Here is Evidence Andy Warhol was a Pedophile

This is a collaborative investigation piece, with original research and framing by myself and long-term collaborator, Lauren Chief Elk. Here is a compilation of evidence, that is only part of what we found, as a small independent team with no funding or support, and no access to non-public materials. However, we think it will be sufficiently illuminating. We will be working on a campaign next week to make sure that every art critic, art magazine, museum and art school is notified so that the appropriate next steps are taken to continue the investigation.

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In spring of 2022, Netflix released a documentary about Andy Warhol, called the Andy Warhol Diaries. This has coincided with a revival of the 70s arts and disco scene. Shot Sage Blue Marilyn, by Andy Warhol, sold for $195 million dollars this year, the highest price sold at auction for a 20th century piece. The artwork features a portrait of Marilyn Monroe, who had died tragically several years prior. A previously unseen Basquiat work, who had also died young and tragically, was featured in a Tiffany’s ad with Jay-Z and Beyonce. There has also have been several recent Basquiat exhibitions and Warhol exhibitions… a lot of work is being done to put the spotlight back to this timeline and these figures. 

As independent investigators focusing on pedophiles, it is difficult to imagine how so many people watched the Diaries documentary, thought it was great, and completely ignored the evidence of pedophilia presented — Andy’s clear obsession with teen boys, with youth in general, of photographing boys and making pornographic films featuring underage performers, of his sexual obsession with Jean-Michel Basquiat and the MANY erotic photographs of him that Andy took. Andy’s relationships with teenagers were presented as loving, gay relationships in a time where there was still a lot of homophobia and internalized homophobia. No. 

When you start tugging on that thread, things unravel very clearly. Andy had, literally, at least four boyfriends who were 19 years old, as he himself was in his 40s and 50s. Warhol “dated” Jed Johnson, after meeting the teenager when he was delivering packages to Warhol’s residence. Jed was 19, Andy was… 40. Jed had literally just left his parent’s house. Andy dated Robert Pincus-Witten, another 19 year old, who also appeared in the pornographic film “13 Beautiful Boys”. Andy dated 19 year old Sam Bolton. Andy was 57. 

Even one instance of a man preying on a teenager in this way, is unacceptable and a very serious crime. But here we see a clear predation pattern of Andy Warhol serially attacking teenagers with age gaps of 20, 30, and close to 40 years. These boys were all aspiring artists or enterprising young folk, and like many of the MANY young people in Andy’s life, they were vulnerable to Warhol’s fame, money and connections. 

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The most disturbing account we’ve found, is that of the DuPont brothers. Warhol dated Richard DuPont, a junior in college, who he met at Studio 54 when Richard was 17. Andy was 48. 

Here is an excerpt, at length, from an interview in New York Magazine with the DuPont twins about their experiences with Andy, being drugged, pimped out, sexually exploited and used for Warhol’s art, as well as attempts by Warhol to force the twins to have intercourse with each other. Multiple of his boyfriends were part of a twin sibling-hood. It is one of the most clear narratives we have been able to find in the public record that highlights the utter depravity and sexual abuse that Warhol committed: 

Richard: And he always had an Altoids tin full of quaaludes that people had given him hoping to hang out with him, so he would give them to us too... 

Richard: He’d always be trying to get us to help him get commissions for portraits. At Studio, he’d ask, “Can we get one of those rich men you’re sleeping with to buy a portrait?” And later it was more like, “Why don’t you go sleep with that one, and then talk him into getting a portrait.” We did that a lot….

Robert: We always said no when Andy asked to film us having sex or pose naked. “You’ll be famous,” he always said. “You’ll be a star. We’ll make a movie.” 

Richard: There’s one afternoon in 1979 I’ll never forget. It was winter, and Andy’s “Shadows” paintings were up. He, Rupert, Robert, and I went to lunch on Canal Street, and this short man came and joined us. After lunch, it felt like I’d had six drinks instead of one. I must have been drugged.

 Robert: Me too. 

Richard: We went to this loft with high windows. 

Robert: It was all white and very sterile. 

Richard: And there was a bed. Somebody started to unbutton my clothes. And there was a video camera there. The short man wanted Robert and me to do it together. Andy was watching. 

Richard: I was like, What the hell? What’s the scene, Dean? I said, “No! This is freaky!” And I just stormed out. Andy followed. Two blocks away, Andy went into a store and bought me a down coat from Japan.

 Richard: Sometimes we’d be in the back of the limo, and Dalí and Potassa would say, “Pull it out, pull it out!” Dalí had a word for orgasm—I don’t remember it, but he would say it and I would do it. I don’t know why. Maybe I felt like I had to in order to get invited to dinner or something. I remember doing it for Andy in the balcony at Studio, and in the back at the Factory. One time I did it for Andy and Dalí together. We were in a black limousine, going uptown on Park Avenue South. Potassa and Dalí’s wife, Gala, were there, too. I don’t know why Andy grabbed me; maybe he was trying to get Dalí turned on, or maybe he just wanted to show that he had control. At first I was scared. But Potassa was pouring her Champagne and saying, “Cham-pan-ya!,” and Andy was saying, “Do it, do it!” so I just did. Gala was laughing, and Potassa was clapping. It was like theater for them, I guess.”

These are very clear instances of grooming and repeated sexual abuse of teenagers, and yet, the article presents this as the “Heyday of Money, Sex, and Art in New York”. This is almost always the framing that we see of events around Warhol that are clearly abusive and pedophilic — they are dressed up in glamour and glitz and nostalgia and sexual decadence and fame, so all the evidence is sitting right there out in the open and yet no one sees it… or more likely, they don’t fucking care, as our society in particular loves celebrity pedophiles. 

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Our current theory is that these abuses cluster around 19 because this is the age of someone who has just graduated high school and is therefore out of their parent’s house and school structure; an extremely formative time in someone’s life where they are very naive and vulnerable. We have also noticed inconsistencies in ages of the young partners across material, which indicates potential tampering with ages and timelines. In fact, a lot of this material indicates a coordinated cover-up effort that involves isolating the different relationships so they aren’t viewed in totality, and couching the age gap in talk of artistic inspiration and collaboration.   

There is little doubt that there are other victims — this type of serial predator with this level of access to youth in exploitative environments, can often rack up huge numbers of violations. It is reminiscent of the Saville case in many respects, in particular how fame and money and public adoration created conditions where he was able to achieve huge numbers of offenses - Saville had over 500 victims. There are probably others out there — we have only had access to what is publicly available and documented; and there’s clear evidence of coverups such as certain films and photographs with erotic material that seem to be missing or not available, and accounts of meeting young people and their ages shift across contexts.

Teenagers were the absolute focus of Andy’s life, and they were around the Factory all of the time. Much analysis of Andy Warhol’s work talks about his obsession with youth, youth as muse, as creativity and art subject. But he was abusing teenagers — this wasn’t about some kind of artistic meditation, it was about producing child sexual abuse material for him and his friends, it was about gaining access to youth, and the means to abuse them (drugs, fame, threat of loss to career, etc). 

There are just a ton of abuse and sexual exploitation of minors that can be linked to Andy Warhol and the Factory or Studio 54; pedophiles often set their lives up so that have a ton of access to children, and Andy is no different. The Factory, and the entire idea of “art”, hid the clear pattern of predation.

Outside of his teenage “lovers”, Andy has had sexually exploitative relationships with much younger boys in connection to the Factory: Lance Loud, a child star, was only 12 or 13 years old when Andy started a phone and mail correspondence; this is reminiscent of Michael Jackson’s grooming and abuse pattern, who gained the trust of many youth and their parents over a long period of telephone and fax contact; Andy and Michael Jackson actually were in the same social group, along with numerous other associated pedophiles which we’ll outline in part further down. 

 A young boy, “Little Joey”, age 13, “worked” at the Factory as Andy’s “assistant” and “used to go wake up Andy every afternoon so that he would come to the Factory and that Andy used to come to the door in cum-stained underpants”.

 Another documentation details how Joseph Freeman “would call Warhol on Sundays… they would just chat on the phone… ‘he’d talk for hours. We’d say: ‘What are you doing, Andy?’ and he’d say: ‘Oh, I’m sucking cock.’ I mean, we fell abut… he just seemed to understand what would make teenage boys kill themselves laughing’”.

Patty D’Arbanville was “discovered” by Andy Warhol when she was only 13. At 17 she was cast in a sexually explicit role in one of his many pornographic films, “Flesh”. Jane Forth, who ended up being a “Warhol Superstar”, met Andy at only 15, and a year later became the star of “Trash”, a sexually explicit film in which all performers were nude; she recalls “being scared to death of him” at their first meeting. Stephen Shore was “hired” to work at the Factory, a known den of sex, pornography, and drug abuse, when he was 17. Bibbe Hansen was only 14 years old when she met Andy; she was a “go go dancer” for Andy’s band, the Velvet Underground, and filmed for him. 

 Andrea Feldman was 19 when she starred in her first Warhol movie. She referred to herself as “Andrea Warhol”, one of his Superstars. She became addicted to drugs, and when she, at a point of utter desperation, came to the Factory hysterical for help, Andy ignored her, even though people were telling him she desperately needed it. In her suicide note, it is rumored she addressed Andy in extremely negative words. 

There’s many other stories; in this article we are only presenting some of our findings, but feel it urgent to get it out there so that other investigators can add to the case. Many of the young stars around Warhol died. This has always been chalked up to the glamorous druggy lifestyle, not Andy Warhol’s fault; of course, the image shifts when you acknowledge Warhol’s predatory behavior and obsessions, including with young celebrity death. When he met his most famous muse, Edie Sedgwick:  

“I could see that she had more problems than anybody I’d ever met,” said Andy, describing his initial impression of Edie in The Philosophy of Andy Warhol. “So beautiful but so sick. I was really intrigued.”

Vanity Fair editorializes, in a common patten of painting Andy’s reprehensible abuse as art, “It was the sickness as much as the beauty, of course, that excited his interest, the sickness giving the beauty a tension and an urgency that it might otherwise have lacked.”

 He denied help to Edie Sedgwick when she was in dire need; then he expressed desire to film her killing herself (considered by him to be an inevitability) and regretted that he wasn’t able to capture it upon learning of her death. There are other accounts of Andy’s desire to capture youth suicides of his “cast” on film. 

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This is a pattern for him, bringing teenagers into environments that are full of drugs and booze, full of older men, dazzling them with fame and money and the opportunity to launch their craft, and sexually exploiting them…then ruining their lives, refusing to help, and knowingly letting them die, while having a highly known “interest” (read: fetish) for young death. 

This pattern — of Andy Warhol denying help to the teenagers that he got addicted to drugs, sexually exploited, and manipulated for his career, is all over the archives. In a startling number of cases, a death soon follows. He did it to his boyfriend Edward Wallowich. He did it to Andrea Feldman. And he did it to Edie, and to Basquiat. A lot of his young superstars died. He himself was obsessed with the idea of a young, famous, star who falls to an untimely and tragic end — which locates these deaths in a totally new framework.  

The Factory and the art machine in general was a massive cover for what was actually going on there, which was a skilled predator manipulating and abusing teenagers, getting them hooked on drugs, and extracting their work. Fame and access to resources is a way to attract and manipulate teens who have no life experience much less the skills to evade a highly sophisticated predator in a compromised environment. The Factory and the idea that it was “art”, not trophies of sexual exploitation, was the cover for the huge body of work he has done “featuring” teenagers, taking massive amounts of nude and semi-nude photos of them, filming them for his movies, drawing boys engaged in sexual situations together. 

In fact, the family of a Warhol victim, Richard Toelk, sued the Warhol estate for sexual exploitation and torture and called the film “child pornography”. Toelk was only 14 years old, he was shot in a Warhal film wherein he was instructed to give himself electrical shocks and some kind of knife play, and was given drugs;  Warhol collaborator Paul Morrissey, continued to exploit Toelk through his teen years. The press available on this case paints Toelk’s family as gold diggers trying to profit from the Warhol legacy. 

The Factory was a place where there were all kinds of drugs around, where phonographic material was often made, where Andy had full control over the environment, held a lot of power over the young people. Pedophiles will often use drugs and alcohol to make it easier to attack — don’t forget the Altoid box of quaaludes and known accounts of druggings; Rob Lowe, who Andy was spending a lot of time with when Lowe was 19, has said they were giving beer to kids as young as 15. Victor Hugo would pick up boys from the bathhouse and give them to Andy to take legions of explicit photographs, many of which never showed up in a public exhibition. Weird!  

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The pedophilia seems to have been known by… everyone, including the press and the public. An Esquire article states:

“and so America’s kids run away and wander into Warhol’s ’s studio, into his life, or he finds them at parties or in the streets or they are brought to him by his friends much as people give each other gifts. Warhol likes to look at them. He likes to see them naked…” 

This is a pretty classic framing about Warhol’s love and commitment to the youth, but it’s really a very bald face admission that Andy is bringing in vulnerable kids, getting vulnerable children from other members of his pedophile ring, creating child pornography from them for himself and other’s enjoyment, and that this was the true focus of his life and art: child abuse. 

The treatment of Andy Warhol’s relationship with Jean-Michel Basquiat, the top artist of his generation, and one of the all-time masters in the arts, must be treated very carefully, and we sincerely hope to pass the baton on this to others who are more qualified and more knowledgeable about Jean-Michel’s art and life, to analyze the relationship through this lens. We will say this: 

 The typical story about Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, is that here were two icons of their generation, engaged in an artistic journey something between a collaboration and a competition, a generative and mutual artistic relationship, to which we owe some of the best art of our generation. Basquiat tragically died too young, but we’ll always have his artwork… and remember his special relationship with Andy… on exhibit next month …

Common narrative. What about this narrative? 

Jean-Michel Basquiat, a young Black genius, is born into a broken and abusive home. He leaves his home, and at age 15 he is living off the streets, tagging, and doing sex work to survive. Andy sees him on the street and starts giving him little bits of money here and there, not much, $10, nothing to a rich man, and taking his early works. (We believe that Andy very well might have been paying the teenager for sex at this time). Andy later brings Jean-Michel into his circle, and becomes obsessed with him, taking thousands and thousands of polaroids of him, including ones with explicit content, such as genitalia and poses in jockstraps and so on. Andy is thrilled for the opportunity to steal this young man’s work as well and use it for his own empire, as he has done to other artists. 

Basquiat, like many of the young people around Andy, begins to decline from drug addiction. When Jean-Michel’s girlfriend calls Andy to beg for help for him, he denies it. He discusses in his diaries how art collectors feel that the price of the Basquiat artwork would go up immensely if Basquiat dies; a sentiment he himself had expressed in general and about specific of his other artists. 

And Basquiat dies too. 

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We call for a FULL investigation of the relationship between Andy Warhol and Basquiat. ALL sales and promotions and productions of Warhol must be immediately stopped until we can have a fully staffed investigative team that is able to access non-public material and can conduct interviews with witnesses. 

There are dead kids all over Warhol. For years, this has been chalked up to the cost of the lifestyle; but it was a lifestyle that Andy Warhol was creating on his terms for the purposes of exploiting the youth. He was their care giver, support system, boss, collaborator, career — he could give them the world or take it away. These are the perfect conditions for not just exploitation in general, but sexual abuse in particular. The death obsession is perhaps one of the most disturbing things we found, among many horrors.

There is significant reason to believe we are looking at not only an instance of a singular pedophile, but an entire Hollywood pedophile ring. Andy was associated with the following people who have credible accounts of pedophilic predation: Carl Laszlo, Dali, Woody Allen, William Burroughs, Michael Jackson, Halston, Allen Ginsburg, David Bowie. There are others. 

Oh, there are. 

Jeffery Epstein. We have direct, credible, verified accounts of Warhol hanging out at Epstein’s residences. Warhol established the New York Academy of Arts; Epstein was on the board. The New York Academy of Arts is where Epstein and Maxwell targeted Maria Farmer, the first Epstein whistleblower. 

This obviously bears SIGNIFICANTLY more investigation, that we have evidence of a large arts pedophile ring linking directly to Jeffery Epstein. Please remember that pedophiles recognize each other, just as you or I recognize people like us. It is never by accident that pedophiles “just happen” to all be hanging out together and collaborating on things together. 

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One thing that makes this particular case a sensitive challenge for investigators is that Warhol did, in fact, use his fame and access to lure young aspiring artists into the Factory. And many of them were incredibly, incredibly talented and very much artists in their own rights; Andy picked people who could further his plagiarized art, career and platform. 

For many of those people, their legacy and career has revolved around Andy Warhol, and they are put alongside him in history, and the Factory is a huge piece of their stories and relevance as artists, which makes it incredibly difficult to perhaps even reconcile the predation, much less go open with it. Many of these kids went on to be renowned photographers, artists, actors. Andy not only sexually preyed on these kids, but he used their artwork even in direct plagerism  — many members of his inner circle state that his “genius” is that he stole everything. Wow. 

 Having a victim’s entire career bound up in association with a predator, is a great coercive force, that resembles for example, what we have seen in Hollywood with the Weinstein case. The connection to the Factory was a huge part of these people’s lives, and the young people who came to Andy came because they were aspiring talents; Warhol viciously abused them, stole their work from them, and sexually violated them; and yet, for them to turn their back on the Warhol brand would mean the loss of their work and careers. 

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After the initial detection of possible pedophilic activity by Andy Warhol, we began to investigate this matter further, and we were absolutely shocked that this hasn’t been exposed yet. It is VERY evident in the archival material, and this is based solely on publicly available material that has been heavily managed and massaged. We have a guiding principle as investigators that what you see in the public domain is only a fraction of the picture; take, for example, Epstein, who was known to be in the company of teen girls, and what was happening in the background of that was sexual horror and devastation and torture of teen girls at mass scale.  

There have been so many documentaries, so many books, so many exhibitions, so many interviews and articles over the years… we even have only put into this article a small part of the total evidence we ourselves gathered across books, memoirs, documentaries, archived articles, art boards, etc. 

 How has no one said anything, how has no one connected the dots? Andy Warhol’s life has been poured over in absolutely exhausting detail; he himself was engineering an alternative narrative of events that would serve his purpose, I.e., the way he created his Diaries, which again, far from being diaries, were really commercial products that were designed with the eventual release in mind, were designed to turn a profit; like much that came out of Andy Warhol, this was a fabrication. There has been a great deal of commentary around his life that he “invented” or “created” himself; this is a misunderstanding of what is a pedophile covering up their abuses. Because despite the cover-up job, which has surely required thousands of people over the years, the pedophilia and the sexual abuse and exploitation comes through loud and clear. 

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Andy Warhol never made any bones that he was a ruthless capitalist, and the “art” and entertainment empire he established, as well as the investments of artists associated with him, continue to be MASSIVE business to this day…. And this empire is entirely based on kids, many of whom were sexually abused and exploited and died early and tragically due to the toxic conditions of the Factory and Warhol’s circle. It must be destroyed.

But Warhol is big fucking business. The Marilyn portrait, done shortly after her tragic death (he loved young dead stars, didn’t he), recently received the highest bid of an artwork in history at auction with Christies. We notified Christies several times, including calling their offices, prior to the painting being sold. There’s the Andy Warhol Museum, and there are his permanent installations as well as extremely profitable traveling exhibitions. We have tried to contact the Andy Warhol Museum on several occasions. There’s the Diaries, the documentary — we also notified the documentary creator, with no result. Our research has also indicated that Bob Colacello has played a large role in an organized cover-up; he should be relieved of any ongoing work as a writer/arts and culture critic, and be investigated immediately. There’s an entire world of prints and memorabilia and art museum, gift shop type material and then of course, there’s the licensing. This is big business. And so it stays covered up. 

But not anymore. All pedophile rings must go.