In a new interview, Gina Gershon recalls a chilling encounter with Paul Snider—the nightclub promoter who weeks later murdered his wife, Playboy Playmate Dorothy Stratten, and himself—a tragedy that continues to cast a long shadow over Hollywood.
Actress Gina Gershon is revisiting a moment that has haunted her for decades: a brief but chilling encounter with Paul Snider, the Canadian nightclub promoter who would soon become infamous for murdering his estranged wife, Dorothy Stratten, and then himself. The story, detailed in a recent interview on SiriusXM’s The Julia Cunningham Show, underscores how a random meeting in a Hollywood nightclub became a permanent marker in one of Tinseltown’s darkest true-crime sagas.
Gershon, now 63, was just 19 or 20 at the time, out with a young Jodie Foster—a friendship forged through mutual friends and shared nights at the theater and on the dance floor. “Jodie and I became party friends because she came to see my show,” Gershon said, recalling their carefree adventures. “You know, we’re like, ‘Let’s go dancing. Let’s dress up for Halloween.'”
Credit: Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty
One evening after a concert, Foster suggested they check out a new hotspot. “She goes, ‘Let’s just go dance,'” Gershon recounted. They slipped in easily—underage but undeterred—and were simply enjoying the music and each other’s company when Snider approached. “That creepy guy said, ‘Hey, I think you should be in Playboy,'” Gershon said. “He had smarm all over him.”
When Gershon politely declined, explaining she wanted to be an actress, Snider pivoted to boast about his own wife. “Well, my wife is an actress and now she’s doing this and this and this and this and this,” Gershon quoted him saying. She recognized the reference immediately: “Which she was. She was working with [filmmaker] Peter Bogdanovich.” That wife was Dorothy Stratten, the 1980 Playboy Playmate of the Year, whose star was rising rapidly [cite].
The conversation left Gershon and Foster deeply unsettled. “We were like, ‘Ew, we should go. This is gross. We gotta go. There’s like yucky people here,'” she recalled. Snider handed her his card, which she promptly discarded. “He was definitely a creepy dude,” she affirmed. “Right away, I was like, ‘Oh my god.’ I didn’t want to keep his card. He was gross.”
Credit: Frank Edwards/Fotos International/Getty
Just weeks later, on August 14, 1980, Snider murdered Stratten at the home they once shared, despite her friends’ warnings not to meet him to discuss their divorce. He then turned the gun on himself in a murder-suicide that stunned the entertainment world [cite]. The 20-year-old’s death exposed the exploitative underbelly of the Playboy empire and ignited a cultural fixation that has endured for decades.
“It was like two or three weeks later,” Gershon remembered, describing a visceral reaction to the news. “I got a very sick feeling in my stomach thinking, ‘God, what if I had been saying, ‘Yeah, I wanna go meet Hef and I wanna do this.'” The encounter transforms in memory from merely creepy to potentially fatal—a haunting reminder of how close she came to a different fate.
The Stratten-Snider tragedy reverberated far beyond that nightclub. It inspired a wave of creative works, including the film Star 80 and the documentary The Death of a Centerfold, and it remains a touchstone for discussions about the vulnerability of young women in Hollywood. For Gershon, the memory is a permanent scar: “He was definitely a creepy dude though. Right away, I was like, ‘Oh my god.'”
The Cultural Fallout
- The case spawned multiple books, most notably the investigative work The Killing of the Unicorn.
- It was dramatized in the 1983 film Star 80, with Mariel Hemingway earning an Oscar nomination for her portrayal of Stratten.
- Documentaries like The Death of a Centerfold have kept the story alive for new generations.
- The murder-suicide continues to be referenced in true-crime podcasts and series, cementing its place in pop culture.
Gershon’s account, emerging now in a SiriusXM interview, offers a rare firsthand perspective from someone who brushed against the killer and walked away. It’s a story that bridges the gap between anecdote and history, reminding us that behind every headline lies a network of almost-were victims and survivors carrying quiet trauma.
For more authoritative entertainment analysis and the fastest breaking news updates, stay tuned to onlytrustedinfo.com.
