“You were a free spirit, untamed and ruleless, finding this world difficult to understand.”
LISA BOND EASTON
in a posthumous letter to her husband
How do you fit on a page the details of a life that was barely contained by the planet? Jake Easton IV, who died at age 57 of a heart attack on October 13, 2025, in Newport Beach, California, lived a sprawling, untamed, adventurous life, and left this world far too soon, with too much yet undone, and too many people who weren’t done loving him.
Jake Easton’s endless hunger for life took him around the world. From Aberdeen to Alexandria, Bhutan to Burgundy, Cancun to Cape Town, Dubai to Domenica, Honolulu to Harare, London to Lusaka, Marrakesh to Milan, Zimbabwe to Zambia. And hundreds of places in between.
Most of Jake’s last two decades were spent in South Africa, a country he loved with all of his soul. Whenever he talked about his life on the Western Cape, you could see that Jake was transported: to the beaches, the mountains, the skies, the people. It was heartbreaking for him to have to leave. But South Africa never left him.
Jake lived a big life. He was big. His voice was big. His hair was big. His mustache was big. And his joy was big. Indeed, joy was the drug that Jake was determined to peddle to the world.
And he told big stories. Boy, could he tell stories.
Rebel student. Hollywood studio assistant. Beach lifeguard. Bar owner in Chicago. Trapeze artist all around the world. Surfer dude in California. Surfer dude in France. Wine maker. Coffee magnate. Babysitter. Entrepreneur. Friend. Father. Husband.
You would listen to his tall tales, and you would think, “None of this can be true.” But then you would discover that almost all of it was true.
Yes, he really did work in a circus as a trapeze artist in Club Meds around the world. He was the catcher, the guy who the flyers had to rely on to save them from falling to earth. Jake was good at it. He was always the one protecting others.
He worked for International Productions at the legendary Paramount Studios in Hollywood. The producers of “The Godfather” worked in the office next door, and he worked among the props for “Titanic,” the most successful film ever. His sister Anne remembers Jake getting her and her brother onto the lot for a tour, to see how the magic was made.
He really did open a bar in the upscale Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago, having never done more than drink in one before that.
He wanted more life.
While working at Club Meds around the world, he met a French woman, Sandrine, married her, and spent years surfing on the beaches of southwestern France. He moved back to California, they divorced. He worked. He met a woman, Samantha, fell in love, traveled the world, and landed in South Africa, where he hacked and planted in the soil a vineyard that still makes world-class wines today.
He and Samantha had two sons, Keenan and Quinn, whom he adored more than life itself. He and Samantha divorced, she kept the winery, and he started a coffee roasting business from scratch. He had unreliable partners, and the business faltered. Then he met Chris Gaag, and together they built Tribe Coffee into a South African coffee powerhouse.
One night on the Cape, at a babysitting gig for friends who owned a hotel, he met his co-babysitter, Lisa Bond, a designer who had done the hotel interiors. When the parents got back and Jake and Lisa were sprung, they hung out. They ended up talking through the night. Both of them had the grit born of a life lived in Africa. When Jake discovered Lisa had once been a rum runner under, let’s say, extra-legal conditions, he realized he had met a pirate. A fellow risk-taker. Both of them had been bruised by life, and love. But, they had a sense that this chance meeting was different. Sure, they circled each other for a minute. Jake handed Lisa his phone number, and said, “You can call me if you want – but not before a week.”
Lisa, whose early business card logo featured a porcupine, waited exactly 7 days. Then she called. The die was cast. They had found their forever.
“Jake and Lisa were two planets destined to crash together and become one,” said Chris Gaag, Jake’s business partner in Tribe Coffee for more than 10 years, and one of his closest friends. “They never stopped working at it. But they just couldn’t figure out how to get into the same orbit before they ran out of time.”
For the past 16 years, Jake and Lisa were ironclad soulmates. Life buffeted them from all sides. Clients went bankrupt. Economies tanked. Business partners faltered. They moved to France with Lisa’s son Jesse. They tried to make ends meet. Jake headed back to Africa to be close to his sons. Lisa was gaining clients and paying off debts, so she couldn’t follow. Then the pandemic hit, and they were trapped half a world apart.
“At the end of each day, we would talk about our hardships and our accomplishments,” Lisa wrote in a letter to Jake after he died. “We would support each other, share everything, every detail. You were only ever a thought away.”
Whether separated by a moment in time or by half the planet, they were always talking, always building a dream. The pandemic delivered a blow to both of their businesses. But Team Jake-and-Lisa picked themselves up, slapped the harsh South African dust from their clothes, and started over. Often separated, but never apart.The minute the pandemic allowed it, they were married on a beach on the Western Cape. And they were deeply engaged in the fight to build a new life together in America when Jake died.
Lisa recalled the days when she was stuck in France and he in South Africa. More than 9,000 kilometers apart, but only a one-hour time difference. They had breakfast every morning together over video. He’d show her the ocean just below their house. The sunrise, the sky, the waves they had both known and loved for so long. Sometimes during the day, while Lisa was working in a dusty 300-year-old attic in a small French village, Jake would send her “work” pictures, of his feet up on an ottoman, with the ocean waves crashing in the background. Just to drive her mad.
“No matter where they were, Lisa and Jake were communicating,” Chris remembers. “They communicated in the morning. They communicated during the day. They communicated every night. I think they talked more than my wife and I talked. And we lived together. And Jake never stopped talking about her. He showed me pictures of her work. He was endlessly proud of her. To be honest, it was kind of annoying.”
Everyone who ever met Jake remembers how whip-smart he was. Not in a lord-it-over-you kind of way. Jake was more like a sponge, except instead of water, he soaked up knowledge, and squeezed it into the world.
No matter how many books you’d read, there was a decent chance Jake had read more. No matter how many movies you’d seen, he could probably quote from all of them. No matter how many places you had been to in the world, he had likely been to more. And no matter how many languages you spoke, he probably spoke more. His siblings fondly remember tall tales with suspect facts. His friends later in life remember unbelievable stories that turned out to be true. As he got older, and his life got bigger, he embellished less. His real life had become as big as his dreams.
Even if you knew Jake had a degree in linguistics, you’d think: He can’t be fluent in all those languages. Then you’d overhear him having an easy conversation in Japanese, or Spanish, or French. And he could make people laugh in all of them. Occasionally, he’d sprinkle in a phrase in Afrikaans. Or Zulu. Or Xhosa. Or Fanagalo. Languages most of us have never heard of.
“Who knows how many he really spoke?” his brother Terence recalls. “What I remember most was the joy. Singing, dancing and drinking. Whenever we were together, these three came along. It didn’t matter if we were in public, with a small group or just the two of us together. We were always joyful and playful together. At 15 years old or 40, it was the same. Endless laughter. He could be destitute or I could be in the middle of a failed marriage, but being together was a time for joy, not sorrow. He always sought out joy.”
When Jake was in a room, you’d know he was there. On first meeting you, he was as likely to hug you as shake your hand. It was easy to misread him, to think to yourself, this guy is a player. But if you paid attention, you realized Jake wasn’t so much a player, as much as he was endlessly playful, in all aspects of his life. He could not drink it in fast enough.
Sometimes his lack of seriousness was maddening. He was the life of any party, a whirling dervish of energy and enthusiasm. But he was at his best when joined with someone who could focus that energy, and temper his dreams.
“You were a free spirit, untamed and ruleless, finding this world difficult to understand,” Lisa wrote to Jake in her last letter. “You lived without limits, without boundaries. That was both your beauty and your burden.”
“What I admired about Jake is that he had the ability to connect with anyone,” his business partner Chris remembers. “And I mean anyone. Unemployed person on the side of the road. CEO of a company. Data scientist. Chemist. Mathematician. Hairdresser. He had an opinion or some form of knowledge of so much. One time I saw him talking to a customer in the café, having a laugh. It turns out the guy was a major arms dealer in the Middle East. And Jake just starts asking him about his business, like they were old friends.
“He was a multifaceted person,” Chris said. “It was why Jake and I worked so well in business together. He would make the connection, and inspire people, get them excited, and then I was able to close the deal and see things through.”
Like everyone who loved Jake, Chris remembers the fun times the most. The craziness. The laughter, the joy.
Jake turned Chris on to surfing, something Chris still enjoys today. He remembers how when work was stressful, Jake would tell him to grab the boards, and they would head down to Muizenberg Beach, and surf their lunch break away, making fun of each other, telling jokes, blowing off steam.
Often on those surf trips, their friend Dave Jones joined them. In 2018, Dave got sick, and spent time in a coma. Every day for weeks, Chris and Jake would visit Dave in the hospital, sit with Dave’s brother Jef, and just be present for their friend. Each day, Jake and Chris would make a video and send it to Dave’s phone, with the idea being to convince Dave, when he awoke, that decades had passed, Rip Van Winkle style, and that the world was completely different. Unfortunately, Dave never woke up, a devastating loss to them all.
“Jake was with us every moment, there for all of us,” Dave’s brother Jef recalled. “And when Dave died, Jake delivered the eulogy at his memorial. It’s just who he was. We couldn’t have managed without him.”
Chris remembers countless times running a business together, when Jake put relationships over everything. Sometimes, it would drive him mad.
“He had such a deep caring nature for people,” Chris recalled. “He wouldn’t show up for a meeting. It would be infuriating for me. But then he’d tell you, ‘This person found out their father died, so I stayed with them.’ He would do that for anyone. And if it involved Keenan and Quinn, everything else in the world would stop. When he could see them, nothing else mattered.”
When Jake returned to California shortly before he died, he tried to make up for lost time with family members. His own childhood had been tumultuous, characterized by divorces and remarriages and new half-siblings and constant relocation. And he had been away for a very long time. So he tried to make that time count.
“We were both trying to get our businesses up and running,” remembered his sister Anne, an attorney, about those months after Jake returned. Anne was trying to launch a new podcast called “My Lawyer Friend,” and Jake immediately jumped in to help, developing scripts and acting as producer, while simultaneously trying to start his new coffee business. “It was humbling, and brought us closer together.”
His brother Terence recalled the early years with Jake, when Terence wasn’t always on his best behavior, often got Jake in trouble, and generally was the difficult little brother. It was a time he does not remember with pride, and something he now knows Jake carried with him quietly.
“Last year, I apologized for my years of misbehavior,” Terence recalled. “What he said shocked me. I expected him to say, ‘Hey, don’t worry about it, you’re a great brother.’ He had always complimented and encouraged me. Instead, he simply said, ‘Thank you.’ He waited patiently our whole lives for me to realize it on my own, because he never wanted me to feel bad – always protecting me.”
Jake Easton IV was born on September 1, 1968, in Santa Monica, California. Near the ocean, where he would feel the most at peace for the rest of his life. After a brief and highly unsuccessful experiment with traditional schooling, Jake’s mother recognized his artistic bent and free spirit, and moved him to an alternative school that taught through creativity and freedom, allowing students to design their own curriculum. Once there, he thrived.
“He was a free spirit from a young age,” his mother Jessica remembers. “He did not like boundaries. But he was enormously smart, with an incredible memory.”
He tried a traditional high school in California, but that didn’t last long either. So he spent the next two years on the big island of Hawaii at a preparatory school. Despite his rather profound independent streak and frequent run-ins with school authority, his natural charisma earned him victory as junior class president, which his brother Terence remembers was unsettling to the school administration. Fortunately for them, he returned to Southern California for his senior year.
After graduating from high school, he began performing in circus acts at Club Meds around the world. This peripatetic nature would stay with him through much of his entire life, until he got to South Africa.
He came back from his Club Med travels married to Sandrine Renoux, a French woman. Jake went to college at University of California Riverside, got a degree in linguistics and language, specializing in French, Japanese and Spanish. The couple moved to the Basque coast of France for three years, and lived near the ocean. Jake’s love for France would never fade.
Jake returned to Los Angeles, divorced Sandrine, and started work at Paramount Pictures in the fall of 1997 with Chris Ottinger, who became a friend. The two constituted the entirety of Paramount’s International Division, taking up residence in half a bungalow, the other half occupied by Rob Lowe.
Ottinger remembers when Jake answered the public call to audition for the sportscasting gig on KROQ radio Los Angeles while the regular sportscaster, a young man named Jimmy Kimmel, took a vacation. Jake did his entire audition in a fake French Canadian accent, and won the temporary gig, talking sports each day completely in character, while the future famous late-night talk show host sat on a beach somewhere. “It was completely hilarious,” Ottinger recalled.
“But what I remember most was how much time we spent on the water. We used to work all day, eat dinner, and meet down on the beach in Malibu at least an hour after dark. This was before night surfing was a thing. We realized the great waves didn’t end at sunset. The secret was that the Chart House restaurant lights (now Maestro’s Ocean Club at Topanga Point) were bright enough for young eyes to see perfectly. We got barreled. We hit the lip. We did some small airs. We screamed in joy.”
After several years back in California, Jake met Samantha O’Keefe, left his job, and the two headed around the world. Once again, Jake was on the move. In 2003, Jake and Samantha arrived at the Western Cape of South Africa, and decided that this was where they would make a home. Son Keenan arrived that year, and Quinn two years later.
The couple bought property in Greyton, a small town in the Overberg region of the Western Cape. Jake envisioned a vineyard in this new growing region, and over the next several years turned that vision into a reality. They planted all the vines, built a farmhouse, and created Lismore Wine Estates, still a respected, world-class winery today.
In 2009, Jake left his marriage and the vineyard behind, and began work at Origin Coffee Roasting in Cape Town. After developing a skill blending flavors from different vines and grapes, the creative art of coffee blending came naturally to Jake.
Then came that fateful babysitting night, when he met Lisa, and everything changed. About a year later, Lisa’s major client went bankrupt. She got a work offer in France, and she realized she had to leave. Jake wasn’t going to let her go without him. So she and Jake and her son Jesse reluctantly moved to Burgundy, doing the best they could to survive. Lisa took on design clients renovating ancient houses. And Jake worked for a small local vineyard, which proved difficult after having created his own.
Soon, the love for his sons drew Jake back to South Africa. Jake and Lisa realized they had to live apart for a time, she to earn money, and he to be the best father he could be. But they determined that they would always be together.
Back in South Africa, Jake started his own coffee roasting business, Tribe Coffee. After some rough times, he and Chris Gaag built Tribe into a respected Cape business with a roastery and two café locations. Jake eventually became South Africa’s representative for the African Fine Coffee Association, an industry association for the entire sub-continent.
Jake and Lisa talked every day, and traveled often between France and South Africa to be together. Then the pandemic hit, dealing an economic blow to both of their businesses, and commencing the most challenging 21 months they ever faced, each unable to reach across the distance to be with the other. The world closed, but somehow their hearts stayed open, and when the pandemic ended, they decided to get married at the first opportunity.
The wedding was on June 29, 2022, in Bloubergstrand, Cape Town. After the ceremony, the two walked alone along the beach, opened a bottle of Champagne, watched the waves, and listened to the seagulls flying overhead.
A year later, Jake and Lisa started dreaming of a plan that would finally bring them together for good. He went back to America, where he found the job market difficult for a 57-year-old who had been absent for two decades. He started up another coffee business, Revolution Coffee, while Lisa stayed in France, earning the money they would need when she finally got her visa to join her husband in America. Then it all ended, in the most unlikely of ways.
Jake Easton IV is survived by his wife, Lisa Bond Easton of Burgundy, France; sons Keenan and Quinn Easton of Greyton, South Africa; stepson Jesse Bond of Burgundy, France; mother Jessica Newman Skrentny of Redlands, Calif.; father Jake Easton III and stepmother Laurie Easton of Newport Beach, Calif.; brother Terence Easton and his wife Tricia Easton, nephews Andrew, Parker and Collin, and nieces Sophie and Maddie, all of Houston, Texas; sister Anne Easton of Paris, France; brother Alexander Easton of Northern California; and family and friends around the world.
“Everyone who has called me, or who I called, does not believe it to be true,” Chris Gaag recalls of the news of Jake’s death. “I expected to read that Jake had been chased down by a Mexican cartel while helping someone in need. Or maybe captured and poisoned by a unknown indigenous tribe in a jungle somewhere. That would have made sense. But a heart attack? How can that be?
“We thought Jake was invincible.”
His brother Terence certainly did. But he sees in the life of Jake Easton IV a legacy that carries through to his own family.
“Anytime someone would say, ‘you can’t do that,’ Jake would just do it,” Terence said. “To him, everything was possible. Who joins a circus at 18, learns five languages, says he can open a bar when he’s never opened any business, then says, ‘Sure, I’ll be a farmer,” and creates a wine sold all over the world? Then starts a coffee business out of thin air?
“I think because Jake never felt like he was something, it gave him the freedom to be anything. What a gift and a lesson for all of us. My son recently wrote to my father that he had decided to take a new job. In the note he said that his Uncle Jake inspired him to think bigger and stretch further about who he was and what he was capable of doing.
“There lies the legacy and the eternal life of my brother Jake.”
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