Porn Firm Sells the Hendrix Sex Experience

The exploitation of the private lives of celebrities, even dead ones, by the US entertainment industry is again under the spotlight after a Los Angeles company released a 45-minute video purporting to show a sexual encounter with Jimi Hendrix.

Vivid Entertainment Group describes itself as the world's leading adult film company. It is selling Jimi Hendrix the Sex Tape for $39.95 as a digital download or DVD. Billed as a "sexual documentary", the film has an 11-minute segment said to be 8mm footage from the late 1960s; the rock legend died of an overdose in 1970.

Former friends of Hendrix question the authenticity of the film, which shows a man resembling the guitarist in scenes with two women in a darkly-lit hotel room. Kathy Etchingham had a relationship with Hendrix, and told the New York Times: "He would never have allowed anyone to see that. In private he was very shy and would cover up."

The dispute revives debate over the degree to which celebrity private lives are fair game, even when in the grave. The Hendrix tape follows an incident this month in which a New York businessman paid $1.5m for a 15-minute film of Marilyn Monroe supposedly having sex with an unidentified man.

A memorabilia collector, Keya Morgan, said the footage had been found in FBI archives. But the fact the businessman remains anonymous, and has refused to allow his purchase to be seen (in order, it is said, to protect the Hollywood star's memory), inflames suspicion by blogs and websites that it is all an elaborate hoax.

Vivid insists it went to great lengths to confirm the authenticity of its Hendrix film, bought from a sex-film distributor called Howie Klein. In turn, Klein says he bought it from a collector who found it at a London auction a few years ago.

A private detective was brought in to check out the story, Vivid says, and experts were also consulted.

One is a former 1960s groupie known as Cynthia Plaster Caster, a reference to the casts she used to make of the sexual organs of stars. "No doubt about it - that's Jimi Hendrix, and I should know," she is recorded saying on the video.