I are quite good at it, so we have contacted Nina and we’re going to be going that route as well and we’re excited to work with them.”
We had to ask: Is she the “S” or the “M”?
“I’m the S,” she said quickly, then added, “Well, normally, I’m the dominant half, and then, with my husband, I can’t challenge him, so I’m the M. But in the movies, when it comes to the Nina Hartley and the S&M type stuff, I would definitely be on the receiving end from my husband. When it comes to women, I usually always take on the dominant part. It just comes naturally, yeah. It feels right. For me to try to dominate my husband, it would look silly. He is a big, kind of intimidating-looking fellow. He definitely looks like he’s been in prison a little while.”
And through it all, Janine still has hopes of making a life with her husband and daughter ... but it won’t be easy.
“We have a neutral place we go to for Sunny, for them [James and Bullock] to bring her to the neutral place, and I pick her up and I bring her back and he brings her back to his house,” Janine described. “He has now informed me that he has chosen not to do that anymore; that that will not be happening, and so he’s just going right against what the court papers state, and apparently he thinks he can. He’s definitely counting on me going back to jail, and he and Sandra both wrote letters to the judge up in Oregon. He has nothing to do with this tax case. If it were the custody case, I could understand it, but this is my business, my tax case, and for him and his wife to take it upon themselves to write letters and to state lies, just bold-faced lies; especially Sandra, the letter she wrote, I scratch my head, going, ‘What are you thinking?’ To just use her star status to bury me, shame on them both. So that makes me think that yes, I probably will be getting more jail time because he’s got a lot of pull, and you know, I’m the target right now, and I think he’s going to get his way once again, and I’ll do it. But then I’ll get back on my feet and it’ll be fine.”
Update: As AVN went to press, we received word that at her Jan. 20 probation violation hearing, Judge Coffin sentenced Janine to spend six more months in a Portland, Ore., halfway house, though she may be allowed to return to California in May to finish her sentence in the Los Angeles area. For more on Janine's case after this article was pubished, check out this link:
