None of the young cast members or crew had any idea that the man perched atop the armored vehicle, wearing a purple beret, was not long out of prison for child sex offences. Yet when he started spraying off blanks from an automatic weapon, allegedly in their direction, they may have had an inkling that something was awry.
The man putting fear into the hearts of those assembled on-set was Jaskarn “Jacky” Jhaj, a British man then aged 35. Since the 2021 shoot, Jhaj has made headlines for a string of unsettling and expensive stunts involving children.
On this occasion, at the grand Waddesdon Manor house in Buckinghamshire, England, the production manager lost his temper. A former U.S. combat veteran, Reed wasn’t a man who flared up easily. He had served in Iraq, losing many friends and comrades in the process. However, as Jhaj rattled off rounds from the automatic weapon, Reed feared a tragic on-set accident similar to that which had killed Bruce Lee’s son Brandon in 1993, when gunpowder in a blank ignited and caused him to be shot with the lead core of a previously loaded dummy round. A few months after Jhaj’s 2021 shoot, actor Alec Baldwin accidentally killed cinematographer Halyna Hutchins in similar circumstances.
“You will not point that in any direction again,” Reed screamed, in footage seen by VICE. “You just pointed that at me? I swear to fucking God. That’s it.”
“I was ready to go up there and fuck his ass up and walk home,” recalled Reed, speaking to VICE earlier this year. “I’d had enough of this guy by this point. I’m a goddamn combat soldier, not a toy soldier. It was the biggest clusterfuck ever.”
The cast, which included a number of teenage female actors wearing schoolgirl dresses over military fatigues, stood watching beside a rented tank. The bizarre spectacle was all part of Jhaj’s own strange, low-budget war movie, which could be imagined as a cross between Harry Potter and Full Metal Jacket.
In it, the convicted pedophile cast himself as a Don Juan-type character who revels in the attention of the girls at a military school. One line in the script read: “He throws his flask at her to quench her thirst and walks away with newly invaded blonde. Mary catches it, sips it to find its empty [sic], she throws it back in his direction but he’s long gone.”
“He was parading around topless like a peacock”
This year, Jhaj was remanded in custody in France after allegedly hiring out Disneyland Paris for a staged ‘arranged marriage’ to a 9-year-old Ukrainian girl, and was only stopped when the hired ‘wedding guests’—composed of more young schoolchildren and their parents—raised the alarm to shocked theme-park staff. It followed the 2019 publication of an e-book titled Wedding, in which Jhaj refers to his character Jarrad Janae as “the world’s foremost prolific womanizer.”
Previously, photos posted on social media suggested Jhaj had held a mock death metal show outside the British Museum and crowd surfed on top of his ‘adoring’ fans, who again were almost certainly paid extras. He blew up a BBC World News-branded lorry outside the O2 and walked away from the inferno naked, panicking local residents. He hired a horse-drawn carriage and a full choir, as well as arranging the services of a priest, to stage a lavish fake funeral in West London, mourning a real-life 23-year-old man named Lauris Zube who went missing near an iced-over dam in Riga on New Year’s Eve, 2023. (Jhaj pretended to be the Latvian’s brother; more child actors were meant to play the mourners until casting agents complained over lack of payment and backed out on the day of the service.)
Yet what Reed witnessed at the grand Waddesdon Manor is right up there with the most egregious of Jhaj’s schemes.
The shoot took place in mid-August, beneath overcast skies toward the end of the English summer. Earlier in the day, as part of a scene, Jhaj had been lounging with a teenage actress on the lawns of the property, which was built in the 1870s by Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild in the style of a French Renaissance chateau. Jhaj—who was calling himself ‘Jacob San’ at the time—laid beside her, wrapping his fingers over hers and around the trigger of a machine gun loaded with live blanks. He then fired off a burst of rounds.
Later that day, Jhaj—who has been called a “fame-obsessed pedo” by the Sun—was reportedly spooked when the police were called. (He was under a Sexual Harm Prevention Order and on the Sex Offenders’ Register at the time.) Jhaj was said to have left abruptly, fretting aloud: “I think I’m about to get arrested.”
Reed and the rest of the cast and crew, numbering more than 30 in total, only found out that Jhaj was a convicted pedophile after one of the members of their WhatsApp group recognized his police mugshot from several years previous. They probably didn’t imagine that he would continue to engineer further elaborate mock film shoots seemingly designed to enable him to meet young girls, culminating in the ‘marriage’ incident in June at Disneyland.
After the affair had made global headlines, the footage VICE obtained from the 2021 shoot at Waddesdon Manor, along with the movie’s script, provides a vivid window into Jhaj’s fantasies.
The film, titled Jilliahsmen Trinity, was based on a book that Jhaj had self-published after his release from prison in 2020, and which was priced at £100 a copy on Waterstones’ website until it was removed in June. The disjointed 60-page script perhaps unsurprisingly begins at a set of school gates: in 2016, Jhaj was jailed for sexual activity with children, after picking up schoolgirls in a silver Range Rover in Hounslow, West London. Claiming to be a Hollywood movie producer, he was also found guilty of sexual activity with a separate 15-year-old. (Upon his release from Wormwood Scrubs prison, he seemingly paid young women to fawn over him, before releasing some dubious music on Spotify.)
Two YouTube videos later emerged of young people praising the book. A well-known YouTuber named Tal Fishman, who runs the channel Reaction Time, posted a confusing review hyping up Jilliahsmen Trinity that garnered 340,000 streams. In another video Jhaj describes Jilliahsmen Trinity in a garbled stream-of-consciousness rant, manically alluding to knowing the secrets of the human experience. (According to one online reviewer, the plot of the film and the book revolve around the protagonist’s “willy” being a “measuring stick for the universe.”) This has an almost equal number of views, raising questions over whether they were bought from a click farm. The video’s description reads: “36 minutes later, this man would be raided and JAILED for four years, to the darkest corner of the world, from where he would pen the Jilliahsmen Trinity franchise.”
In the script, a group known as “Jahjah’s Armed Forces” are directed by a character named Jack to deploy from a military training school and save the female protagonist, who’s been kidnapped by an evil character named “Lord Terrorist” and taken to Hell. In the first page of the script, she runs off crying.
“He was parading around topless like a peacock,” one of the actors, a former British Army soldier, told VICE. “It wasn’t a genuine film. It was a nothing, basically. It was all a bit of a pisstake.”
“He exploited people who were eagerly trying to be in the entertainment industry,” said a production assistant. “It was so weird and surreal. He was micromanaging everything, but not telling anyone what exactly was going on. Some people just broke.”
The extras are understood to have been sourced through a leading company and there are questions over how Jhaj was able to procure actors from such firms again for other shoots, beginning with the staged movie premiere in Leicester Square. At least one cast member had made complaints detailing the numerous issues with the Waddesdon Manor debacle, which extended from Jhaj’s conduct to the alleged non or underpayment of cast and crew, as well as other apparent issues including the use of guns and the alleged unauthorized flying-in of a helicopter that was only turned back when Waddesdon Manor staff threatened to call the police.
A Waddesdon Manor spokesperson told VICE: “It would be inappropriate to comment on individual private commercial venue hire events.” A spokesperson for Uni-Versal Extras said: “Our involvement was strictly limited to the Leicester Square event. We had no prior knowledge of Jacky Jhaj before that shoot, and we have had no involvement with him since … We immediately raised our concerns with the police and liaised with the local council, relevant unions, and other casting agencies to help ensure that such an incident is not repeated.”
Aside from the obvious sense of farce at Waddesdon Manor, it was a day that seriously knocked the confidence of some of the aspiring actors and extras, many of whom were looking forward to being credited in a ‘proper’ production for the first time. “I was genuinely emotionally fucked up about that for a while: It traumatized the shit out of me,” says Reed, who helped with casting and hiring the military vehicles. “I felt partially responsible. I stopped responding to any casting calls.”
Reed had also led the cast as they practiced military marching drills in preparation for filming. But when he realized he had been hoodwinked, it hit a sore spot. “He took advantage of something that meant everything to me,” he said.
As Jhaj awaits trial in France, cast and crew members from the ill-fated Waddesdon Manor shoot are still wondering how he was able to live out his filmic fantasies unchecked.
If you need someone to talk to about an experience with sexual assault or abuse, you can call the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673), where trained staff can provide you with support, information, advice, or a referral. You can also access 24/7 help online by visiting online.rainn.org.
Follow Mattha Busby on Instagram @matthabusby
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