Wendy Iwanow's previous home is much more impressive than this one. Located in West Palm Beach's Northwood Hills neighborhood, the 80-year-old mansion is straight off the pages of Architectural Digest. An imposing iron fence there guards a perfectly landscaped yard; a koi pond burbles under a mango tree. The orange stucco exterior glints regally in the South Florida sun. It's a showplace in which Iwanow says she invested more than $100,000 and countless hours repairing.
Her new place may not be as fancy, but with a yawning front porch, swaying swing, and scattered bric-a-brac, it's much more inviting. Still, a suit of armor stands guard by the front door of the Fort Pierce home, and two huge Dobermans bark a ferocious warning from inside until Iwanow tells them to shush. The outside of the house does not reflect the owner's style, a fact she's quick to share. But inside, in the entryway, Iwanow's personality begins to show. There, hanging in matching frames, are two black-matted antique prints. One is an aging sketch from a medical book that details the parts of a human penis; the other is a poster warning devils and witches to get out of town. "I had to have those when I saw them," Iwanow says smiling.
Six months ago, this country retreat with its wood-crate shelves and shabby-chic décor became Iwanow's refuge from the drama that occurred two hours south in Northwood Hills. She hoped to leave behind the warring neighbors, the police visits, and the prying newspaper reporters. For the most part, her strategy worked. "It took me a very, very long time to sell that house," Iwanow says. "It had stigma. With all the calls to the police, the crime statistics were out of control. I had to drop the price tremendously." By "stigma," Iwanow is referring to the two-year dispute she had with her neighbors, the worst dispute West Palm Beach's police force has ever had to referee. It began with normal quarreling over trees and property lines, but after 141 calls to the police; damage to Iwanow's car and to her and her neighbors' homes; numerous racial and personal slurs; a few black eyes, a broken nose, and a concussion; and three restraining orders, it ended last year when Iwanow finally moved.
The stress of the past two years hasn't taken a visible toll on Iwanow. Now 30 years old, she looks more like 24; her pale white skin is creaseless and contrasts dramatically with her long jet-black hair and blunt-cut bangs to give her a vintage cheesecake look, like the famous pinup Betty Page. Moving to Fort Pierce has allowed her to reinvent herself, and she hopes to carve out a new identity here. She doesn't look like her alter-ego, Bianca Trump, star of more than 200 adult films, anymore. Now, after a long apprenticeship and training period, she works as a tattoo artist. She recently remodeled the bathroom in her new home, and she spends her free time playing with her dogs. Though Iwanow is not ashamed of her past, she is ready to move on and has set a deadline of May 15, 2003, to exit the sex industry entirely. Until that day, she's negotiating with Penthouse magazine to do one last photo shoot, and she still works as an escort. Her rates range from $400 for an hour to $5,000 for a day, depending on how far she has to travel. And the number of images inked on her body steadily grows, a natural effect of her new tattooing career. The most menacing and noticeable of these is centered over her breastbone, where in brilliant colors and classic tattoo script it reads: "Never Forgive, Never Forget." This might well be her motto.
Iwanow's story isn't simply the salacious tale of a porn star's steamy exploits. It's a sad story of urban blight. A conflicting story of gentrification. A convoluted but mesmerizing account of race and class warfare and differing ideas on what qualities make a neighborhood great. It just so happens that behind the neighborhood clean-up efforts and many of the complaint calls to code enforcers was a sexy porn star living in a big mansion on a hill, a mansion in which every room was wired with a web camera so that Trump's fans could watch a different drama unfolding inside the house. But from the rooms inside, viewers couldn't see the real action outside. There, on any given day, neighbors waited for Trump to leave the house so they could hurl insults at her. They argued over property lines, trees, and walls. They vandalized her car and held prayer services asking Jesus to save her soul. Finally, they just tried to beat the hell out of her.
Twelve years before Iwanow bought the mansion, she was just a normal teenage girl. Like most young women employed in the adult entertainment industry, Wendy Christine Iwanow says she didn't mean to end up as a sex worker. A Catholic school girl from Bayridge, Brooklyn, she was still a virgin when she married at 18. Her husband, also 18, joined the Army and was stationed in Washington state, so Iwanow went with him. But the marriage lasted only a few months, and the disillusioned girl, thousands of miles from home with no work experience, needed money. She moved in with a stripper friend in Seattle and, seeing the money that her friend was making, decided to try dancing too. She intended to strip only for a week or so, until she had earned enough money to get back to New York. But on her third night dancing in the club, she was spotted by a Penthouse magazine scout, who asked her to pose for some pictures. Her Penthouse layout led to invitations from magazines like Hustler and High Society.
After a year had passed and she had been featured in numerous pornographic magazines, the offers began to dwindle. She had exhausted the magazine circuit and needed to look elsewhere for work. That's when she got her first movie offer. Iwanow was paid $35,000 to appear in Two of a Kind, her first adult video. Nervous and still a little shy at 19 years old, she says she was shocked when she arrived on the set and saw two actors having sex while the crew buzzed around them with cameras and lights. But the money was good, so she kept making movies, soon growing more comfortable with the awkward situations. Iwanow/Trump became known in the industry as a "box-cover girl," the adult entertainment equivalent of a Hollywood "opener." Her name and picture on the cover of a video meant it would sell: For the extra exposure, she was paid an additional $500.
In 1991, an adult video production company offered Iwanow a multifilm contract on one condition: that she get breast implants. A 34C cup size at the time, Iwanow says she hadn't really considered implants before. But the money was good and the production company offered to pay for the procedure, so she decided to go for it. When she awoke after the surgery, her 34C's had become 36DDDs. Though at the time she was pleased with the results, it's the one career move she says she now truly regrets. Still, her new breasts enabled her to rise high in the adult entertainment world, and she worked in movies with big-name adult stars like Ron Jeremy, Savannah, and Tori Wells. But what she didn't know then and today knows all too well is that her silicone implants would rupture and leak, causing her to develop fibromyalgia, a chronic, irreversible, and debilitating condition that breaks down joints and cartilage and leaves the sufferer in ever-increasing pain. "Nothing will change the fibromyalgia, and nothing will make the silicone disappear from my body," Iwanow says. "It's annoying, but it hasn't gotten so painful lately that it's intolerable. I think mostly I'm just starting to learn how to live with the pain."
In the past 12 years, Iwanow has had the implants removed and replaced five times, as set after set would rupture and silicone would leak. She learned that her body has developed an allergy to silicone and fights the implants, trying to break them down. Today, she says replacing the silicone implants with newer saline ones would do her no good because saline implants are enclosed in a silicone casing. "I've had 30 or 40 consultations with doctors to have these implants removed," Iwanow says. "Most doctors say no because of my medical condition and the amount of surgery they'd have to do. The expectation of rupture upon explant with me is about 85 percent, which could cause more problems."
Originally, though, the implants were a money-making boon. Iwanow learned that if she cross-marketed herself, making movies, dancing in strip clubs, selling lingerie, and charging for subscriptions to her website, she could earn $200,000 to $500,000 a year. But by the time she turned 24, all the extra work left her burned out with the West Coast porn scene, and she settled down to a comparatively quiet life working as an escort in Broward County.
That year, 1995, Iwanow was working for a company called Amber Escorts when a man named Michael Beaulieu called the service looking for some company. The agency sent Iwanow to Beaulieu's Pompano Beach home. After the deal was done, Beaulieu paid her, taking out $200 in cash from underneath a stack of newspapers. Three months later, three men appeared at Beaulieu's home, forced their way in, beat him and his roommate, and robbed him of $80 in cash. Beaulieu told police he thought Iwanow was involved, reasoning that the robbers had known to ask for the money he kept hidden under the newspapers. Police detectives arrested Iwanow, accusing her of using her work as an escort to look for potential robbery victims. They theorized that the intimate contact she had with clients allowed her to see where they kept their money and that after being robbed the victims were probably too embarrassed to report the crimes. But a jury found Iwanow not guilty of assisting in the robbery of Beaulieu, and because, according to court files, the prostitution charges against her had long since been dropped, she walked away from the incident relatively unscathed.
It wasn't until early 2000, after she bought the Northwood Hills house, that police officers again began appearing in her life. When Iwanow first moved into the mansion, she kept to herself, concentrating on refurbishing the home. The previous owners had moved to Connecticut a year before she bought the property, and the time spent sitting empty caused the house to fall into disrepair. Right after Iwanow purchased it for $165,000, she began a massive remodeling effort. With her live-in boyfriend, William Ochs, she rewired the house, refinished the hardwood floors and touched up the wood ceilings. The giant master bedroom was painted and polished, and the master bathroom was remodeled. Iwanow also added a half-bathroom downstairs. Satisfied with the interior progress, she turned her efforts to the outside of the house. She gave the house a stucco finish and painted it terra cotta orange. She planted ficus hedges, built a koi pond and a fountain, repaired the detached garage, and installed the iron fence and gate. And when the outside met with her approval, she turned her attention to the surrounding neighborhood.
When it was founded in the early 1900s, Northwood Hills was one of West Palm Beach's ritzier areas. Legend has it that some of the castle-style homes built on Northwood's hilltops had been constructed by pirates and rum-runners who relied on the unobstructed views of the Intracoastal and sea to watch ships arrive. But by the 1920s, the rogues had moved out, and the castles and mansions were sold to trendy West Palm Beachers. A construction boom in the area at that time yielded a number of stately homes in Northwood Hills. The new residents favored homes like Iwanow's 3916 Westview Ave. mansion because they couldn't afford the much pricier estates on Palm Beach island but wanted the same luxuries that island dwellers enjoyed.
Bordered by 25th and 45th streets and Greenwood and Windsor avenues, the neighborhood built on mango groves quickly became a desirable residential area. A 1924 article in the Palm Beach Post described Northwood Hills as having "the most slightly residential lots in the city," a strange statement that the community seemed to receive as a compliment. But as years passed and Northwood Hills ceased to be a fashionable address, the homes began to show their age. Wealthy property owners moved to newer areas, and middle-class families took their place. In time, the homes continued to deteriorate and the fences sagged. As property values plummeted, absentee landlords bought the castles and bungalows and rented them cheap. When the economics of the community changed, so did the complexion. What had once been a predominantly white community became a predominantly black community, populated with many short-term renters who had little concern for the long-term viability of the neighborhood.
For the past 20 years, Northwood Hills has seemed to be trapped in a downward spiral, at least as far as real estate agents and tax appraisers are concerned. It wasn't until the late 1990s that white speculators like Todd and Kim Turner, Iwanow's neighbors to the north on Westview Avenue, began buying the old homes and fixing them up, hoping to one day cash in on their investments. Residents in similar West Palm Beach neighborhoods like Northwood Shores and Northboro had seen their home values triple in five years' time; Northwood Hills' newest residents hoped the same would happen for them. David Ortlieb, a Northwood Hills resident, says his house has indeed tripled in value since he bought it six years ago; he claims the area is currently considered a top area for young artists and designers in West Palm Beach looking for affordable, attractive homes.
But to many of the longtime, black Northwood Hills residents, the arrival of the new neighbors smacked of race-based gentrification. From the start, Iwanow says her neighbors resented that a single white woman could afford the big house on the hill. "They call it revitalization, but it's regentrification," Iwanow says. "The people see it; they're not fucking stupid. The majority of the people who have bought the big houses there and fixed them up are white. The black people see it, and they see it coming from white people."
But before she thought about any of that, Iwanow settled into the hilltop mansion and was determined to live there. She became active in the Northwood Hills Neighborhood Association. She joined efforts to have big speed humps, called traffic calms, installed on the streets. She hand-planted flowers along the sidewalks. She lobbied for landscaped medians and hosted neighborhood cocktail parties in her home. She memorized city codes and demanded that they be enforced, often angering absentee landlords. West Palm Beach's mayor, Joel Daves, came to some of her cocktail parties and once told the Palm Beach Post that Iwanow and Kim Turner were two of the most productive neighborhood activists in the city, though he did not respond to New Times' request for comment for this article. Iwanow participated in the Help-a-Neighbor program, buying paint and helping refurbish the houses of those unable to do so themselves. "I was painting their houses before I'd finished painting mine," she recalls. She even wrote and edited the neighborhood association newsletter. At first, everyone seemed pleased with her efforts.
Then came the mango tree. Iwanow says that mangoes from a tree growing in the yard of Fred and Cynthia Stubbs, her neighbors to the south, were dropping into her driveway and hitting and denting hers and her boyfriend's cars on the way down. She says she left a note for the Stubbses informing them of the dents in her car and asking them to trim the tree. "[Fred Stubbs'] initial response was to cuss me out and say that he wasn't going to fix anything," Iwanow says. So she says she hired landscapers to climb the tree and trim the limbs one day while he was at work.
But there seems to be some confusion about how they met, on both Iwanow's and the Stubbses' part. In a November 18, 2001, story in the Palm Beach Post, Iwanow claims that when she first met Fred Stubbs, she extended her hand to him and introduced herself. "He said, 'I don't shake hands with the blond-haired, blue-eyed devil,'" she said. In the same story, Stubbs' account of their meeting is markedly different. He says that the first words he ever heard Iwanow say was a chain of expletives about how his hibiscus bushes were scratching her car when she pulled in her driveway. "I couldn't believe it," Stubbs told the Post. "I said, trying to be neighborly, 'Listen, if these hedges are on your side, you can trim them... She butchered them. I was upset. I told her, 'They'll grow back, but please don't touch them again.'"
When reached at home, Cynthia Stubbs referred to Iwanow as a "drama queen." Stubbs, a middle-aged black woman with long braids and expressive mannerisms, says she feared for her and her family's safety while Iwanow lived next door to them. "People called me, threatening me, claiming to be her bodyguard," Stubbs says. "She has caused so much trauma to this neighborhood. Don't you think this neighborhood has had enough of her? The police don't even patrol this area anymore. We don't need any more of this." Stubbs then refused to comment further on the dispute.
After the mango-tree and hibiscus-bush flare-ups, bad feelings between the neighbors continued to grow. Iwanow says that soon after they began quarreling about the mango tree, she asked Fred Stubbs to remove a section of his retaining wall that she claimed was over the property line and blocking a portion of her driveway. Stubbs refused to remove the section of the wall, so Iwanow had it removed. When Stubbs saw what had been done, he called the police and asked them to arrest Iwanow for vandalism. They didn't. A few weeks later, during the night, Stubbs rebuilt the wall. The next morning, unaware that the wall had been rebuilt, Iwanow hit it as she backed her car out of her driveway. When she saw how much damage had been done to her car, she called the police to file an incident report. With the officers standing there, Iwanow took a sledgehammer to the retaining wall, knocking the offending section down again. "That went on probably seven times," Iwanow recalls. "He'd rebuild it, and I'd knock it down."
Then in January 2001, an anonymous complaint was made to Palm Beach County Commissioners alleging that a woman named Bianca Trump was running a pornographic website out of her home without a business permit. The Northwood Hills neighbors found out about the complaint; Iwanow was outed as a porn star. True enough, there were web cameras installed throughout the house to broadcast explicit images of her to her adult entertainment website. City code officers later decided that her business was not illegal because she sent the images directly to a server in Los Angeles and was not doing business in the area. But by then, the public relations damage had been done. Armed with the knowledge that Iwanow was a sex worker, the neighbors' comments became more pointed.
"They used to leave Jesus pamphlets and statues on my car," Iwanow says. "They called me the devil, a witch, a slut, and they always called me 'cracker.' A few times, they had Reverend [Thomas] Masters come out on Sunday morning, and they held a church service right in front of my house. They had, like, 40 people standing out there, screaming, doing all their Baptist, Holy Ghost-ing shit."
Masters, pastor of the New Macedonia Missionary Baptist Church in Riviera Beach and brother-in-law to Washington, D.C.,'s former mayor Marion Barry, insisted to New Times that no such thing ever occurred. "I never got involved and was never asked to be involved in that," Masters says. "I never mediated, never negotiated, never had a prayer meeting, never been in anyone's house, never been in front of anyone's house, never, never, never. I don't know why she's saying that I did. I have no dog in this fight, no stake in this sand. My name stays best if I stay out of this mess."
Iwanow believes the Stubbses were behind the religious efforts; Masters insists that the Stubbses are not even members of his congregation. Another former neighbor of Iwanow's, Shantelle Ulmer, told New Times that she regularly attends Masters' church, though Masters says that he also doesn't know her. But it was when Ulmer moved into the house diagonally across the street from Iwanow's that the neighborhood confrontations seemed to take on a particularly unholy tone. Ulmer, a 36-year-old single mother with three children ages 17, 13, and 5, now lives in a house the Stubbses own in Boynton Beach. She was receiving Section 8 housing assistance when she lived in Northwood Hills but lost the assistance because of the publicity and police reports filed during the conflict with Iwanow.
"I'm grateful to the Stubbses. I'd probably be out on the street if they hadn't let me move in here," says Ulmer, who says she is again receiving Section 8 assistance.
Iwanow believes that in Ulmer, the Stubbses found a ready ally, someone willing to be louder and angrier than they were. "When [Ulmer] would scream at me, I'd scream right back," says Iwanow, who believes that Ulmer often watched and waited for her to leave the house. "When she'd start yelling at me, I'd tell her to get a job and get something better to do. She'd yell back, 'Well, you suck dick for money.' I'd scream back, 'Yeah, well, the money I make sucking dick helps pay for your Section 8 housing. You should be patting me on the back.'"
Ulmer, a black woman with a fountain of orange curls trailing off her head, acknowledges that she was quickly drawn into the dispute. But she insists that she didn't watch and wait for Iwanow, though she admits to yelling. "Yeah, I taunted her," Ulmer says. "Once we found out she was a porn star, I'd use that just to get under her skin. I'd yell, 'You're just a porn-star slut,' and she'd yell back, 'Yeah, well, you're just a welfare mother.'"
All of these former neighbors agree that as the dispute between them escalated, the bad blood seeped into every area of their lives. Reached by telephone at his Lake Worth home, Iwanow's former boyfriend Ochs mostly corroborates his ex's story, though he says they haven't spoken in months. "They taunted her," he says, "but it wasn't like they were the enemy and she was innocent Wendy. She's very evil. She practices witchcraft, and she's got a pentagram tattooed on the back of her neck."
One day, Iwanow came home and found her Lexus covered in white latex paint, so she filed a police report. On another day the Stubbses say they came home and found fish grease on their house, so they filed a police report. Iwanow found a statue of Jesus on her car; the Stubbses found a voodoo doll and candles on their retaining wall. Back and forth, the neighbors squabbled with each other, always calling the police and filing reports, a total of 141 times.
Iwanow says that she and her boyfriend took to playing poker with the card-sized incident reports that the officers left behind. "We were like, 'I'll give you three 'criminal mischiefs' for your one 'armed home invasion,'" she says, referring to the time that three men wearing ski masks robbed them and their guests during a cocktail party. One of the men had a 9mm handgun and used it to relieve Iwanow's guests of some $330. But when the men sent Iwanow upstairs to get more money, according to police reports, she came down pumping a 12-gauge shotgun and chased the men out of the house and down the street.
In all, Iwanow says her house was broken into four times. Her car had paint thrown on it twice, was badly keyed once, and had the rear window smashed out once. Sometimes friends who left their cars parked at Iwanow's house would return to find them vandalized.
Ulmer believes that Iwanow brought many of the neighborhood problems on herself. "If I hated white people, I wouldn't move into a white neighborhood," Ulmer says. "The kids in the neighborhood, they were the ones dumping the paint on her car and all that. But they did it because she'd yell 'Stay away from my house, you little niggers' at them when they walked by her house on their way home from school." Ulmer insists that she and the Stubbses were never directly involved in the vandalism that occurred at Iwanow's house. "But if that lady had come within two feet of my house," Ulmer says, "I would have done something bad to her, and I would have been willing to do the time for it."
To Iwanow, comments like these are not surprising. "Every conversation I had with [Ulmer] began and ended with 'cracker,'" Iwanow says. "With [Ulmer], everything is racial, racial, racial. They were here first, it's their neighborhood, and they want it to stay like it is. No one can tell them otherwise."
The neighborhood dispute reached a climax on October 6, 2001. That Saturday afternoon, Iwanow returned home from garage-sale shopping to find that her Lexus was again covered in white latex paint. This time, she says, she'd had enough and went into her house, grabbed a gallon of her own white paint, and flung it all over one side of the Stubbses' house. Half an hour later, when Cynthia Stubbs came home, Iwanow was still outside washing the paint off her car. "It was an all-out war," Iwanow says. "Cynthia was trying to climb over the fence to get at me, and I was spraying her with the hose. I wanted her to fall off that fence. The cops got there while I was hosing her down." After another incident report was filed, a calm fell over the neighborhood for the remainder of that day.
Iwanow decided to eat dinner out that evening, to relax and calm her nerves. As she drove home, Iwanow received a call on her cell phone from neighbor Kim Turner, who suggested that she park in Turner's driveway that night. Considering the events of the day, it seemed like a good idea. Iwanow stopped in front of Turner's house to open the gate.
"The next thing I know, [Ulmer] was yanking me out of the driver's side of the car," says Iwanow, who believes 15 to 20 people were standing in the street around the car.
"Cynthia's son hit me in the face with a metal pipe or a crowbar," Iwanow says. "I don't know if I went unconscious or not, but I ended up on the ground by the car." Iwanow was, however, able to get back into the car and pull it through the gates and up Turner's driveway, badly scratching it on the gate as she drove. Iwanow says that Kim Turner, responding to her dogs barking, came outside to see what was happening. She walked into the crowd, where she was punched and slapped several times before West Palm Beach Police and an ambulance arrived. Iwanow was taken by ambulance to the hospital.
Turner, who was not seriously injured, declined treatment. Iwanow suffered a black eye and a concussion. But when detectives arrived in the morning to talk to everyone involved, the stories each of them told differed so much that detectives decided none of them was credible, Iwanow says. No one was ever charged with any crime stemming from that night's events. Last year, Iwanow put the City of West Palm Beach on notice that she plans to sue for its failure to protect her, but since the mandatory six-month waiting period passed in December, making Iwanow free to sue, no suit has been filed.
Her attorney, Barry Silver, says the case is on hold. "It seems to me like [Iwanow] was trying to make the community better," he says, "and for her efforts, she was subjected to harassment and violence." Silver says he and Iwanow decided to file the notice because they believe that police may have decided not to investigate the assault because of Iwanow's porn career. "If that's the case, it's flat-out wrong," Silver says. "Everyone in this country is entitled to the same protections. Every person should be protected by the police, regardless of who the victim is or what she does for a living."
On October 23, 2001, two and a half weeks after the street fight, a judge granted Iwanow temporary restraining orders against Ulmer and Fred and Cynthia Stubbs. In July 2002, Ulmer was arrested for violating the order after Iwanow told police she verbally assaulted her. But in November 2002, the state attorney dropped the charges against Ulmer when Iwanow did not appear in court. Now Ulmer says she wants to sue Iwanow, Kim Turner, and the West Palm Beach Police Department for falsely arresting her. "I'm going to make sure they pay for what they did to me," Ulmer says. "I'm not going to hurt them, but I want to make sure they pay. It's not over yet."
Even after Ulmer moved out of Northwood Hills but before Iwanow did, the drama continued. On August 14, 2002, at about 1:45 a.m., neighbors were awakened to find multiple SWAT teams surrounding Iwanow's house. Soon, they learned that all of Westview Avenue had been closed off after someone called the police to report hearing a gunshot coming from inside Iwanow's house. Officers camped out on Iwanow's lawn while she was alone inside the house. Ochs arrived on the scene and told officers that Iwanow might have been depressed over financial problems. "I guess they thought she was suicidal," Ochs says, "but [Iwanow] says she never fired the gun. If she had, there would have been a hole somewhere, and I never saw one."
Iwanow spoke with police negotiators throughout the morning, and at 9:20 a.m., she agreed to leave the house. The Palm Beach Post reported that she was taken to the Oakwood Center of the Palm Beaches for an evaluation. Iwanow now says the events of that day were blown out of proportion. "Everybody made such a big deal of that," she says. "I wish they'd just let it go." Ochs says he believes the SWAT team responded because it was Iwanow's house. "They had every cop on the force there," Ochs says. "I guess they all wanted to see what was going on."
Before that day, Iwanow and the Turners had already put their houses up for sale. Todd Turner, who works for United Airlines, says he anticipates being moved to another city for work and would have been trying to sell their house anyway, regardless of the neighborhood controversy. Still, he says he and his wife would rather leave the past in the past and not talk about it with New Times. Ulmer too, despite her threats of litigation, says she would like to forget all that happened in her former neighborhood. "I just want to move on with my life and put all of this behind me," she says. "I want peace. [Iwanow] turned my life upside down."
Iwanow sold the Northwood Hills mansion on October 8, 2002, for $270,000, then nestled into the $125,000 Fort Pierce country home she bought with Ochs last year. She hoped to settle into a quiet life. But only a week after moving in, she and Ochs had already gotten into trouble. Iwanow called St. Lucie County deputies claiming that Ochs had attacked her. After arriving, officers decided not to arrest Ochs and wrote in the report that Iwanow and Ochs both sounded drunk. On October 22, 2002, a St. Lucie County Circuit Court issued Iwanow a temporary restraining order against Ochs. But the order was dropped when Iwanow failed to appear in court December 6. She says she was out of town that day and couldn't make it. But she also says she'd like to forget everything that's happened in the past few years. She wants to reinvent herself. The last two -- make that 12 -- years have been a crazy roller-coaster ride for Iwanow, and now she says she looks forward to just being normal. She wants to garden some more, make a few more repairs on her new home, and perfect her tattooing craft. But mostly, she wants to leave both Bianca Trump and Northwood Hills behind. "When I left there, it was my intention to just walk away and not have anything to do with this stuff again," Iwanow says. "I just want to move on and disassociate from it all."
But the real loser in this story isn't the beaten porn star, the angry neighbors, or the relocated mother on government assistance: It's Northwood Hills.
"In the beginning, my impressions of [Iwanow] were the same as everyone else's," says David Ortlieb, the Northwood Hills resident who worked with Iwanow on several neighborhood association projects. "She was working really hard. This neighborhood has gotten a lot better, and a lot of that is due to [Iwanow's] efforts." But Ortlieb says that today, many of Northwood's residents believe their community suffered under the negative publicity. "Things like that can polarize a community, and to a small extent, it did," Ortlieb says. "But we were frustrated by the news stories because now people think this is an area with racial strife. That was just one small pocket of controversy."
