Up and coming artist, and ex-husband of Del Shores, Jason Dottley (who recently did a music video with drag queen legend Pandora Boxx) is currently making he way across the county, playing primarily in gay bars and smaller venues – and a recent December night was no exception. However, the alleged sexual assault by the artist certainly wasn’t on the set list.
[View NewsWire Press Release on incident]
A friend and myself happen to be in Fort Smith on the weekend of Dec 18th finishing up some day-job stuff, and decided to check out this small bar – and we’ve held onto this story for a couple of weeks, waiting to see if anyone else would come forward or file a police report, or what other information we could find, and now it’s time to post the reports we’ve received. We were able to talk to a few different people in different venues he has played at in the past few weeks, and the reputation and reports seem to follow him from city to city. Dottley had a tour stop in Ft. Smith, Arkansas at a bar called Kinkead’s, on the same night we were there, so we stuck around, and got much more than we anticipated.
After we contacted a few people to see if anyone else was able to contribute to what we witnessed.. more than one came forward. The accounts were too many and too vocal to be discounted, or to be a one-time thing, and finally the owner of Kinkead’s made a statement of his own about the incident on his Facebook page late Friday evening, apologizing to patrons.
So just what happened with Jason Dottley? Several independent reports agree that “everyone” at the bar on Thursday night had entirely too much to drink, including the performers, the owner, no one was exempt. Reportedly, one of the drag performers was beyond the drunk stage and was not coherent, and this caught the attention of headliner Jason Dottley, who is also gay. According to multiple reports, as well as our own, allegedly he was attempting to put his penis in the mouth of the near passed out drag queen (we have withheld her name, for privacy), and the entire event was being championed and encouraged by bar owner, Rick Eubank.
We’re not quite sure what that would be called, other than sexual assault? Of course given the circumstances and environment, these go widely unreported and under-reported in the LGBT world.
Bar owner Rick Eubank did apologize for the incident, read his vague account of the event below:
Yesterday, I drove for a long time after only getting less than 4 hours of sleep the night before. I had nothing to eat all day long and arrived in town at 10:00 p.m. In less than 15 min after getting home, I had the fastest shower I’ve ever had and went as fast as I could to the bar. I walked in, had a drink and within one hour managed to be drunk… EXTREMELY drunk actually. I allowed things that I would never accept as “ok” in any situation, much less in my home. The lesson for me is that I SHOULD have been the responsible person that dealt with things in a responsible way, but not eating and no sleep took me further than I should have let happen. I apologize for anyone that was affected by that and in the future will make sure that it doesn’t ever happen again.
Several Patrons commented on the post, many of them regulars, with the exception of Jason Dottley, who commented as if he was oblivious to his actions or that this post was even about him:
Patrons replied to Jason Dottley letting him know that he was the reason for the post and apology, but he never replied any further. We reached out to both Kinkeads and Jason Dottley, and both downplayed the incident. We do give Rick a lot of credit for publicly apologizing, and we for one, will continue to visit his bar on our Fort Smith trips, which are occasional. Kinkeads is a home away from home for many, and just a home for many that live in the city. Not a lot of bar owners would put themselves on the line publicly as Rick did, and he should be commended. We will note however what John Taffer would have to say about this situation, and it would certainly involve some screaming at loud levels about not drinking at your own bar – you’ve seen the show. We know many both in Nashville and Ft. Smith have heard about the incident, as there are ties in both cities for some involved.
Late this afternoon, we received yet another confirmation of the incident, which stated that “WE AS A COMMUNITY HAVE MOVED ON FROM THIS WITHOUT IT GOING PUBLIC ITS UNACCEPTABLE YOUR ACTIONS OF GOING PUBLIC .I LOVE MY HOMETOWN AND OUR COMMUNITY WE ALL HAVE ISSUES AND ITS NOT EVERYONE’S BUSINESS WHEN SOMETHING HAPPENS WHEN THAT PERSON MOST AFFECTED HAS MOVED ON.“
On a somewhat unrelated note, Kinkead’s has announced it will be closing on Jan. 17th for an undetermined amount of time:
So, this is Nashville, Music City – do you have any Jason Dottley stories? Share away!
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