LOS ANGELES — Democrat donor Ed Buck, once a fixture of West Hollywood politics who is now in federal prison for sex and drug crimes, must pay $2 million to the mother of one of his victims as a result of a wrongful death lawsuit.

A jury of five men and three women unanimously found Buck liable for the drug overdose death of Gemmel Moore in 2017 and awarded his mother damages on Wednesday. The federal jury began hearing evidence in the case on Monday.

Buck, 71, plied the men with drugs and then sexually assaulted them while they were unconscious or immobile. In Moore’s case and that of another man, Tim Dean, he injected his victims with fatal amounts of methamphetamine.

In 2021, federal prosecutors convicted him of nine felony counts, including distributing methamphetamine resulting in death and enticement to cross state lines to engage in prostitution. Buck, once a champion of causes such as fur bans and AIDS awareness, and a large donor to Democratic officeholders, is now serving a 30-year sentence for his crime that unfolded inside his Laurel Avenue condominium.

Jurors on Monday in the civil wrongful death lawsuit began hearing evidence after Buck failed to finalize and sign a 2024 settlement agreement with Moore’s mother, LaTisha Nixon.

“There isn’t a moment that goes by that I don’t think about him. This verdict doesn’t bring him back, but it gives me some peace knowing someone was finally held accountable for what happened to Gemmel,” his mother said following the verdict.

Nixon sued, accusing Buck of engaging in unlawful and negligent conduct, wrongful death, sexual battery, assault, hate violence based on Moore’s race, human trafficking, and revenge porn, and was seeking damages on behalf of her late son.

Buck denied the allegations and argued Moore was a willing participant. Until his 2019 arrest, Buck frequently hobnobbed with powerful politicians, donating about half a million dollars to prominent Democrats.

Moore died in July 2017 and Dean in January 2019, both inside Buck’s apartment, their bodies found in near-identical circumstances. Moore flew in from Texas on July 27, 2017, on a ticket that Buck had purchased. Hours later, he was dead. A coroner’s investigator found Moore lying on a mattress with pornography playing on the television. Syringes, pipes, sex toys and methamphetamine were found throughout the apartment.

Drug abuse was at the heart of Buck’s sexual behavior, according to testimony and evidence presented at his 2021 trial.

Buck advertised on Adam4Adam, a gay hookup site, that he was interested in “party and play” sessions, widely known to mean using methamphetamine during sex.

A parade of men testified in his criminal trial that Buck would offer them extra money if they “slammed,” or allowed him to inject them with the drug. In what prosecutors called a “carrot-and-stick approach,” he would sometimes withhold payment if they didn’t smoke enough methamphetamine or let him inject them.

Federal prosecutors described him as treating his victims “like lab rats in his twisted experiments.” Buck drugged them to the limit of their bodies’ tolerance; once they were unconscious or immobile, he sexually assaulted them, choked them, slapped them. One man, injected with something that left him unable to move, managed to regain control of his body only when Buck revved a chainsaw in front of him, sending adrenaline coursing.

Buck filmed many of the episodes. In a video played at trial, he gave stage directions to a masked man who was smoking methamphetamine: “Stare directly into the camera, flare your nostrils and blow it out slowly. Now, if you add wide-open eyes to that, it would be a perfect shot.”

Dean, 55, a former basketball player who worked as a fashion consultant at Saks Fifth Avenue, went to Buck’s apartment on Jan. 7, 2019. Within an hour, he had overdosed. Before calling 911, Buck wiped up Dean’s vomit and blood and threw syringes and pipes out of a window, according to federal prosecutors.

It took the near-death of another man for authorities to finally arrest Buck. In September 2019, Buck injected Dane Brown with three doses of methamphetamine. Brown managed to stagger out of Buck’s apartment to a nearby gas station, where he called 911. Buck was arrested a week later.

Brown’s family is also suing Buck. While he survived in 2019, he was found dead in South Los Angeles in November 2024.

©2026 Los Angeles Times. Visit at latimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.