The first time Priscilla Hendry met Jesus David Torres in person, he immediately tried to kiss her. She was 15. Torres was 22. It was 2006, and the two had recently started talking on Myspace. Torres would soon be known onstage and online as Dahvie Vanity, lead singer of the band Blood on the Dance Floor, but at the time, Hendry knew him only as a hairdresser who seemed eager to meet her in person. They made a date.
When Torres showed up on Hendry’s doorstep in Spring Hill, Florida, she instantly recognized him by his over-the-top scene hair wig and colorfully decorated face. And right away, he went in for a kiss, she said. “Like, aggressively,” she recently told HuffPost, “and I pulled back, because who meets someone for the first time and tries to kiss them?”
If it wasn’t the first bad sign, it was the most obvious one.
There’s not a lot to do in Spring Hill. Teens could hang at the Walmart, or the Dunkin Donuts, or the Beacon Cinemas. Hendry chose a movie that night. After parking outside the theater, Torres asked if she had money to pay for both tickets. When Hendry told him she did not, Torres became angry and decided to drive her back home. Before they arrived, Hendry said, he pulled over and tried to kiss her again. She jerked away.
According to Hendry, Torres then shoved her face into his crotch so forcefully that he ripped out her hair extensions. She said she begged him to stop, even scratching at his arms to get free, but he overpowered her and forced her mouth onto his penis until he ejaculated.
“I was crying, and I said no, and that I didn’t want it,” Hendry said. “He did it anyway.”
Hendry’s story is disturbingly familiar. HuffPost spoke to a dozen women who said Torres sexually assaulted them between 2006 and 2015. We also spoke to a girl, now 16, who said Torres started grooming her when she was 13 and he was 30. Most of the women said they were under 18 at the time of their alleged assaults. Many recalled being yanked by their hair and forced to perform oral sex. Others said Torres molested them at his shows. One woman said he anally raped her in a hotel bathroom. None went to the authorities, but all described a pattern of abuse that has left them traumatized years later. (The cops did get involved in one incident, in 2009, that culminated in Torres’ arrest and that he described as “bullshit.” The case appears to have been dropped.)
Seven of the women, including Hendry, were willing to use their full names for this story. Others asked to use their first names only or to remain anonymous for fear that Blood on the Dance Floor (BOTDF) fans would harass them. Though the band’s following has declined considerably over the years, Torres, now 34, continues to make and sell music. He has more than 1 million followers on Facebook, nearly half a million on Twitter, and more than 120,000 on Instagram. Several of the women who spoke to HuffPost said they were motivated to come forward in part by a fear he was still preying on girls.
Torres did not respond to repeated requests for an interview. When contacted by phone, he immediately hung up after a HuffPost reporter identified himself.
All Ages Welcome
Torres was born in North Carolina and got a high school education in central Florida. Prior to founding BOTDF, he became popular on Myspace, where he dubbed himself the “Elite Hair God.” In 2006, he founded BOTDF, gaining a following primarily among kids and teens. From the start, the band’s appeal was more about style than substance. Torres, dressed in gothic clothing with vampiric makeup and his signature flamboyant wigs, relies heavily on autotune and writes songs that pander to an adolescent mindset: Sex is cool, parents suck, my fans are my family.
BOTDF’s darker themes — including school shootings, revenge porn and killing women — reflect a deeply troubled teenage boy’s idea of transgressiveness. Lyrics are graphic and artlessly sexual. “I’ll fuck you in the face and leave a nice taste,” Torres sings on “I Heart Hello Kitty.” No one quite knows how to categorize this music. A little bit electro-pop and a little bit screamo, the band has also experimented heavily with “crunkcore,” a style popularized by bands like Brokencyde that Urban Dictionary calls “one of the worst genres ever conceived.”
BOTDF’s songs, which have tens of millions of views on YouTube, helped Torres attain the kind of niche internet celebrity whereby one gets big without being famous. He had fans without having to be accountable to a public image beyond the one he’d created for himself.
“My mom wouldn’t let me listen to [BOTDF], and that’s what I liked,” said one of the young women who accuses Torres of sexual assault. “I knew everything about them was garbage.”
She and several other accusers said they first met Torres at his all-ages shows, where he’d often strip onstage. In one YouTube video, crowds of young faces are seen gazing up at him in his underwear at a 2012 performance as he squeezes his crotch and shouts “Fuck me!” In another video, he giggles, then tells his screaming fans: “I wanna just come on all your little titties tonight!”
Online activists have created social media groups over the past few years to expose what they say is Torres’ predatory behavior, leading the frontman to write songs specifically addressing what he called false accusations. In one, he explicitly claims he is “not a suspect of rape.” In another, he asserts his innocence and says he’s been “crucified like Jesus Christ.” After touring with BOTDF in 2010, internet celebrity Jeffree Star publicly accused Torres of “child molestation,” but the singer has insisted he’s “never been attracted to children.” Star did not respond to HuffPost’s request for comment.
Earlier this year, indie publication MetalSucks produced the first disturbing feature about the allegations against Torres, profiling six anonymous women accusing him of sexual assault. Three of those women also shared their accounts with HuffPost.
Forced To Watch Her Own Rape
Emerald Poor had just turned 18 and was near-giddy with excitement when she saw Torres getting a manicure at the local Norfolk, Virginia, mall in 2011 before a BOTDF show at the venue Shaka’s. She recalled that his freshly painted nails read “Fuck Me.”
They chatted for a bit, she said, and Poor assured the then-27-year-old singer that she would be attending his performance that night. By the merchandise table after the show, Torres gave Poor his number and said he wanted to hang out that night, she told HuffPost, but she suggested getting breakfast instead.
The following morning, on Nov. 15, 2011, Poor said, Torres raped her. Moments after knocking on the door of his Holiday Inn room just a couple blocks from the venue, the singer grabbed her by the throat and dragged her into the bathroom, she said.
“He just kept doing the shushing motion, saying, ‘Shh, be quiet.’”
- Emerald Poor, one of Torres' alleged rape victims
“He literally forced me down to my knees — he was sitting on the toilet — and literally shoved my face into his cock,” said Poor, who is now 25. After being forced to perform oral sex on Torres, Poor said, he bent her over the bathroom sink and pulled down her underwear.
Poor said she whimpered out “no” about four times as he anally penetrated her without a condom. “He just kept doing the shushing motion, saying, ‘Shh, be quiet,’” she said. Poor tried looking away from the mirror in front of her, she said, but with a fistful of her hair in his hand, Torres wouldn’t let her.
“The moment I would look down, he would pull my head back up and force me to watch,” she said.
Torres then took Poor to a bed and vaginally raped her, she said, adding that he called her his “little girl” as he thrust inside her. Bottles of alcohol were strewn about, and two unconscious women lay in the next bed over, Poor said. HuffPost was unable to contact those women.
‘You Just Get Used’
Torres’ predilections were no secret. Former BOTDF bandmates told HuffPost they often saw Torres wandering off with young female fans before and after shows. Garrett McLaughlin, who used to sing in BOTDF under the stage name “Garrett Ecstasy,” said Torres’ behavior deeply disturbed him. He quit the band in 2009. Torres quickly recruited Jayy Von Monroe, then 17, to replace him.
Torres’ taste for teenage girls and lewd onstage acts made Monroe uncomfortable as well. “It became embarrassing, and I didn’t want to tell people what band I was in,” said Monroe, now 27, who left BOTDF in 2016. (Jayy Von Monroe is a stage name. He declined to use his real name in this story.)
“I think that [Torres] has a very childlike mind, and that’s why he’s able to, I guess, get into the heads of these kids and manipulate their thoughts and minds and what they idolize,” Monroe added.
Monroe used to live with Torres in Arizona and said he remembers the singer bringing home teenage girls. One of them was Tye Burns.
Burns, a young woman from Houston, was 15 years old when she first began performing oral sex on Torres, she said. The two had started talking through Facebook messenger, and in January 2012, she found herself at a mall in her hometown with a then-27-year-old Torres. They shopped at a Spencer’s store before going back to Torres’ car, she said.
Once in the car, Burns said, Torres pulled down his pants and exposed his penis.
“I didn’t even see it because it was dark, and he grabs the back of my head and just throws my face on it,” said Burns, who is now 22, and who also spoke to MetalSucks about her alleged abuse. In text messages she showed to HuffPost from 2012, which she allegedly exchanged with Torres, the two declared their love for each other.
In May 2012, during her spring break, Burns went with her mother and brother to Torres’ home in Chandler, Arizona, she said. For five days, her family members stayed in the living room while she stayed in Torres’ room. She said he expected her to perform oral sex on him roughly twice a day. “You just get used,” she said.
“Dahvie passed Tye off as a family friend,” said Monroe, who lived in the house with Torres at the time of Burns’ visit. “In the back of my head I was like, ‘You’re way too nice to strangers,’ but it wasn’t a matter of him being nice for the sake of being nice. He had something he wanted, and I realize that now. The two of them were sneaking off together.”
‘He Told Me Not To Tell’
Torres has used his influence over young girls as a weapon. In 2010, he wrote a threatening song about an 11-year-old girl after he accused her of spreading rumors about him. The girl, well-known on 4chan for her YouTube videos shit-talking people on the internet, accused the singer of having had a sexual relationship with her. Online trolls, including fans of the band, went wild harassing the girl.
She posted a tearful video begging for the harassment to stop, and her father threatened to get authorities involved. It only egged on Torres’ legion of trolls, along with 4chan users, who turned her misery into memes. The girl became an internet celebrity for all the wrong reasons, and even now there are corners of the internet still discussing the “lulz” that were had at her expense. In the song, Torres whines, “When you crossed that line and dragged my name through the dirt / believe me girl, you’re gonna feel all of my hurt.”
The singer seems to make a game of humiliating women. In a video that was uploaded to the official BOTDF YouTube account, he filmed himself groping a young woman who appeared to be intoxicated. “Do you want to lick my cum?” he asked, after pushing the woman to her knees and pointing the camera to her face. “Do you like treats from my penis?”
Torres later claimed the woman “wasn’t abused,” and said BOTDF “removed the video out of respect for her and her family, so clearly we did the right thing.” The woman did not respond to HuffPost’s request for an interview.
Another young woman from Arizona, who asked not to be named, alleged that she was in a sexual relationship with Torres for more than a year while she was a minor. She said Torres, then 26, contacted her on Facebook in 2010 after he moved to her neighborhood in Chandler. He asked how old she was, she said, and she told him the truth: She’d just turned 15. He wanted to meet.
“He invited me over to a party at his house. It was pretty close to mine, maybe five or 10 minutes away,” the woman, who is now 23, told HuffPost. (Torres’ Arizona address, as listed in public records, is about six minutes from her house, according to Google Maps.)
“[He said] if I was 18, he’d tell everyone I was his girlfriend.”
- An unnamed woman from Arizona, who allegedly had a sexual relationship with Torres
She arrived at the party with a friend, and within an hour, the woman said, Torres had cornered them alone in his bedroom, stripped off his clothes and demanded that she perform oral sex. She said she managed to get away, and was surprised when Torres sent her a friendly text the next day.
“I felt weird about what happened, and I was kind of creeped out, but I thought that because he was texting me and being nice, I should forget about it,” she said. She agreed to see him again.
By her count, the two hung out around a dozen times, sometimes going on movie and dinner dates, before Torres moved to San Diego a couple years later. She said she started submitting to his demands for oral sex when she was still 15.
“He would always go out of his way to tell me he wasn’t talking to any other girls, and that if I was 18, he’d tell everyone I was his girlfriend,” she said. “He told me not to tell my parents.”
The two had sex once, the woman said, and as soon as they were done, Torres pulled an emergency contraceptive pill from his drawer and forced her to swallow it in front of him. This disturbed her, she said, but the attention from an older, famous man still made her feel special.
“He’d tell me things like, ‘You’re my best friend,’ or ‘I love hanging out with you,’ and then when it came to sexual things, if I ever refused, he’d always say something like, ‘You’re my best friend, though!’ or ‘Don’t you like being friends?’” the woman recalled. “It was the kind of stuff predators say. I wish I’d realized that at the time. I just wanted to do whatever I could to stay in his life.”
A Wolf In Sheep’s Clothing
Those who knew Torres best say he was a master manipulator who put on the face of a happy, goofy scene kid.
“You meet him and he just charms you,” said Odessis Hudson, who sold merchandise for BOTDF and briefly lived with the band in San Diego. “He charms everybody that he meets. That’s what’s scary.”
Hudson met Torres in March 2014 when she was 17 and he was 29, she said. The singer drove her to a Texas parking lot and allegedly forced her to perform oral sex on him.
“We parked, and my head was in his lap,” said Hudson, who is now 22. “He didn’t say anything to me, I didn’t say anything back, it just happened so quickly.”
Jenny, a 24-year-old woman from Phoenix who did not want to use her full name, said she dated Torres for a year. Their romance started in 2012 when she was 17 and he was 28, she said, and on their first date, Torres forced her to perform oral sex on him at his home in Chandler.
Jenny said Torres convinced her they were going to get married and spend their lives together, so she dropped out of high school to go on tour with him in early 2013. She said she eventually left him and moved back home after catching him cheating on her multiple times.
“I’ve never met somebody like him who has the ability to just walk into a room and be the most charming, charismatic person ever,” said Jenny.
But Torres was also quick to anger, his former friends and alleged victims said. He would scream at bandmates in front of fans and threaten to fire them. He and his horde of fans also viciously attacked women online, calling them sluts and whores. And he found ways to control the people in his life, they said.
McLaughlin, Monroe and Hudson all said Torres controlled the band’s money and refused to pay them. Instead, he’d pay for their food and make them ask permission to use his credit card for any other expenses. Monroe said he finally left BOTDF after he was diagnosed as HIV positive and Torres refused to pay for his medical treatment unless he agreed to go on tour.
“By the time I got back from tour, I felt like I was on my deathbed,” Monroe said. When he finally saw a doctor, he was “dangerously close to AIDS.”
Though Torres has lost his old bandmates, he now makes music with 36-year-old Fallon Vendetta. The two were engaged briefly before breaking up this year. Vendetta did not respond to a request for comment.
Torres’ Arrest
Torres was arrested in 2009, apparently after a woman accused him of sexually assaulting her at one of his shows. In a video on BOTDF’s YouTube channel, he later claimed the woman “seemed to have underlying mental issues.” Police took him into custody, then released him.
Witnesses who were present on the night of the alleged incident tell a different story. It was Sept. 12, 2009, and BOTDF was performing in Denver, according to McLaughlin, who was still singing alongside Torres at the time, and a woman named Elyse who did not want to use her full name, who was selling BOTDF merchandise at the show. That night, they said, is what led McLaughlin to quit the band and accuse Torres of pedophilia.
After setting up at the venue, McLaughlin said, he and a friend walked out to the parking lot to hang out in BOTDF’s tour van until the show started. To their surprise, the van had been moved to a location “where it was dark and no one was around.” They opened the door and found Torres inside with two girls who appeared to be “really young” teenagers, he said.
Torres “chased us away. He didn’t want us near the van,” said McLaughlin, who said he then went back inside the venue. Time passed, and it was getting close to show time, but according to McLaughlin, Torres was nowhere to be found, and the tour van was gone. McLaughlin said he was starting to worry that something was wrong, but Torres showed up just in time and the group went onstage.
“We play probably two songs and then the lights come on in the building. The sound gets cut off. We’re done. They won’t let us play. There’s somebody up at the sound stage motioning for us to get off the stage,” said McLaughlin. “In my head I’m just wondering, ‘What did Dahvie do?’”
The band stormed through the crowd to figure out what was going on. Police cars had surrounded the building, and an officer asked Torres for his name, then handcuffed him against a wall, according to McLaughlin and Elyse. Once outside, McLaughlin said, he noticed that one of the girls he’d seen in the van was sitting on the ground, speaking to a police officer and pointing at Torres. She sobbed and said Torres had forced her to perform oral sex, McLaughlin said.
In its story, MetalSucks published an unverified copy of what appears to be an arrest record from a Colorado police department documenting a sexual assault committed by Torres. It’s dated Sept. 13, 2009, the day after BOTDF performed in Denver. HuffPost was unable to verify the document’s legitimacy or confirm if a charge was ever filed. A representative at the Colorado Bureau of Investigations would not say if any arrest records existed in Torres’ name, and noted that sealed court records are not accessible to journalists or the public.
Meet, Greet, Grope
At his concerts, Torres enjoys the adoration of hundreds of screaming teenage girls who flock from their parents’ homes to see him perform at all-ages venues. The women who spoke to HuffPost described BOTDF’s shows as mass grooming opportunities, and said Torres would often get girls’ phone numbers and flirt with them at the merchandise table.
Torres has allegedly kissed and groped many young women and girls during these shows, including Sophie McClure, who said she was just 13 when he first kissed her in December 2012, when he was 28.
“I was thrilled about it at the time, like, ‘Whoa, a band member wants to hang out with me and talk to me and compliment me,’” McClure, now 19, said. After meeting at a show, the two continued to talk for years, and McClure helped set up one of his concerts in Oregon. At one performance, McClure said, Torres had a young girl flash the crowd for a free shirt. At another, he took his pants off and crowd surfed. His pants remained off for the rest of the show, she said.
“He would pull people out of the crowd, say, ‘Look how beautiful you are, I just wanna come all over your faces,’” McClure said. “He had this whole act with a squirt gun where he would pretend he was ejaculating on children in the crowd.”
HuffPost spoke to two women who said Torres fondled their breasts without consent after they asked for autographs at his shows. Shae, a 20-year-old college student from North Carolina who didn’t want to use her full name, was 13 at the time of the alleged incident in October 2012 at the Greene Street Club in Greensboro. It was her very first BOTDF show and she couldn’t wait to meet Torres — she’d been listening to his music since the seventh grade and had a photo of him as the lock screen on her phone.
Shae, who also spoke to MetalSucks, said she approached Torres at the end of the night and handed him a shirt to sign. He obliged, she said, then squeezed her breasts. At another show at the same location in 2014, Shae asked Torres to take a Snapchat video with her. Torres, 29 at the time, took her phone and instead remarked on her mother, who was standing nearby.
“You’re fucking hot, mom,” he said in the video, which HuffPost has viewed. “Are you from heaven? I just wanna say I want your boobies!”
Later that year, during a pre-show meet-and-greet session at The Vanguard in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Torres allegedly groped another woman who asked him to sign her shirt. She said she wants to remain anonymous because Torres “has been known to stalk and harass his victims.”
‘I Felt Defenseless’
Tiffany Galvez and Kyla Jorgensen allege that Torres assaulted them when they were both 17. After a 2012 show in Boise, Idaho, the girls chatted with Torres at his merchandise table, then had dinner with him at a local pizza place. Galvez’s boyfriend at the time and another friend were also present. After talking about beauty school at the restaurant, Torres asked if they all wanted to come back to his tour bus to play with his hair. They agreed.
“Before we got out of the car to the tour bus, Dahvie was like OK, give me your phones, and if anybody asks, you’re over 18, OK?’” Galvez said. Once on the bus, according to Galvez, Torres took her into the bathroom to work on his hair.
“Instead, he pushed me up against the wall of the bus bathroom and got really close to the front of my body,” Galvez said. “And his exact words were: ‘So, are you gonna S my D or what?’ and immediately my heart just started pounding, my hands were shaking.” (The phrase “S my D,” as in “suck my dick,” is the name of a 2008 BOTDF song.)
Galvez said she was saved by the forceful knock of her then-boyfriend. The two exited awkwardly, she said, then Torres invited Jorgensen to join him alone in his bedroom. Galvez said she tried to give Jorgensen “a look” but didn’t verbalize what had happened. Once they were alone in his room, Jorgensen said, Torres grabbed her breasts with both his hands.
“I’m 17, I’m in the back of this bus with a guy who’s 10 years older than me, sitting there not knowing what to do,” Jorgensen, now 22, said. Approximately a minute passed before Galvez began banging on the door to get her friend, the women said. As they drove home that night, Galvez said, she was in denial that anything inappropriate had taken place while Jorgensen sobbed.
“At this point, I am in denial because basically my hero is a fucking pedophile,” said Galvez. She said she continued to text Torres for a couple weeks after the alleged incident and sent him naked photos at his request. Galvez provided HuffPost with messages and photos from a number she said belonged to Torres.
“I’m going to gag your little teenage mouth with my hard cock and fuck you till you cum all over me,” reads one text. In another exchange, after Galvez said she had just gotten her tongue pierced, she received a text saying they would not be able to hang out for a couple weeks. When Galvez asked why, the reply to the 17-year-old was: “You can’t suck my dick with a freshly pierced tongue.”
Emily H., who also spoke to MetalSucks and asked not to reveal her last name, told HuffPost she met Torres in 2015 when she was 18 and he was 31. The two matched on Tinder while both were living in San Diego, and Torres took her to a local Benihana restaurant, where she watched him spend much of the date taking selfies, she said.
Later that night, Emily said, they went to Torres’ house, which he shared with friends and bandmates, and they drank and smoked weed and cuddled in his bed until one in the morning. Then, she said, he assaulted her.
“I had kind of fallen asleep,” Emily said. “All of a sudden, he had pulled his dick out of his pants and he started pushing my face into it. I don’t mean just lightly — I mean hand on the back of my head, as hard as possible. I fought him. I pushed back. Then I put my hands on the bed and tried to push him back, but he kept shoving my head down towards his crotch.”
“I’m so sorry, I’m just really horny for you,” Torres allegedly told her. Emily said he grabbed her head again, so hard her neck was in pain, and forced her to perform oral sex.
“I felt defenseless. I was scared. It was really frightening,” she said. “I had never been forced to do something like that in my life.”
He Was 30. She Was 13.
Over the years, as allegations against Torres continued to pile up on the internet, social media groups dedicated to exposing his behavior have popped up. In one Facebook group with hundreds of members that refers to the band as “garbagecore,” people discuss their own experiences with Torres.
The singer still makes music, sells merchandise and interacts with fans, but his touring days may be over for good. Members of the “garbagecore” Facebook group are quick to contact venues where BOTDF is scheduled to play to alert them about the allegations and pressure them to kill the shows.
Hudson, one of the women who used to sell BOTDF’s merchandise, said the band members would find out hours before shows that they could no longer play.
“It was annoying for me when I was in the band because I was losing money and had to sit in the hotel with Dahvie for three days because we had fucking canceled shows,” Hudson said. “But after I left the band, then I was like, ‘Yeah, get him canceled!’”
The women who spoke to HuffPost said they want Torres to face consequences for the pain he allegedly caused them. They fear he could still be abusing women and girls.
After her alleged assault, Hendry, the young woman from Spring Hill, Florida, became so depressed she temporarily dropped out of high school. For more than a decade, she would have to see BOTDF’s merchandise in Hot Topic and hear her friends gush about Dahvie Vanity.
“I can’t believe this guy is still famous and he’s doing all this stuff to underage girls,” she said. “How is he still a thing? How is he still in the limelight?”
“I knew about the allegations against him ... I didn’t want to believe it.”
- An unnamed 16-year-old girl who allegedly started talking to Torres online when she was 13
In October, HuffPost spoke to a 16-year-old girl from Michigan. The girl, who is not named because she’s a minor, said she began chatting with Torres online when she was 13. HuffPost reviewed Facebook chat messages from an account appearing to belong to the singer that asked the teen if they could Skype and repeatedly professed love to her.
One night in November 2015, a then 30-year-old Torres came to Battle Creek, Michigan, for a show. He asked the 13-year-old out for pizza, the girl said, and she wanted to go, but her grandfather, who spoke to HuffPost, wouldn’t let her.
“I knew about the allegations against him and didn’t want it to be true, about him being a pedophile and stuff,” the girl said. “I didn’t want to believe it.”
Torres knew she was 13, she said.
The two still stayed in touch and would often have long phone conversations, she said. In one, Torres allegedly asked what her bra size was. In another, he wondered what sexual fantasies she had of him. The child had none.