I've always had a lot of questions about Paradise Vision - for one thing, I was one of their primary targets for harassment and abuse when they first launched. They were started by a girl named Gabrielle, who never revealed herself on camera - she was just an internet identity. Her idea of promoting her business was to viciously attack me and Realtickling, who were the two major producers at the time.
She used to post claiming that I had privately told her all my videos were fake, bombard the message board with insults on my appearance, and at one point she even wrote a bunch of m/m tickling fiction starring me and Max Speer, I guess in an attempt to humiliate me.
One of the hazards in this business is that you end up dealing with people who have no idea what they're doing. Without any clue how to market and grow a business, they resorted to personally insulting and harassing the competition.
And also the way they did things was sort of strange at first, as we discussed in the recent thread about their Miss Ticklish USA pageant. They didn't want to admit that they used models - everyone had to be a contestant, or a friend of theirs, or in one case they supposedly tricked a prostitute into being tickled against her will.
But the one thing you would never hear early PV admitting to was - we hired a girl to come to our studio and film a tickling video as a job. I think they felt like that compromised the integrity of the video - "Our videos are so real that we don't even pay the girls - it's almost just a coincidence that they're for sale being tickled on tape!"
Then later, Gabrielle supposedly retired and handed off the business to her mother Renee, who was pretty active and not afraid to be on camera at all.
Over time, I started to believe that Gabrielle was a fiction - a persona created by Renee because she was concerned that as a middle-aged woman she might be criticized or rejected by the community.
The handoff from Gabrielle to Renee was very conveniently timed - the TMF had gotten big, and the original alt.tickling boards were all disappearing. Switching from Gabrielle to Renee allowed Paradise Vision to reach out to me and apologize for the daughter's behavior, and ask for a fresh start.
Which they wanted because they wanted to advertise here, and at the time I had a ban on all of their content because I was, I think justifiably, pissed off at the way they had treated me.
In any case, in my mind the puzzle pieces never quite fit together smoothly. To me the simplest explanation - Occam's razor - is that it was all just Renee.
I could be completely wrong of course. It's just what I've come to personally suspect about it, with the benefit of a lot of hindsight.
