Violet Rain: Her Cause of Death and New Details of Her Final Weeks Revealed

Details from the Los Angeles County Coroner-Medical Examiner and exclusive interviews conducted with Violet Rain’s friends help unravel the mystery of her tragic death earlier this year.

I would wish them to seek out for me, in the details I am

about to give, some little oasis of fatality amid a wilderness of error.

~Edgar Allan Poe, “William Wilson”

The March 2019 death of adult film performer Violet Rain in Los Angeles led to an avalanche of speculation within the world of X. The allure of a comforting narrative is strong, and with her official cause of death still unknown, rumors spread that the 19-year-old had fallen victim to fentanyl-laced narcotics, at a time when a sudden ”lifestyle change” had alienated her from her support system of adult industry friends.

In the wake of her death, many of those close to Rain remained silent, hoping that the scandal and sadness surrounding her death would be laid to rest with her, and that Violet could be remembered as a beautiful young woman, a kind person and a loyal friend.

Call it misinformation or disinformation, or perhaps opportunism, but much of what we have been told about Rain’s death, as well as her final days and weeks, is wrong. And the people who killed her remain at large.

In this report, many of Rain’s friends speak publicly about her life and death for the first time.

Cause of Death

According to the report filed by Los Angeles County Deputy Medical Examiner Dr. Paul Gliniecki, Violet Rain’s cause of death was anoxic encephalopathy due to the combined effects of cocaine, alcohol (ethanol) “and other undetermined factors”.

Anoxic encephalopathy, or hypoxic-ischemic brain injury, is a result of decreased oxygen delivery to the brain. It commonly results from poisoning (including drug overdose). Many patients who suffer anoxic brain injury expire without regaining full consciousness.

While ‘Cause of Death’ denotes the specific injury or disease that lead to the death, ‘Manner of Death’ represents the determination of how the injury or disease led to death.

Rain’s Death Certificate lists her Manner of Death as “Undetermined”. This classification is relatively rare, as it is the job of the Medical Examiner to determine how the person died.

Deaths involving poisoning are often classified as undetermined, as the designation is most often employed in cases that have little available information about the circumstances surrounding the death, or where known information equally supports, or conflicts with, more than one manner of death.

Missing pieces

Even after lengthy investigation, the figure of Violet Rain that emerges is one of a secretive and enigmatic persona. 

She was born Jazmine Nicole Dominguez on July 2, 1999, and was raised in the Arizona’s Phoenix valley. A knowledgable source informs MikeSouth.com that her mother struggled with drug addiction, and she was raised by her grandmother.

Rain’s interest in modeling dated back to her childhood, as this heartbreaking blog from 2010 demonstrates.

The text accompanying the GoFundMe dedicated to raising funds for her funeral notes that Rain had “moved to Los Angeles to pursue modeling less than a year ago.”

It continues, “unfortunately, she got involved with a toxic friend group full of low life promoters and people taking advantage of her kindness and controlling her in the night life industry.”

The mystery surrounding her demise has been compounded by the amount of false information that was disseminated starting with the announcement of her hospitalization, which was first reported on March 8. While we now have many more details, the story of Rain’s final days nonetheless remains something of a riddle.

Since March 8, the official story has been that Violet went out clubbing on Sunday night, March 3, and was “dumped” at the emergency room of Adventist Health White Memorial Hospital in East Los Angeles the following morning.

Initial news and gossip site reports were conflicting, with our own Kelli Roberts erroneously reporting Rain’s death on March 8, while she was still on life support. Roberts was also led to believe that Rain had not been sexually assaulted.

The final news reports regarding Rain’s condition came on March 15, and erroneously stated that the young model had died that morning. In actuality, she had passed away on March 13.

The source of much of the information published by the adult trade mags, AVN and XBIZ, as well as the blogs, was Dave Rock of Motley Models, the agency to which Rain had been signed.

For instance, in her MikeSouth.com report, Kelli Roberts wrote that Rain “was not partying with anyone in the porn industry at the time [of her overdose]; that it was “rumored she OD’d on cocaine laced with fentanyl. . . a synthetic opioid that is up to 50 times more potent than heroin”. Roberts added in the comments, “I spoke to Dave from Motley [Models] and his only source was a girl who knew a girl that was at the hospital and got turned away because she’s not family.”

All of the published reports, including those by the adult trade mags, AVN and XBIZ, indicate that Rain’s agent Dave Rock was the source of much of the information regarding the circumstances surrounding Rain’s death.  

And, our investigation indicates that much of that information is wrong.

A wilderness of error

First off, Violet Rain was not “dumped” at an emergency room on the morning after she went out clubbing. 

After she was last seen at Nightingale Plaza on Los Angeles on Sunday night/Monday morning, Rain went MIA for a couple of days before she was carried in to Adventist Health White Memorial Hospital wearing clothing not her own. 

After leaving the nightclub in the early hours of Monday March 4, she had been in communication with at least one person, and had come home to get a change of clothes before going out again. The site of her overdose remains unknown.

Second, while it is not known whether she was actually “turned away” from the hospital as reported, the credibility of at least one source regarding Rain’s demise — identified as 19-year-old starlet Layla Love — has come into question.

One of the most credible sources of information was, and remains, Rain’s roommate, fellow performer Allie Nicole. It was Ms Nicole who was contacted to come to the hospital to identify Rain, who had been admitted to the ICU as a ‘Jane Doe’ because no one knew her legal name.

“Layla wasn’t present and frankly didn’t like Violet. and since she passed has completely flipped and said they were close and she was involved, which isn’t true,” Nicole told MikeSouth.com. She added that Layla only met Violet “a couple times when I was moving my things out of the house Layla and I lived in together.”

“So many people talk out of their asses about Violet, which is why no one knows what actually happened”

Ms Nicole visited the unconscious Rain at the hospital, and spoke to her doctors and the police, both before the time Rain’s family arrived from Arizona on Wednesday, and after.

Lastly, Roberts’ assertion that Rain “was not partying with anyone in the porn industry” at the club on Sunday night or when she O.D.’d also reflects that fact that she was being misled, intentionally or otherwise.

Allie Nicole accompanied Rain to Nightingale Plaza that night, and several people who were close to Rain and her club friends have remained firm in their conviction that she partied with at last one other adult performer between the time she left Nightingale Plaza and her death.

A bad vibe

At Nightingale Plaza, Rain and Nicole had indeed hung out with, as Roberts and others correctly noted, some “YouTubers and one of those SoundCloud Rappers along with the club promoter who was the one who helped her get the fake ID to get into the club in the first place.”

Nicole told MikeSouth.com that Rain introduced her to this promoter, whom police documents identify as Eddie [last name withheld for now], at the club that Sunday night.

“I got a bad feeling from him, a bad vibe,” Nicole said. 

Contrary to this site’s earlier report that Violet was likely “given [ ] bad drugs, passed out [at] the club where someone (3 or 4 people) picked her up and dropped her off at the hospital”, in actuality Rain went to an after-party with Eddie, the YouTubers and rappers at closing time. 

Allie Nicole was not interested in joining them, she said, and her impression is that Rain “rode to the after party with Eddie, or they all rode together.”

Instead, Nicole went home to the apartment they shared in North Hollywood, and texted with her roommate before going to bed. 

Other than viewing her unconscious body days later in the ICU, “that was the last time that I saw Violet.”

“Is Violet okay?”

Allie Nicole said that Rain called her on Monday. They exchanged text messages, and while Nicole was out, Rain came home to change clothes before leaving again.

Rain did not return that day, and then texted Nicole to ask her to grab a skirt for her and place it in an Uber that she was sending to their apartment. However the Uber was canceled, and Rain never got the skirt.

Nicole also recalled receiving a sequence of calls from an unfamiliar phone number while her roommate was still missing. When she answered, it was Eddie the promoter calling to ask whether she had heard from Rain: “Is Violet okay”?

Those familiar with the 19th century murder ballad “Ommie Wise”, about a scoundrel named John Lewis who schemes to meet his flame (who’d had the audacity to get pregnant) and then drowns her, may recall the verse in which he attempts to deflect suspicion:

He threw her arms from round him, and into the water she fall
Then he turned around and rode back to Adams’s Hall.
He went asking for Ommie, they said, “She’s not home.
She’s off to some neighbors, been gone awful long!”

Some time later, Nicole received a phone call from the hospital asking her to come down and identify the Jane Doe who had been admitted.

A urine screen popped positive for cocaine, and her alcohol level was a normal-to-high 57mg/dl, or 0.57 blood alcohol concentration (0.8 is the legal limit).

Nicole revealed that doctors at the hospital disclosed that Rain had been seizing for over 14 hours, “and that even if she regained consciousness, she would never be the same.”

She had a death look

Nicole noted several abrasions and lacerations on her friend’s head, as if she had been in convulsions, banging her head on the ground. And she had been raped, vaginally and anally.

The man who carried her in to the hospital was Eddie. She was wearing a pair of men’s sweatpants several sizes too large for her frame.

According to Nicole, when he was interviewed at the hospital, Eddie’s story was that he had found Rain in the road on 4th Street, naked, and drove her to the hospital.

The Investigator’s Report attached to the Autopsy Report contains the following note:

The passerby reported finding the decedent unresponsive and shaking on the sidewalk, She was admitted to the emergency room pulseless and apneic [not breathing]. . . . Vomitus was noted to her mouth. . . .

I spoke to Detective Meza #27325 from the Los Angeles Police Department Hollenbeck over the phone on 03/20/2019. and he provided me the following information. He stated that the “passerby” that dropped off the decedent at the hospital knew the decedent.

It is a strange coincidence indeed that a woman he knew, and who was last seen with him, just so happened to pop up naked in the road in front of him while he was out driving in the pre-dawn hours.

Although the police say that Rain’s phone was never recovered, Nicole says that Eddie admitted to her that he had the phone. This would explain how he, and the hospital, obtained Nicole’s phone number.

Life of the party

Adult starlet Melody Parker met Violet when they both stayed at the Woodland Hills model house belonging to a man named Geoffrey Hobson a.k.a. ‘Geoff Hobbs’.

MikeSouth.com previously reported on this model house in a series of articles from April 2018, without naming Hobson.

This is how the house’s yard looked in April 2018:

The main house on the right is where the models stay. Hobson resides in the house on the left.

And this is how it looked in August 2019:

In 2018, Motley Models arranged for Violet Rain to live in the RV that had featured in those posts.

“We actually shared the RV together every time I stayed there,” Parker recalled. “[Violet] stayed in the room to the back left and i had the room to the right. We met at Hobbs’ house back at the end of last year. We instantly clicked and shared a love of similar music, baking and shopping of course! We’d ride around Melrose a lot together and shop literally until we would drop.

“I liked her a lot. We shared a quiet a few fun times together, from clubbing to baking cookies naked, to riding scooters downtown, to bedtime giggles and slumber parties.

“She was fun, always the life of the party. My very first impression of her was definitely that she’s like a valley girl, but I found out shortly after getting to know her that she’s actually from Arizona, which was a surprise.”

A mid-life crisis

Public records reveal that Geoff Hobson and his wife divorced in the 1990s, then later remarried. Ultimately, “she left him,” said a source close to his ex-wife, who added that “there was a lot of violence” in the marriage. 

Hobson was assigned anger management classes. There were child custody battles and Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services involvement. At one point they both lost custody of the children and had a year to do alcohol and drug testing. Court records imply that Geoff had difficulty remaining in compliance.

Public records also show a history of serious financial troubles for Hobson, highlighted by small claims actions and civil judgements and nonpayment of support. 

“He is the epitome of a mid-life crisis”, said one source, who describes Hobson as “very careless with money.” 

Hobson started playing in the world of club promotion following his divorce, in 2010. At the time he did not have custody of his kids, and friends say he saw it as a way to deal with that loss and to get over his divorce. 

Hobson’s best friend, J.R. of J.R.’s List is a well-known club promoter with all the top connections in Hollywood. The two began to work together and go out and work the clubs. 

At the time, Hobson was dating a woman who was interested in the swinger scene. While clubbing, the two met adult performer Charity Bangs and her husband Zebulon (known affectionately in porn circles as Zeb the One-Armed Pimp, and the true source of most quotations and ideas published as hers). Through Zeb and Charity, Hobson began meeting porn people. 

“He would do after parties back at his house,” said a source who had attended a couple of the events. “He had some mattresses, so we would have swingers parties there.”

Hobson’s only direct connection to the adult film world is that he once performed in a “Fuck A Fan” scene for Porno Dan Leal.

At one point, Hobson also worked as a driver for adult models. Then, in 2017 or 2018, he began renting out rooms and trailers as part of his “Hobbs House” model house venture.

An industry source familiar with Hobson’s model house says, “It’s like he’s trying to turn it into a hostel for girls. None of them have money, but all of them want to go out and do stuff. He tells girls, ‘I have all the connects to the club scene.’

A source who knew Violet confirmed, “Geoff introduced her to the club scene, and after that she was always out.”

Time bomb

Rain was one of the more responsible young ladies at Hobbs House, and had a valid driver’s license, so she would often be asked to drive the other Hobbs House models around. Parker recalls Rain driving “the few [models] she got along with, but they constantly fell out.”

She adds that Rain and troubled performer Meggan Malone “were close-ish” and that she was friends with “Zoe [Bloom].”

Another source, who met Rain though Hobson, was more blunt: “They would have Violet drive the cokeheads around.”

The source added that Rain even missed some of her own appointments because she was busy driving girls all around town.

“She was being taken advantage of.”

“Every girl at Hobbs House, it doesn’t matter if they’re under age, they all want to go out,” said a source who was friendly with Rain. “You’re 19 or 20, you’re in L.A., what do you want to do? You want to go clubbing. With all those girls at the house, and all the underage clubbing, it’s crazy there and it’s like a time bomb. Someone’s going to die, someone’s going to overdose. Something’s going to happen.”

The source, who visited Violet at her RV on Hobson’s property, added “Violet was ‘stacking her money’. She wanted to get her own place because living there was just crazy.”

Eventually Violet met one of J.R.’s competitor club promoters, identified as Adam Glove. One woman familiar with both Rain and Glove said, “from what I heard she was dating him.” (Glove, real name Glovsky, was then 38 years old.)

Secrets

Adult performer Allie Nicole immediately hit it off with Rain when the two shared a room at the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino during AEE in January 2019. “She was a kind person that literally anybody could talk to,” Nicole said.

Nicole recalls that after AEE, Violet went to Hawaii to shoot for ATKGirlfriends in Hawaii. When she returned, she suggested that Allie move into the 2nd bedroom in her NoHo apartment.

“She was the first one to introduce me to promoters,” Nicole said. “We went [clubbing] all the time.”

Nicole describes Violet as a secretive young woman. “She didn’t talk about her family, and they didn’t know she was in porn until she passed.”

Friend Melody Parker stated that “when she passed away some guy hit me up and said he was [ ] her boyfriend back home but I had no clue; she never told me about [him]. She went on a few dates, met some sugar daddies and one industry guy she had a crush on, but [I’d] never heard of the guy until she died.”

The boyfriend is identified only as “Steven” on the page for the GoFundMe campaign.

Allie Nicole soon realized that Violet was self-medicating. “She suffered from bipolar depression, but she didn’t want to take meds,” Nicole said. “She didn’t feel okay until she was fucked up.”

Having been introduced to the Hollywood club scene, Rain surrounded herself with a circle of friends who made drugs readily available. 

“Sometimes, people don’t know how to say no,” Nicole added.

Promoters

It was through Geoff Hobson that Rain met a group of Hollywood “club promoters”, starting with J.R..

“The club promoters were all shady; that’s where things really went wrong” Parker said. They were predominantly “guys who lived in a 2 or 3-bedroom apartment in Hollywood with four other dudes,” said another friend of Rain’s. The whole scene was seedy, but the promoters provided access to clubs like 1OAK and AOD [Ace of Diamonds].

Rain became a fixture on the L.A. club circuit, and in January 2019 Rain decided to jump ship to a different group of Hollywood club guys.

“A new club promoter reached out to her and she liked him better,” Parker explained. “His name’s Zeke.”

”Zeke wasn’t very good to her,” said Parker, “but she didn’t know any better.”

“I didn’t club that often,” Parker said. “When I would, I would go with Violet and her promoter. I felt like I kept her safe.

Parker added that Rain “had a fake ID from the promoter [Zeke]. It looked just like her.”

“He liked her a lot, always offered her rides when she was blackout drunk; always wanted to take her to the after parties. He always tried to take advantage.

“When she was sober — or more sober — when we first would arrive, you could tell she wasn’t into him, and by the time he got her drunk enough or she had enough coke in her system he’d pursue her. It was gross to watch.”

An illusory change

Confirmed reports of Violet Rain’s death began appearing online on March 15. The main source information for adult news media was Dave Rock. The LAPD detective also contacted Gustavo Turner at XBIZ, but since he, like Rock, almost certainly was not in attendance at the hospital when Rain expired, his source was likely the same party who informed Rock. 

In any event, Rock got the date wrong. Violet had not passed on the morning of March 15 but on March 13, the county coroner now confirms.

“The decedent was pronounced brain dead by Dr. Brooks soon 03/13/2019 at 1744 hours. The decedent was pronounced brain dead for the second time by Dr. Liu on 03/13/2019 at 2013 hours.”

This explains why the GoFundMe set up for Rain’s funeral expenses was posted on March 14, when the AVN and XBIZ reports still had her alive. 

The text accompanying the GoFundMe drive read, in part:

She was dropped off on the curb of the hospital dead and sexually assaulted. She was revived twice And was put on life support for the past week and has passed away. 

Turner’s XBIZ report unintentionally cemented the narrative which has prevailed since Rain’s death: that her demise was the byproduct of a sudden lifestyle change which began after the AVN Adult Entrainment Expo.

“Rain’s social media show her adopting a sophisticated nightlife persona in the weeks preceding her death,” Turner wrote at XBIZ, “with selfies at club bathrooms showing her as a fashionable young woman about town.”

“Why didn’t I say anything to Drake’s dad when I had the chance?” Rain Tweeted on March 2 at 6:30 p.m. “Someone help me stop being so shy. I was in the same room as him for at least two hours.” Dennis Graham, father of superstar Drake, was indeed out and about in Los Angeles that week promoting his upcoming album. He was photographed at some fashionable Hollywood nightlife spots, which is presumably where Rain spotted him.

“She was close to some girls from her agency [Motley Models] until late January,” said a person close to Rain. “But after she came back from Vegas she spoke more about doing mainstream modeling and music videos, and was hanging out with a party crowd of Soundcloud rappers, Instagram models and promoters. She stopped hanging out with her former industry friends, basically.”

However, like much of what we have been told about Violet Rain’s final months in Los Angeles, the assertion that Rain had suddenly “changed friends” is not supported by the evidence. 

While it is true that by February Violet was no longer in day-to-day contact with the performers who resided at Hobson’s model house, she had gone apartment hunting with Melody Parker and after invited Parker and her boyfriend to come see her new place.

And Rain was almost certainly still partying with at least two other girls she had come to know in the months previous: Emily Willis and Zoe Bloom. Like Rain, both Willis and Bloom were signed to Motley Models’ roster, (and, like Rain, were also under the legal drinking age of 21 years old when they partied together).

In addition, according to sources who were close to Rain, she was not so much eschewing porn shoots as she was becoming harder to book.

“She would get so fucked up, and get sick for two or three days,” Allie Nicole said. “Then she would come up with lies about why she couldn’t shoot.”

Nicole remembers that Rain had been booked to shoot for Blacked, but her agent later called to say that upon further consideration, “They don’t want you.” Both women suspected that the cancelation was due to Rain’s reputation as an unreliable “party girl.”

After that, Nicole said, Rain lost her some of the zest for her career and a sense of resignation set in. “She never voiced it — ‘I don’t want to shoot anymore’ — but she wasn’t the same.” 

The party train rolled on.

Questions remain

It’s easy to understand why people would seek to downplay their connection to a young woman who lived and died under these circumstances. And it cannot be ignored that the ‘party line’ that Rain had swapped her old friends for new ones in hopes of a mainstream career serves to deflect negative attention from Motley Models and its roster – and protecting his roster is one of Dave Rock’s jobs.

Likewise, the rumor that Rain had died from fentanyl poisoning, a drug that can be fatal even in very small doses, serves the narrative that Rain was not a big partier, and that her death was unforeseeable.

Although her cause of death is now known, and more details about her life and death are available, many questions remain about Violet Rain’s time in Los Angeles, and concerning her final weeks on earth. We will endeavor to address as many of these as possible in the part two of this report.