Alleged Jimi Hendrix Sex Tape Surfaces

LOS ANGELES, April 29, 2008

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(CBS/AP) Vivid Entertainment is releasing a sex tape allegedly starring Jimi Hendrix.

The Los Angeles-based adult entertainment company said they obtained the footage of the music legend shot in a hotel room about 40 years ago from a memorabilia collector.

The 11 minutes of footage features Hendrix - or someone resembling him - engaging in various sexual acts with two women. The company said they consulted with several experts to authenticate the footage. The DVD includes commentary from former groupies Cynthia Albritton and Pamela Des Barres, both of whom say the man on the tape is Hendrix.

Albritton, who earned her nickname making plaster casts of rock star genitalia, told the New York Times she based her opinion on how the man on the tape looks from the neck up.

"The facial bone structure is the same. The eyebrows and the mustache are true to the style he was wearing in 1970," said Albritton.

A Vivid spokesman said Albritton and Des Barres were paid for their DVD interviews.

Other experts, including a former girlfriend and a Hendrix biographer, say the man on the tape is someone else.

"It is not him," said Kathy Etchingham, 60, who dated Hendrix in the 1960s. "His face is too broad and nose and nostrils too wide for Jimi. Also the hair is too low on the forehead."

Etchingham also said that Hendrix would never have allowed himself to be filmed in the act, because he was very shy in private.

Author Charles R. Cross, who encountered the film during research for his Hendrix biography "Room Full Of Mirrors," told the Times, "It doesn't add up to Jimi." Cross said that he had studied photos and film of Hendrix for years and he had never seen the guitarist wearing the rings the man in the film is wearing.

A spokesperson for the Hendrix estate declined comment to The ShowBuzz.

Hendrix died of a drug overdose in 1970. Seattle-based representatives for Hendrix's estate did not want to comment about the tape.

Vivid Entertainment was also responsible for the release of celebrity sex tapes starring Kim Kardahsian and Pamela Anderson.

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