Music executive accused of sexual assault at Joshua Tree home

The Kellogg Doolittle house is a modernist mirage, built into a cliffside just north of Joshua Tree National Park. Its fanned concrete roof panels, designed by organic architecture master Ken Kellogg, look like a fossil or a carapace when viewed from above. Following the amber-lit driveway into the home, where the dramatically curved rock walls evoke a luxurious slot canyon, you disappear into the landscape.

The house is a showpiece for its owner, Scott Leonard, who throws music and fashion-industry events there. In February 2023, Leonard, who describes himself as a former major-label record executive and artist manager, hosted Grammy winner Alicia Keys, who performed a private concert sponsored by Hennessy liquor. For aspiring musicians in the artsy desert town below, an invitation to visit would be unforgettable.

Jamie-Lee Dimes said she has a different, darker memory of that house. The singer-songwriter alleged that in 2022, Leonard invited her to the home to give advice about her music career. Instead, Dimes alleged in an interview and in a San Bernardino County sheriff’s report reviewed by The Times, Leonard drugged and raped her there.

“This has been one of the worst times in my life,” Dimes said. “If this is what I have to tolerate to have a career in music, I would rather speak up.”

Later, Dimes learned that a second local writer and visual artist, Courtney Barriger, had complained about Leonard. Barriger alleged in an interview and police report that Leonard drugged her and attempted to assault her in the same house in 2021.

Leonard, 59, has not been charged in either case.

The Times sent a list of questions about the women’s claims to Leonard’s attorneys. They declined to comment. The San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department did not respond to questions about the status of either case.

The music industry has been troubled by high-profile assault allegations against superstars like Diddy. Yet Dimes and Barriger allege that young artists can still face vulnerabilities, even when they leave L.A. for smaller, ostensibly safer scenes in the desert.

Dimes, 35, an Australian folk and Americana musician, followed her muse to Joshua Tree in the footsteps of musicians like Gram Parsons, Emmylou Harris, Led Zeppelin, U2 and the Eagles. Dimes, who grew up in the easygoing Australian beach town of Gold Coast, felt drawn to the area’s rugged natural beauty and otherworldly energy. Her music earned praise in Rolling Stone Australia, CMT and the tastemaking Triple J radio station, and she performed at the Library of Congress in 2023.

In Joshua Tree, she found a tight-knit scene of independent musicians, many of whom had fled the high rents of L.A. for a desert community of about 30,000 people. Yet she still felt connected to the big city’s culture industries. Famous musicians had tracked albums in the area’s many small recording studios. Entertainment executives had vacation homes nearby. An aspiring artist could bump into someone at Pappy & Harriet’s or the Red Dog Saloon who might change their life.

“It’s such a small town,” Dimes said. “I’d lived there for seven years, and when you meet someone, you usually feel like they’re family and you can trust them. It’s so normal in Joshua Tree to go to somebody’s house at 8 o’clock and play some music.”

Leonard stood out in Joshua Tree as wealthy and well connected, with a landmark home, yet also a regular at local clubs. His resume would impress any aspiring musician. His LinkedIn profile cites a four-decade career with executive jobs at some of music’s most important firms, leading international marketing for the major label EMI and directing artist development for Virgin Records America, both in the early ’90s.

Through his company Insane Artists Management, he said he co-managed the experimental pop star Björk and the platinum-selling rock band Tonic until 2013. He also lists roles leading creative agencies that ran campaigns for PlayStation and “The Blair Witch Project,” and later serving on the board of an environment and women’s rights nonprofit and teaching classes at USC.

(A source familiar with Björk’s management said that Leonard ran a marketing business with Björk’s former manager and that he had no regular contact with the artist. A spokesperson for Universal Music Group said the company acquired EMI/Capitol and Virgin in 2011, and was unable to comment on employment records before then. A representative for USC said they had no record of him working there.)

According to property records, Leonard bought the Kellogg Doolittle house through a limited liability company in 2021, paying $6.55 million. At the time, he said he was the chief marketing officer for an artificial intelligence software company. Voter records also list him at a home in the wealthy, bohemian Laurel Canyon neighborhood of Los Angeles that, according to Redfin, last sold in 2023 for $3.75 million.

In Dimes’ police report, which she provided to The Times, she said that she met Leonard through mutual friends in August 2022 and that he invited her to his home to talk about her music career.

“The fact that I met him in Joshua Tree, where it’s very community based, and not L.A., made me feel like I could trust him,” she said.

In her police report, Dimes said that she arrived to the house, where she was alone with Leonard. After she played some songs on guitar for him, Leonard “slapped me on the ass a few times” and “asked me who the oldest person I’d ever had sex with was. I found it uncomfortable and tried to change the subject,” the report adds.

“I was very clear from the moment I met Scott that there was no way I would ever have sex with him,” she wrote.

About an hour later, she said she began feeling extremely disoriented. She felt like she was “under the influence of this heavy tranquilizer,” she said in her police report. She alleged Leonard took her to a bedroom of the house where there was a large circular bed. “I have recollections of him behind me and on top of me,” she said in the report, where she recalled that his “hands were in my vagina,” and then “he was on top of me, penetrating me with what is believed to be his penis, but it is foggy.”

“I do not remember how I got there but my clothes were on the floor when I woke up,” she continued in her report. “He was naked beside me, which freaked me out because there was no way I consented. … I saw blood all around my thighs, my menstrual cup was shoved up my cervix. I couldn’t walk and I was screaming.”

Dimes told police in the report that she awoke the next morning with “bruises on my wrist … shoulder, stomach and lower abdominals, thighs and a damaged toe.” When she confronted him, according to the report, “He said, ‘You have to go now, do not talk to any of the workers when you leave, you’re really f— up.’”

Dimes said in the report that she drove home, still disoriented, as she had a flight booked to return to Australia in two days. Four days later, according to her report, she submitted the clothing she wore that night to police in the Gold Coast District investigation branch, in Australia. In December, that agency shipped the clothing back to San Bernardino, where it was deposited in an evidence locker along with DNA swabs from Dimes.

The Times spoke to Dimes’ mother, roommate and two friends whom she told about the alleged assault in the hours after she left the house. Dimes’ mother recalled her daughter in deep distress, telling her she’d woken up covered in blood after allegedly being assaulted in Leonard’s circular bed.

“I am so severely traumatized I haven’t been able to function,” Dimes told police. “I honestly feel like my entire life has been flipped upside down because of this man taking advantage of me, sexually assaulting me … and thinking I won’t say anything because of his business and music connections.”

A year earlier, Barriger, a 36-year-old fantasy author, fashion designer and model from Florida, was living in an Airstream trailer in the nearby Sunfair Dry Lake with her then-partner. From their trailer, they could see the Kellogg Doolittle House above them. Like Dimes, Barriger was inspired by the desert’s art scene and natural beauty, and moved there from Los Feliz in 2019 for a more affordable, creatively fulfilling life where they could someday buy property.

She said in her report that she had known Leonard and his partner, Keiko Harada, socially for seven years. “He was introduced to me as someone with a lot of clout,” Barriger said in an interview with the Times.

On Nov. 11, 2021, the couple invited Barriger and her then-partner to a small gathering at the Kellogg Doolittle home, which Leonard had just purchased.

“He had this house but always played it cool,” she said. “He would say things like ‘Can I see your paintings? Do you need a business mentor?’ ”

Barriger said that she went to the home by herself. In the police report, which The Times reviewed, she said she was unsettled by his conversation. “Leonard said something to the effect of ‘humankind would not have evolved if rape wasn’t an aspect of it,’ “ she said in the report.

The three were drinking wine, and Leonard offered her a spare bedroom to sleep in rather than drive home. Around 2:30 in the morning, according to the report, Leonard mixed Barriger and his wife new pineapple-flavored cocktails, and after drinking them, Barriger felt a rush of energy and enhanced visuals.

She “looked into Keiko’s eyes and saw they were dilated. … Victim 1 walked to a mirror and looked into her own eyes and saw they were also dilated. Victim 1 confronted Leonard about drugging her, and Leonard denied all allegations.” (Harada, reached by phone, declined to comment.)

Barriger said in the report that, after Harada fell asleep, “Leonard walked Victim 1 to the room he offered her to sleep in and tried to seduce her.” She “tried to leave the situation,” the report continued, but “Leonard pulled Victim 1 back down to the bed by her pant loops and tried to kiss Victim 1.”

“I’m just thinking, How do I get this man out of here?” Barriger recalled in an interview. “I started to get that shark-in-the-water feeling again, like he was dangerous and very aggressive. I’m drunk and can’t drive home. I just went super stiff, like ‘How do I just make this stop as fast as possible and get out of there?’ ”

Barriger said in her report that after she went stiff and demanded he stop, Leonard eventually left the room. The next morning, she “went to High Desert Medical Center to get a test for MDMA, where staff told her she would have to file a police report before she could be tested,” but she “was not ready to file a report at the time.”

“I didn’t know what to do and I was scared,” Barriger said. “There were two different versions of what to do then. I was like ‘Is he as bad as I think he is? Or am I overreacting?’ ”

Though the report was clear that she “was not raped by Leonard,” she “felt that she was incapacitated by the drugs and physically unable to leave Leonard’s residence.”

The Times spoke to Barriger’s sister, former partner and close friend about the incident, each of whom she told about the encounter at the time. Barriger had sent them cellphone pictures of her severely dilated eyes on the night of the incident, which The Times reviewed. Barriger’s sister recalled her calling at 7 a.m., frantic, saying Leonard had attempted to assault her and that she felt drugged and didn’t know how to leave the property.

“I thought I did my due diligence,” Barriger said in an interview with The Times. “But it’s contributed to a lot of loss in my life.”

In 2023, Dimes returned to Joshua Tree, and she ran into Barriger’s then-partner, a local musician, at a grocery store. She learned they’d each made allegations against Leonard about his actions at the Kellogg Doolittle home. They separately reported them to police in September 2022 and March 2023.

This year, after reaching out to detectives about the progress of their investigations, they learned that in April 2023, the San Bernardino County Sheriff‘s Department suffered a cyberattack that crippled its computer systems and databases. The county paid a $1.1-million ransom to a Russia-aligned hacker group to retrieve the data.

In May 2024, they each had to resubmit their statements and information to police. In a note affixed to Dimes’ updated police report, the sheriff acknowledged that the department “suffered a significant computer network disruption that has affected the ability to access reports that were authored between April 23, 2019, through April 7, 2023.”

While they wait to see what happens with the San Bernardino authorities, Christine Pelosi, an attorney working with both Dimes and Barriger (and the daughter of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi), said, “We’ve been stuck on this for a long time. We need some sort of justice.”

Leonard also is facing seven criminal counts in Los Angeles over a separate 2022 incident, where a Hollywood recording studio he owned caught fire, killing 26-year-old Nathan Edwards and injuring Ozzy Osbourne’s daughter Aimee, who was recording there. “This building was a creative hub for music in Hollywood, a space that should have been regulated for fire code,” Osbourne’s wife, Sharon, wrote in an Instagram post after the fire.

In a civil lawsuit against Leonard filed in June 2023 in U.S. Central District Court in California, Edwards’ family alleged that Leonard “recklessly disregarded the fact that the failure to maintain adequate fire and life safety warnings, containment, suppression or other safety devices at or about the subject property would create a dangerous condition and enhance the risk to occupants and invitees that would lead to injuries and damages, including death, should a fire erupt.” An attorney for Edwards’ family said the suit has been settled, and declined further comment.

Leonard’s arraignment and plea hearing, on seven criminal charges around failing to maintain a safe structure, is scheduled for July 31.

Meanwhile, the two women have worked to continue their creative careers after the alleged incidents. Dimes recently performed at South by Southwest, while Barriger has two books out soon, one about sustainability in the fashion industry and an environmentalist children’s book. They’ve each moved out of the country in part, they said, because of their experiences with Leonard in a small town where they no longer feel safe or comfortable.

They worry that other young artists in Joshua Tree may be invited to the Kellogg Doolittle house without knowing what Leonard’s been accused of.

“There’s this danger I still have a feeling about,” Barriger said. “When he invited me, I really wanted to see his house. Like, what could go wrong?”

“These people in positions of power, they play on their connections,” Dimes said. “You’re like, ‘I’m an emerging artist and he sees something in me.’ That’s how they get you. But I think he underestimated us.”