After Snctm success, Damon Lawner launches an L.A. restaurant

Staff Writer

June 20, 2023 5 AM PT

Damon Lawner used to throw legendary sex parties in L.A. as the founder of Snctm, an exclusive club for the super-rich. To get in, members had to apply in advance, submit photos of themselves, pay up to $75,000 in annual fees and answer such questions as, “What most turns you on?”

In 2019, he sold the secret society for $1 million after six hedonistic years that cost him his 15-year marriage and strained his relationships with his two young daughters.

“I became Damon: the founder and owner of Snctm,” he said last month, sitting on a squashy white love seat in the sparsely furnished two-bedroom Hollywood apartment where he now lives. “I don’t want that to be me anymore.”

Recently Lawner became co-founder and co-owner of Puzzle, a members-only French restaurant scheduled to open this summer in West Hollywood. To get in, diners have to apply in advance, list their net worth, pay up to $10,000 in annual fees and answer such questions as, “Describe a dream night at Puzzle where anything you desire can be enjoyed.”

If that sounds a lot like Snctm, Lawner assured me that the dinner parties won’t be like his sex parties. Think of Puzzle, he said, as more like foreplay than the full thing.

Then he mentioned the curtains.

Five of the restaurant’s 15 tables will be tucked into cozy arched alcoves and outfitted with thick jewel-toned velvet curtains that can be drawn shut for privacy. That raises the obvious question.

“I have to tell people they cannot have sex. Like, I have to tell them that,” Lawner, 52, said. “Then the question becomes, well, what happens behind those curtains and what are grown-ups allowed to do in their own little private space? Am I going to peek my head in? No.”

By the time Lawner moved into the Snctm party house — a 6,500-square-foot seven-bedroom with a built-in sex swing and a stripper pole down the hill from the Playboy Mansion — he was already being called the next Hugh Hefner. If anything, his nights were even wilder.

A former model and nightclub promoter, Lawner had started Snctm in 2013 with the intention of creating a sexual utopia where the wealthy could shed their inhibitions and explore their desires through erotic theater.

About a hundred people — a mix of paying members of both sexes, special celebrity guests and women admitted free on the basis of “aesthetic appeal” — would arrive at his extravagant monthly soirees in masquerade masks and black-tie attire or lingerie. The clothes typically did not stay on long.

At the first gathering, held in an underground nightclub in Beverly Hills, Lawner quickly discovered that many pleasure-seeking attendees didn’t want to just watch the performers have sex: They wanted to get in on the action — with the dates they came with, or with others they had just met, often at the same time, in full view of everyone else.

Lawner encouraged it. Although cameras were banned from the events, word got out in elite circles and soon Snctm became the free-love private playground for A-list actors, rock stars, chief executives, city officials and run-of-the-mill millionaires.

The parties were in such high demand that Lawner went on to host them in New York, Miami and Moscow. Showtime made a 2017 docuseries called “Naked Snctm.” Other luxurious sex clubs with application forms and masquerade themes began to furtively crop up around town.

Gwyneth Paltrow, Steven Tyler and Bill Maher were among the attendees spotted at Snctm events; reps for all three did not respond to requests for comment. On Tuesday, after Hunter Biden reached a plea deal with federal prosecutors, Lawner said on Instagram that the president’s son had once been a Snctm member.

David Winkler, a member from 2017 to 2019, called his two years with the club “a great adventure.”

“I’d always been a pretty shy, sexually vanilla person, and suddenly I was doing things that I’d previously been uncomfortable with. It opened me up for the better.”

Lawner’s gift for handpicking captivating and open-minded partygoers was central to Snctm’s appeal, said Winkler, 59, a film producer and author from Westwood.

“Damon was so selective about who he let into the doors — it wasn’t some cheap sex party where everybody brings a date and you automatically swap,” he said. “There’s a very big difference between a sex party and a Snctm party.”

But it wasn’t all boundless ecstasy for Lawner, who was $1 million in debt when he watched “Eyes Wide Shut” and came up with the idea for Snctm. He indulged readily in everything on offer at the parties, making a lot of love and money in the process, but the steamy nights, heavy drinking and hard drugs took their toll.

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“I lost myself in that world,” he said during a visit last month at the under-construction Puzzle, a tiny, windowless space set behind an unmarked black door on the Sunset Strip.

“I just wanted to be loved and I wanted to be special and I wanted people to think highly of me because I didn’t feel that way about myself, and Snctm gave me that in spades,” he continued. “It elevated me to this place, but it also was a very empty and false thing.”

His older daughter, 17-year-old Olivia, was in the neighborhood with a friend and stopped by. She recalled being bullied in middle school because of Snctm — “It was really not the thing you want to see your dad doing” — and worried about him constantly, making him promise to get rid of the club by the time she entered high school.

“My perception of him at the time was, like, completely changed and almost ruined from who I grew up with,” she said. “It affected me so much.”

Lawner said an aimless period of regret and repair followed his sale of Snctm four years ago, an all-cash deal with a group of investors led by a New York-based member. He made amends with his family, got “California sober,” adopted the spiritual moniker “Father Damon,” tried to reconcile with his ex-wife and, when that didn’t work, pledged his future relationships would be monogamous.

Needing to be loved and needing to be admired — those things have driven me to places that I shouldn’t have gone.

— Damon Lawner, founder of Snctm and Puzzle

Lawner, who made as much as $1.7 million annually when he owned Snctm, also needed to find a new job.

“The last many years, I haven’t known what I was going to do — I just wasn’t feeling inspiration for anything,” he said. “How do you follow up what I did?”

At first, Lawner hosted some private parties and nightclub events in L.A. and London. He considered teaching “tantric love and soul-gazing” workshops for couples. A few months ago, he was hyping a grander members-only sex club called Secret Garden, “an exclusive society where affluent individuals are met with beautiful garden girls and experiences.”

Secret Garden memberships were NFT-based and priced from $100,000 to $1 million. Lawner didn’t sell even one.

“I put the word out and not much traction came from it,” he said. “At the end of the day, sitting here in this moment, it’s not something I want to pursue — creating a private island party for billionaires and what that entails. That doesn’t turn me on.”

None of his other business ideas panned out either, leading to his latest professional pivot: “All of my new endeavors,” he announced recently on Instagram, “are about love.”

Puzzle will be a personal test for Lawner, whose brand is built on sex and who is by nature prone to temptation. Velvet curtains aside, he is excited by the potential for a restaurant that is as much about sensuality as it is about food.

“It’s our little hideaway for people who can afford it,” he said as we made our way through the dining room, walking carefully over piles of sawdust while a construction crew pounded away overhead, “and people who are attractive enough to join them.”

He has already sold three-quarters of the memberships for Puzzle, including all but one of the 11 most expensive Emerald-level slots, priced at $10,000 a year (23 Black-level memberships cost $5,000 and 75 Gold-level memberships cost $2,500). The tiers correspond to priority access for reservations; diners will have to pay for food and drinks on top of the annual fees.

Elena, an Emerald member who declined to provide her last name so she could freely discuss her sexual proclivities, applied in February after she saw one of Lawner’s Instagram posts about the restaurant.

The fashion blogger from Hidden Hills said she was intrigued by its promise of intimacy and excellent food (a to-be-announced French chef is relocating from a Michelin-starred restaurant to run the kitchen, Lawner said). She brushed off the steep price point: “I want top-of-the-line everything,” she said. “You want the best, you have to spend extra money.”

Elena anticipates going to Puzzle every week or two for “a great dinner with other members, talking about our fantasies and exploring other people’s dreams and thoughts.”

“And if I get to lick caviar off somebody’s boobs, then I’m going to do that,” the 42-year-old said. “That would be a great night.”

Lawner has teamed with three business partners to open Puzzle, leaving the fine-dining modernist menu, opulent decor and service details to the others.

His focus, as it was at Snctm, is on guest list curation and entertainment.

On Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays, Puzzle will transform into a neon-lit nightclub from 11 p.m. to 2 a.m. Lawner expects to be a fixture for the after-hours festivities, as well as for the PJs-and-lingerie Sunday brunches he’s planning.

He has this internal conflict all the time. Like on one hand you’re talking about monogamy, and now you’re talking about velvet curtains and handing out condoms.

— Claudia Fijal, who worked as an “atmosphere model” at Snctm parties

He’s currently assembling a roster of “Single Ladies,” a special complimentary membership that “gives the most gorgeous ladies in L.A. full access to our private club for drinks on the house and dancing all evening to the best DJs,” according to Puzzle’s website. Single Lady applicants are required to submit their Instagram handles for Lawner to peruse.

“For better or worse,” he said, “beautiful women make the world go ’round.”

Thomas Fuks, one of the partners in Puzzle, brought Lawner onto the project at the start of the year. The two friends first met shortly after Lawner had sold Snctm and was working the nightclub circuit in Hollywood, bringing women over to tables crowded with big spenders.

“I sat with him and I told him, ‘I think you’re better than that,’” said Fuks, who also owns Mediterranean restaurant Members in Hollywood. “He’s such a creative person; he has so much talent. I said, ‘You shouldn’t do this promoting, you should really create and bring your universe and take over the night.’”

The result is boundary-pushing Puzzle. The team is trusting Lawner to “make it hot without being trashy,” Fuks said, with the hope that like-minded customers will be amenable to the restaurant’s provocative, don’t-ask-don’t-tell premise.

“We’re still, to be honest with you, trying to figure out what we can and cannot do. It’s kind of tricky,” he said. “It’s essential to make sure everybody’s on the same vibration and page and vision inside the room.”

Lawner’s other new love venture is the more overtly named Sex Weed, his high-end cannabis line of pre-rolled joints; the strains were all selected — after many enjoyable nights of trial-and-error testing, he said with a sly smile — to heighten sexual pleasure.

Sex Weed “frees men and women of ego and performance that gets in the way of truly transcendent sexuality,” the company’s website asserts. It will be released at dispensaries around L.A. in a few weeks, priced at $100 for a box of five.

“I’m hand-rolling rose petals and wrapping them in freaking gold leaf by hand,” Lawner said, opening a glossy crocodile-skin-patterned Sex Weed box and removing a delicate fuschia pink joint a few days after the Puzzle visit. “I mean I’m not, but the people that are doing it are. It’s very labor intensive. I can’t charge $40.”

To help fund his new businesses, he sold the 1965 Shelby GT350R that he bought for $250,000 during the height of his Snctm reign, making a $100,000 profit.

Lawner’s life these days is considerably more modest. After moving out of the Holmby Hills Snctm Mansion in 2017, he bounced in and out of hotels and rented homes before signing a one-year, $3,000-a-month lease in March for his Hollywood apartment, where he lives above a waxing salon and a pizzeria.

He owns practically no furniture: The dining area is empty; the living room consists of a marble coffee table, a large teddy bear and a pair of marshmallowy love seats with a matching armchair; his bedroom is bare save for a mattress and television on the floor beside a cluster of potted plants. Nearly everything is white, including the thin, calf-length tunic that Lawner is wearing with no underwear.

“I’ve been a millionaire multiple times over and lost it all multiple times over,” Lawner said between languorous pulls of a Sex Weed joint. “I’m on the path to being a millionaire again. Now the question is: Do I repeat the same cycle?”

That’s something his family and friends are wondering, too, as the charismatic playboy reemerges onto the scene.

“Damon to me is like the modern-day sex Jesus — I kind of feel like he sacrificed himself for the greater good of creating a culture for people that was needed, especially in a city like Los Angeles,” said Claudia Fijal, one of the first women hired by Lawner to work as an “atmosphere model” at Snctm when it debuted. “I mean, he risked his marriage, he flipped his world upside down.”

Despite Lawner’s efforts to tame his ways, “at the end of the day a lion is a lion,” said Fijal, now 34 and living in Las Vegas.

“It’s such a shame because he has this internal conflict all the time,” she said. “Like on one hand you’re talking about monogamy, and now you’re talking about velvet curtains and handing out condoms.”

Winkler, the former Snctm member, said he’s undecided about whether to join Puzzle now that he’s in a happy relationship and “grew out of that lifestyle.”

“I’m guessing that anything Damon does will eventually turn into sex,” he said. “As eccentric as he is, he really is a kind man who just wants love and wants intimacy. Until midnight.”

Lawner knows he has to work hard to keep his addictive personality in check. He still goes to Snctm parties from time to time — he plans to attend the one in downtown L.A. on Saturday — but is more mindful about his late-night extracurricular activities.

“Needing to be loved and needing to be admired — those things have driven me to places that I shouldn’t have gone,” he said. “I have something in me that, if I don’t attend to it, can be very self-destructive. And so I just have to admit that and stay on a good path.”