"There was a paranoia thing going on there," he continued. "If you sat with them for a while, drinking the massive Manhattans they were always drinking, and smoking Shermans, it always got came back to Anna Gaskell."
On her blog in May, Duncan wrote a rambling 17-paragraph entry that accuses Blake's ex-girlfriend, the art photographer Anna Gaskell, and her family of conducting a "smear campaign" against the couple while also supporting an ultraconservative political effort. In the legal document, Blake suspects Gaskell and her family of colluding with Scientologists, bikers and ex-CIA operatives as part of a "covert harassment campaign" against the couple.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Saturday August 04, 2007 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 0 inches; 25 words Type of Material: Correction
Suicides: An article in Friday's Calendar about the deaths of Jeremy Blake and Theresa Duncan misspelled the last name of author George Pelecanos as Pelicanos.
Gaskell said she had not seen Blake in 12 years and never met Duncan. "Jeremy was an incredibly loyal friend. It's a sad situation," Gaskell said. "My family isn't part of any right-wing conspiracy. My brother's a Democrat."
Downhill years
Despite being aligned with a who's who of creative pacesetters and enjoying prestige in their respective fields, Duncan and Blake tried and failed to get separate movie projects into production in 2005 and 2006, then left Los Angeles.
The chronology presents a revealing glimpse of their last five years together: attending rock star birthday parties and taking power meetings with movie executives, hobnobbing with boldfaced names, including Philip Seymour Hoffman, Giovanni Ribisi and Emily Watson, while living in a state of semi-constant dread -- even if, as friends say, the couple's apprehension about being victimized was not reason enough for them to commit suicide.
Singer-songwriter Beck, a practicing Scientologist for whom Blake designed an album cover in 2002, is singled out in the legal document as the person responsible for bringing the couple into conflict with the church. Made aware of how he is characterized, Beck recalled a productive but brief working relationship that was amicable. "I hadn't heard from him in years, so the news of his suicide was heartbreaking," Beck said in an e-mail. "The controversy surrounding it was completely out of left field for me."
Duncan's efforts to make "Alice Underground," a screenplay she wrote about two girls who accidentally kidnap a rock star, that she hoped to direct as her debut feature, lay at the heart of the perceived Scientology conspiracy.
