Sex, Lies, and Rob Lowe's Videotape

Jul 11, 2025

Dear Gen Xer,

Rob Lowe invented the sex tape. That’s what he says, anyway.

He also believes the scandal that followed - the one that threatened to ruin his career – was the best thing that ever happened to him.

The scandal got him sober. Sobriety got him married. He and his wife, Sheryl Berkoff, have been together for 34 years.

It’s a far cry from the Brat Pack boy toy of 1988, who went from About Last Night to A Current Affair.

THE SCANDAL
- July 1988; Lowe attends the Democratic Convention in Atlanta, Georgia
- Lowe leaves a party with a couple of women
- A sex tape surfaces; one of the ‘women’ is 16 years old
- A civil lawsuit is launched by the 16-year-old’s mother

THE SUIT
- The age of consent in Georgia was 14 at the time
- The lawsuit wasn’t about Lowe having sex
- It was about Lowe filming the sex (age of consent: 18)

THE TAPE
- 39 minutes long
- 3 separate parts
- PART 1: 25 minutes long; Lowe and a 21-year-old male friend have sex with an American model named Jennifer after a night of partying with Grace Jones in Paris
- PART 2: 7 minutes long; Lowe in Atlanta, batting practice with the Braves, interview with Channel 22, the California Raisins, the Goodyear blimp, an anti-KKK demonstration
- PART 3: 7 minutes long; 16-year-old Jan Parsons and 22-year-old Tara Seburt engage in sex while Lowe watches; they giggle and joke, mug for the camera; Rob and Jan get it on

I’ve put together an oral history of what (and who) went down that night.

My sources were: UPI, Interview Magazine, Stories I Only Tell My Friends by Rob Lowe, and Rob Lowe’s Girl Trouble, from Scary Monsters and Super Freaks by Mike Sager.

I’ve mixed and matched and cut for clarity. Nothing has been taken out of context. Nor have I added any words of my own.

Appearing in this week’s story:

Rob Lowe: Actor
Mike Sager: Journalist
Lester Crowell: Co-owner of SuperHair
Marion Crowell: Employee at SuperHair
Rebecca Weinberg: Performance artist at Club Rio
Susan Sullivan: Publicity Director at Club Rio
Jim Shuler: Reporter at WAGA-TV
Cassian Elwes: Friend of Rob Lowe
Ally Sheedy: Actress, friend of Rob Lowe
Amanda Hinson: Neighbor of 16-year-old Jan Parsons
Arsenio Hall: Talk show host

And now, without further ado: Sex, Lies, and Rob Lowe’s Videotape.

MIKE: The story of the Rob Lowe Sex Tape begins thirty commuter miles north of Atlanta…in the suburban wilds of east Cobb County—at a two-story storefront with a shocking-pink facade: SuperHair Three-13.

[It’s] a prosperous business, highly visible on the Atlanta fashion scene, regularly doing shows, videos and exhibitions. The salon has also become over the years a safe haven for the young, affluent and disaffected of idyllic east Cobb.

LESTER: We dress different, we look wild. We let men wear makeup if they want to. Girls can shave their heads. We're a shock to some people when they first see us, but we're very devoted to hairdressing, and to fashion and everything, and to making our own look in our own way.

REBECCA: Basically, they're into sex, gossip and hairdressing. Lester fosters complete devotion to the salon.

LESTER: Some people call us a cult, but it's not a cult. It's a way of life.

MIKE: In the spring of 1988, Lena Jan Parsons came to work as an apprentice at SuperHair. She was sixteen, a pretty, five-foot-four blonde with a cute boyfriend and "a nice body."… Jan let her grades plummet to Fs after she received a red 1966 Porsche from her father on her fifteenth birthday. …By tenth grade, Jan had dropped out of school and "turned punk," dying her hair Kelly green, wearing white face powder and black clothes, frequenting downtown clubs and hanging out with lesbians.

About the same time Jan began at SuperHair, Tara Seburt became the receptionist at the salon. Formerly a manager of a Domino's Pizza franchise, Tara, 22, had short, spiked blond hair, a butch demeanor, a midnight-blue pickup truck and a female lover who also worked at SuperHair. When Tara broke up with that woman, she began seeing Jan.

LESTER: From what I hear, Tara wanted a lot more than what Jan was giving.

MIKE: Lowe [came to Atlanta] as part of a delegation of about three dozen Hollywood luminaries under the auspices of California assemblyman Tom Hayden.

ROB: Conventions are, by nature, a party. I mean, that’s why people become delegates. They come from all over the world to exercise their democratic rights and to party. But the group I was with wasn’t there to party; we were there to observe. ...Tom Hayden, Ally Sheedy, Alec Baldwin, Ed Asner, Ed Begley Jr., Judd Nelson—that community in Hollywood that’s pretty connected with the social issues. It’s pretty much always the same people.

MIKE: Inside SuperHair Three-13, there was little talk of conventions or politics or even Rob Lowe until a client called with a proposal. A friend of his, John Roca, a photographer for New York's Daily News…was in town looking to freelance. Would SuperHair supply some models?

At 6:30 that evening, Roca met about fourteen employees of SuperHair… After shooting several rolls of film, Roca says, he arranged to meet the SuperHair kids at Club Rio later that evening. He had in mind a piece on Atlanta night life during the convention. He thought the kids, with their blue, green and yellow hair, wild outfits and good looks, would dress up the shots nicely.

LESTER: I called [Club] Rio and Rebecca Weinberg answered the phone and said she was the hostess that night. I told her we had some underage people and we were just going to come in for a photo shoot, would it be okay. She said, ‘Fine, get here before it gets really busy, and we'll comp you in.'

SUSAN: Ten minutes to nine, they all showed up, thirty of them, and they all looked great and perfect. The owner was thrilled to have the club so full so early. She said not to charge them admission. That didn't mean they didn't have to have an ID. Maybe Jan was using someone else's ID, but she had to have one or she wouldn't have gotten into the club.

MARION: People get into the club scene and that becomes their whole life. The idea that you're going out to have fun gets lost. Instead, the clubs are all they live for. Going out, partying, drugs. It really happens. It's sad. I've seen a lot of people who were pretty good kids just get mixed up. I don't want to say it's because of the bars, but maybe it's because of their perception of what the scene is supposed to be. They see it on TV and the movies and on cable. They think this is how they live in Hollywood, how all the glittery people and celebrities live, so this is how they're trying to live here.

SUSAN: Someone from the door staff called up and said somebody from Rob Lowe's entourage had just come by and said that Rob, Judd, Ally Sheedy and some guests would be coming by. I went and found Rebecca and said, 'Listen, we got VIPs coming in,' and I told her to get champagne, buckets, ice and a private room ready. As we were doing that, I saw Tara and Jan sitting at a table. I walked over and said, 'I can't really talk, because Rob Lowe is coming in,' and the both of them said, 'What? That's great!' And I said, 'Yeah, yeah, I'm getting the VIP room ready.' And they said, 'Really? We want to meet him!' And I said, Tm sure he'll be in and out of the VIP room—that's fine, just introduce yourselves.' So they took their drinks and, like, ran over to the table right outside the VIP room and sat down.

MIKE: Susan left Rebecca to take care of the VIP room and walked downstairs. There was Rob Lowe. She introduced herself to Lowe and to Sheedy, Judd Nelson, Holly Robinson, Justine Bateman, Alec Baldwin and the rest, then took them up to the VIP room, an alcove just off the dance floor with a velvet rope across the entrance.

SUSAN: Rob was okay, you know? He had his little Poindexter glasses, a jacket, a polka-dot shirt. Mr. Young Democrat. He was polite.

ROB: I meet so many people. I want to be genuine and open with everyone, because when I was young and just starting out, I remember I was around people who were successful, and I thought that some were kind of cool or off-putting to their fans. It always really bothered me. So I think I may sometimes go too far out of my way. What happened in Atlanta is a good example.

REBECCA: I was working strictly the VIP room. I was kind of socializing. Judd Nelson was following me around with two cocktails in his hands, weaving, saying, 'You're so beautiful, wanna come home with me?'

MIKE: Meanwhile, Jan and Tara waited outside, just a few feet from the VIP room.

REBECCA: Jan kept coming up to me and saying, 'When’s Rob gonna come out? When's he gonna come out?'

ALLY: The place was packed with people. Atlanta was different than being in other towns. In New York and Los Angeles, because there are so many actors, people are kind of more relaxed about it. In Atlanta, everybody knew we were in town, and the word got out that we were at this one club. . . . People were coming up to the door of the room, looking in. They weren't allowed in, but they were coming in anyway. I felt like I was trapped. I left with Judd and Alec.

MIKE: Lowe remained behind and continued to party. Finally, all at once, Lowe came to the door of the VIP room, Rebecca opened the velvet rope, and Jan and Tara rushed over.

ROB: I met a lot of girls, but I very specifically remember meeting Jan, because she was very pretty and she seemed very nice, and she kept walking back and forth past the room. You know, by the seventh pass you notice somebody.

REBECCA: Jan was real excited. Tara was less excited. She's not really into boys. But Jan, you know, this little sixteen-year-old, she was really excited. I mean, here's this girl who's never been anywhere, and she was meeting Rob Lowe. I could see it in her eyes: Rob! She was really hyped up about it.

MIKE: Jan and Tara disappeared into the VIP room. The partying continued. At about eleven, Rebecca says, she went to the employees' lounge to take a break. There she found Lowe and two boys.

REBECCA: They were doing blow, and then one of the guys asked Rob if he wanted some ecstasy, and he just took it. I stayed a few minutes, hanging out, catching what was going on. I asked Rob about Ally Sheedy, like is she a lesbian. He didn't say anything. He was really drunk.

MIKE: Lowe asked Rebecca to call him a cab. With Jan and Tara in tow, he headed for the exit.

MIKE: The thing people really want to know is: Why did he make a videotape?

ROB: It was just one of those quirky, sort of naughty, sort of wild, sort of, you know, drunken things that people will do from time to time. It’s just one of those things.

MIKE: According to Susan and other sources, Tara has said that there were "several eight balls" of coke in Lowe's room on the night of their encounter. She has also said that at one point, while Lowe was having sex with Jan, she picked up the camera and tried to shoot some footage of the two but that she couldn't make the camera work. …[Tara] also said that drugs were used and that Lowe had sexual intercourse with Jan.

In addition, Tara has told friends that at one point, while she sat in a chair, drinking a beer and watching Lowe and Jan have sex, Lowe looked at her, stopped, crawled over to Tara and ripped her shirt off. Tara also said that Lowe was having a hard time achieving orgasm due to the cocaine and ecstasy ingested that evening. In the end, Tara brought the actor to climax orally, whereupon he passed out and the girls left, taking with them the tape, $200 for a cab home to east Cobb and a bottle of prescription pills.

Amanda: [Jan] came over to my house and told me that she had had sex with Rob Lowe and to come over and see the video tape of the sex scene. Jan Parsons told me that if I told her mother, Lena Parsons, that she would kill me. Subsequent to that, Jan Parsons told me that she was going to have a party over at SuperHair…and have a showing of the film.

LESTER: Tara came up with the idea of having a party and showing the video to everybody, and Jan sort of agreed to it, but knowing in her mind that there was no way it was going to happen. That's another reason they took the tape. They didn't want Rob Lowe to have it. And they didn't want Jan's parents to find out she had been with another woman. They realized what had gone on, but they were mesmerized by it. It was like 'Hey! We were with Rob Lowe! We're gonna be stars around the Atlanta area!'

MIKE: Then Jan's brother, Ashley, found the tape in a closet in her room and watched it. He promptly told their mother.

MIKE: Ten months later, a civil suit against Lowe was filed in Fulton County, Georgia, alleging that, while attending the Democratic National Convention in Atlanta in July 1988, Lowe “used his celebrity status as an inducement to females to engage in sexual intercourse, sodomy, and multiple-party sexual activity for his immediate sexual gratification, and for the purpose of making pornographic films of these activities.” The suit was brought by the mother of Jan Parsons.

One week later it was reported that the Fulton County district attorney was investigating. If charged with the sexual exploitation of a minor, Lowe could face a maximum of twenty years in prison and a $100,000 fine.

ROB: I remember going to the club and being surprised because I was carded at the door. I think most people know I’m over twenty-one, but I was carded at the door. So when it came out that the girl I met there was sixteen, I was shocked.

MIKE: Documents filed by Lowes attorneys claim that the Parsons family attempted to "extort" half a million dollars from the actor in order "to avoid adverse publicity."

ROB: I felt like I’d been taken. I felt like something I thought was private was now threatening to become public unless I paid an exorbitant amount of money to somebody, and that made me angry. And when I’m angry I’m an incredibly tough person, because I don’t get angry easily.

MIKE: Lowe's attorneys asked the court to dismiss the suit and impose sanctions against Mrs. Parsons. Lowe's attorneys deny that Lowe seduced Jan Parsons. They said that Lena Parsons has no claim to seek damages for emotional stress she says she suffers as a result of Lowe's alleged seduction of her daughter. Her claims, said Lowe's attorneys, lack any "substantial justification" and are being pursued "for an improper purpose" through "extortionist tactics."

AMANDA: [Jan] said that she had slept with Rob Lowe. She was going to sell the tape for $2 million for blackmail and she told me that if I told anyone that she would kill me.

MIKE: On May 18th, 1989, six days after the civil suit was filed, Atlanta's WXIA-TV, acting on a tip from a courthouse insider, was the first to break the story. It wasn't until the next day that Jim Shuler, a reporter with the local CBS affiliate, WAGA-TV, became the first member of the media to actually see the tape.

JIM: That afternoon I got a call from an insider in the club scene. He laid out this entire scenario for me: Lowe, the girls, the videotape, all that, and it just sounded so bizarre and so unbelievable that we decided the responsible thing to do was not to air it.

MIKE: On the five and six o'clock broadcasts, Shuler summed up the charges in the lawsuit against Lowe and interviewed district attorney Slaton about possible criminal investigations. The phone lines lit up with tips, outrage and offers of access to the tape.

By eleven that evening, after a clandestine meeting in the suburbs, Shuler had a dub of the tape in hand. The station ran it with highly edited, electronically censored clips.

ARSENIO: Finally, Rob Lowe has made a movie that everybody wants to see.

ROB: There were four television crews in my street twenty-four hours a day. They wouldn’t step in my driveway, because I would have them arrested. I couldn’t leave the house, because if they photographed me, then that would have given them an excuse to put something on the news, even if I was just driving my car. They’d ring my buzzer and wake me up at six in the morning and say, “Rob, can we have an interview?” So my friends would come up and bring food and movies. And the press would film each person coming and going.

CASSIAN: [Lowe] was devastated by the Atlanta thing. We all went up to the house. And he was, like, 'Listen, I'm going to somehow make it through this, and someway I'm gonna find my way out of it, and I feel bad for all my friends to have to put you all through this, and I'm apologizing to you for that.'

ALLY: Rob has a very strong sense of humor. Basically, that's what he's using to deal with this whole thing. He's, like, 'Okay, this happened. I really want to get it all cleared up and get it over with.' Working as an actor is very important to him. He's worried about everything that's happened and how it will affect him.

MIKE: Shortly after the revelation of the sex tape, Lowe was pulled from the cover of Teen magazine's back-to-school issue. A spokesman for the magazine said it was "inappropriate to publicize a public figure of Lowe's nature when serious charges are challenging his reputation."

In early June, a women's clothing line bestowed upon Lowe their No Excuses Award. Lowe was pictured in a full-page ad in Women’s Wear Daily. HOW LOWE CAN YOU GO? read the copy.

ROB: Then, about four months later, it changed.

When you first read about it, it was like I’d been tried and found guilty. But I was never charged with anything; I don’t know if people know that, but I never was. So when the investigation was dropped, people got the idea: “Oh, well, maybe we overreacted a little bit.” Then I got what I call “the sympathetic media.”

All of a sudden the crews are back in my driveway. The phone rings and this woman says, “Rob, this is Sandy So-and-so from A Current Affair. We’d just like to tell you that all of our viewers still love you, and we want to know how you’re dealing with everything and your new movie is going.” All of a sudden, she’s the friendliest person in the world. Three months ago they would have lynched me if I’d walked out; now I look through the surveillance monitor and I see this camera crew outside, and they’ve got boxes of lox, cream cheese, donuts, coffee. They’re gesticulating at the boxes and then at their stomachs, like: “Let’s come in and sit around and have brunch and talk.”

MIKE: The media furnace must be fed.

ROB: The scary thing is, you can laugh about it, but it’s scary. Kids are growing up and they don’t know the difference between fact and fiction. The line is getting blurry.

MIKE: As for Jan, she was ordered by the court to stop work at SuperHair and to attend an alternative high school in Cobb County. In the fall of 1988, soon after the tape was discovered, Jan spent ninety days in a psychiatric facility undergoing treatment for depression.

Tara, meanwhile, was fired from her job at SuperHair for what Lester says was nonperformance based on alcohol abuse. … She is lying low. She refuses to be interviewed, saying that she has already turned down a $25,000 offer to talk about that night.

SUSAN: You know, people have two opinions about this whole thing. Either that Rob Lowe's a scumbag, a cradle-robbing pornographer, or that he got taken. You have to see both sides. Everybody was in the club. Jan was acting like an adult, she put herself in an adult situation. She enjoyed being with Rob Lowe. If it was some guy named Beauregard from Clayton County, you would never have heard that he videotaped it.

ROB: Somebody like myself or other actors—our lives are under the microscope all the time. If people are watching me 365 days a year, 360 days they might be bored to tears. And on the other five days, maybe I would qualify as Satan. I mean, take the person reading this article. I’m sure you could pick five days out of the year where they, you know, have done things that they wouldn’t want repeated. The thing is they’re watching me all the time. And they’re not watching everybody else all the time.

SUSAN: It's stupid, because America makes such gods out of its matinee idols. Years ago it was Rudolf Valentino, now it's Rob Lowe. Hollywood puts him up in a sexual position. That's the whole focus. That's the publicity. They market him so that little girls will go to the movies, buy his posters, fantasize about fucking Rob Lowe. So why wouldn't Jan want to fuck him if she got the chance? Why shouldn't she?

ROB: Yes, I made a mistake. I misjudged people. I was careless. I used bad judgment. Those are three big mistakes. And I take responsibility for those three mistakes. [But] just because people will say you have fucked up does not mean you are fucked up. …Everybody can have bad judgment, and it’s something you have to address. You learn to go on from it. It shouldn’t stand in your way. You shouldn’t let people continue to throw it in your face. People are human. There’s such a premium today on being perfect. That’s just not the way people are.

Did you like this piece?