A MAN who prosecutors say died after Democratic donor Ed Buck got him addicted to drugs and injected him before his overdose death “left behind a diary.”
Gemmel Moore, a 26-year-old black man, died in 2017 – and federal prosecutors have charged Buck, 66, with distributing meth in Moore’s death.
Jasmyne Cannick – an activist who pushed for years to get charges filed against Buck – gave Moore’s diary to The New York Times.
In one journal entry, Moore reportedly wrote: “I honestly don’t know what to do. I’ve become addicted to drugs and the worst one at that. Ed Buck is the one to thank.
“He gave me my first injection of crystal meth it was very painful, but after all the troubles, I became addicted to the pain and fetish/fantasy.
“My life is at an all-time high right now & I mean that from all ways. I ended up back at Buck house again and got manipulated into slamming again.
“I even went to the point where I was forced to doing 4 within a 2day period. This man is crazy and it’s sad. Will I ever get help?”
In July 2017, Moore was found dead of an overdose while lying naked on a mattress on the living floor of Buck’s apartment in West Hollywood.
Two dozen syringes and five glass pipes were found, along with meth stored in a toolbox with sex toys.
Buck was ousted from the gay political club he gave thousands of dollars in donations, but later tried making a comeback after prosecutors declined to charge him in the overdose death.
He attempted to crash Stonewall Democratic Club’s holiday party at a Los Angeles-area wine bar – telling members he had been exonerated, club president Lester Aponte said.
“When somebody dies at your house, wouldn’t you think that’s the kind of event that will make you re-examine your life choices?” Aponte told The Associated Press in 2019. “It doesn’t seem like it registered with him at all.”
Days after he was kicked out of the party, another black man – Timothy Dean, 55 – was found dead from a meth overdose at his apartment, before another young black man almost died after that.
Moore’s mom, LaTisha Nixon, said: “I said it the last time we were down here that there’s going to be a third victim.
“We said there’s gonna be a second victim. We kept saying it because we all knew … Ed Buck didn’t stop doing what he was doing.”
In December 2016, before he died, Moore reportedly wrote: “If it didn’t hurt so bad, I’d kill myself, but I’ll let Ed Buck do it for now.”
A lawyer for Buck told the Times that Moore’s apparent journal entries are “unverified writing.”
Former friends of Buck’s spoke to the Times Magazine about Buck’s love for black men.
Someone known as M said that Buck told M’s former husband: “That’s a nice-looking black man you’ve got on your arm.”
M said that when Moore died of a drug overdose at Buck’s apartment, he “genuinely thought it was an accident.”
But when the second man, Dean, died in January 2019, M said he recalled that Buck’s love of black men had a “dehumanizing quality to it.”
M said he once joked to Buck, while they were out in public, about a black man nearby, and said: “Ed, that’s your type.”
“Yeah, but I like ’em stupid,” M claimed Buck said.
Buck, according to former pal Charlie Harrison said, “always had a penchant for black guys.”
“There was one guy he spent a lot of time with, but back then it was, as Buck said, mostly ‘meaningful relationships by the hour.’”
Harrison later said after being accused of using racist language: ‘No one on the planet, except Martin Luther King, put their 100 percent behind fighting bigotry more than Buck.
“It’s equivalent to calling Martin Luther King prejudiced.”
John Duran, the former mayor of West Hollywood, told the Times that Buck’s personality changed when he started using drugs.
“Ed’s story is one I’ve seen happen to many individuals in West Hollywood, gay men who end up making the attachment of sex to meth, and then meth takes over and consumes their lives,” he said.
“When you saw Ed after 2013, he was agitated, losing weight, being angry and amplified at council meetings. Missing appointments or not showing up.
“These are all the symptoms of somebody under the influence of meth,” Duran said.
Buck has been a mega-donor for Democratic campaigns and causes over the years, shelling out hundreds of thousands of dollars.
In September 2019, he was arrested after the third black man was found dead of an overdose.
The Los Angeles County district attorney charged Buck with running a drug house and two days later, federal prosecutors charged him with distributing methamphetamine resulting in Moore’s death.
