The Jeff Booth Show

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Show Transcripts

August 17th , 2008

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This is the Jeff Booth Show for August 17th, 2008, brought to you by the Center for Sexual Expression and Education, and Erotic University. I’m Jeff Booth. This week in politics, we aren’t going to tell you anything, because we ran out of time. That’s because we have an important sexvestigation focusing in on a key obscenity prosecution that reached a verdict this last week. We dig in to expose the pseudoscience and pseudoconstitutionality applied in this case. We did fit in our roundup of what’s going on in sex and entertainment. And we have an interview with Nadine GARY of gotopless.org who tells us about a major topless protest taking place all across the country next week, and how you can participate. Just click on the topic to the left you want to listen to, and thanks for clicking in.

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Sexvestigation

Last week we did a sexvestigation about the follies of obscenity prosecutions, and the cartoonish incompetence and craven disregard for logic and reason that they almost always revolve around. This week, we expose more prosecutorial stupidity, in this case with the prosecution of  Staunton, Virginia After Hours video store owner Rick Krial and his clerk Tinsley Embry.

One of the most disgusting things about these types of prosecutions is that they typically sweep in the clerk, the poorly paid person working at the counter who is just doing their job and getting a paycheck so that they can have a place to live and eat regular meals. For doing that, the full force of the law comes down upon their head. It is about political and religious vengeance against those prosecutors consider sinners, and no fish can be too small to fry to a charcoally crisp. It was a nasty prosecution.

It was a split decision by the jury on Friday. They had no problem with the video depicting sex between just a man and a woman. But throw in multiple partners, and jurors found it obscene. While Krial and the store were found guilty, the clerk was found not guilty.

The prosecutor was obsessed by the depictions of group sex, talking in graphic language at every opportunity about a man’s penis going into a woman’s vagina while another man’s penis was in her mouth. He made it very clear that this is what offended him most, having multiple partners, and that this is what the citizens must put a stop to. I know a lot of women who really enjoy being on the receiving end of that sort of attention, but it is something the prosecutor made clear that not only should no one be allowed to see it, no one should be allowed to do it either.

“You’ve never seen anything immoral in Staunton until this store came here,” prosecutor Ray Robertson said. I guess he’s never seen the Internet or Satellite pay per view. But, of course, that was a lie, since two other stores sold adult videos before the After Hours raid. And the judge agreed with the prosecutor that none of that could be considered comparable material because either it was no longer currently sold or it was broadcast into the city and not sold in a store. The judge even disallowed the introduction of comparable adult material sold within 900 feet of the borders of the tiny town. They based community standards solely on what was available for physical purchase directly in town, despite the fact that the community bought porn from a lot of other places. That’s the problem with community standards- we live and do commerce in a much bigger world than that defined by the boundaries of the town we happen to live in.

And of course, no one was forced in Staunton to watch the videos, except of course the jury, which had to watch three hours and 33 minutes of porn while everyone in the court was facing them, watching them watch it, expecting them to be shocked.  Robertson made it clear that he had watched all 24 hours worth. And wouldn’t it take a lot of courage for jurors to go against a prosecutor and say to their fellow citizens in their tiny conservative town, no, “I don’t find multiple partner sex objectionable.” By voting to convict, they avoid the possible humiliation and criticism from their fellow citizens. Its just easier, despite how they might actually feel. Who is going to stand up in a small conservative town and say they think watching group sex is okay? The system is rigged from the beginning.

The prosecution tried to bring in the former police chief, a sworn enemy of adult videos, as an expert witness on community standards. That’s like bringing in someone who pathologically hates chocolate as an expert on favorite ice cream flavors. Fortunately, the judge agreed with the defense that former chief Butch Wells was no expert.

The expert they did bring in is a complete nutball. Her name is Mary Anne Layden, director of education at the Center for Cognitive Therapy at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a so-called expert on pornography, even if she is not recognized by the scientific community on this point. That’s because her bizarre anti-porn theories go way beyond the boundaries of science. She believes that  porn is the "most concerning thing to psychological health that I know of existing today."  Not war, not poverty, not rape, not hunger, not violence, not disease. But porn. She believes that porn is a drug, pure and simple. Not metaphorically speaking, she thinks it is literally worse than crack cocaine. Her theory is that porn never gets out of your brain so once addicted you are hopeless, whereas with cocaine, you can at least get it out of your system. Pornm, however, is forever.  She said of the Internet: “"To have the drug pumped into your house 24/7, free, and children know how to use it better than grown-ups know how to use it -- it's a perfect delivery system if we want to have a whole generation of young addicts who will never have the drug out of their mind." Porn is the drug. She believes every image of porn is burned into your mind, never to be erased, in your brain forever doing damage. If she had seen as much porn as I have, she would not be able to remember it all. Frankly, most of it was forgettable. And she even believes that the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue is pornography. She is one of the leading anti-porn anti-sex crackpots in the nation, with no peer reviewed research to back up her pseudoscientific claims. She is an extremist on the fringe, an activist who has been tied in with many extreme right wing conservative groups taking advantage of her PhD while she spouts scientifically unsupported nonsense. And this is the woman they brought in to testify that the videos had no scientific value. And she almost caused a mistrial.

That’s because she started to speculate that one of the women in one of the films was underage, despite the judge’s orders not to introduce the subject of child pornography. This was utter nonsense- these were Mainstream films that comply with federal 2257 requirements that document the age of all adult performers. But she just couldn’t help herself. Who hurt you, Mary?  

The prosecutor tried to get this testimony into evidence, and apparently this was an argument he wanted to get in from the very beginning. He tried to claim that the video was designed to appeal to pedophiles, a ridiculous and irrelevant argument. It featured adult sex with adults. The claim that one of the women looked young because she had small breasts and shaved pubic hair was not much of an argument, since all of the women had shaved pubic hair, and studies have shown that shaving ones pubic hair is popular with the public at large. And just because you are attracted to smaller breasts doesn’t make you a pedophile. Breasts come in all sizes, and some of us relish that diversity.   

And this was the second time that prosecutor Ray Robertson tried to introduce evidence the judge had already declared inadmissible, almost causing another mistrial. This is the same prosecutor who tried to deny Krial his right to the attorney of his choice- in this case well-know adult defender Paul Cambria. The bizarre argument that the circuit court dismissed was that  Cambria, who has defended many adult videos, actually represents the adult industry, and thus has a conflict of interest. Good obscenity lawyers are rare, it’s a very specialized field, and the prosecutor wanted to deny Krial competent counsel simply because his counsel was experienced.  Pure amateur hour on Ray Robertson’s part.

The most dishonest and disgusting thing about this case is the fact that the defendants were prosecuted on misdemeanor obscenity charges for two videos- Sugar Britches and City Girls Extreme Gangbangs. But the police originally charged 12 videos as obscene. Here is the evil part. Under Virginia law,  now that Krial has been convicted on the first two counts, which nets him no jail time and a total $2500 fine for him and his store, now the prosecutors can come back at him on all of the other videos, and since he is already convicted of obscenity, the new charges can be felony charges. That’s right- multiple trials for a single raid, with escalating penalties for subsequent convictions.

And this approach solved another major problem for prosecutors. Under the law, an adult DVD must be considered in its entirety, which typically means that the jury must watch all of it. They had 24 hours worth of porn taken from the raid that they wanted to charge as obscene. By using just two videos in an initial trial, they solved the problem that prosecutor Ray Robertson was concerned about when he said “I’ve watched these, and if you require a jury to watch all that, they could become bored or desensitized to these acts.” Yeah, they wouldn’t care, and you wouldn’t get a conviction.

Ray Robertson is a small town prosecutor without the smarts to come up with something this evil. So what evil mind could have thought of this and come to his aid? Not difficult to figure out, actually. His co-counsel was Mathew Buzzeli from the DoJ. That’s right- the Justice Department assigned an attorney to work on a case in the tiny town of Staunton, Virginia, with a population of 23,000 people. Apparently to test a new legal theory on obscenity prosecution that stands a very good chance of a successful appeal and being overturned as unconstitutional.

For the forces of repression, that doesn’t matter. The other two stores that carried adult videos in Staunton no longer do. The fear of expensive and lengthy prosecutions is enough to get people to forgo their rights.

Ray Robertson is a self-promoting fanatic with a religious agenda to control what people see and what they do, which he made clear when he said he wanted to wipe out porn so that no one would emulate what they see in the videos. He said “You go after the triple-X movies because it ought to be obvious to those who watch them that they are obscene, that they rise to that level. And if they rise to that level, they’re illegal - just as much as child porn, just as much as drugs, as much as murder.” That’s an extremist, and with the help of the Justice Department, he is working diligently to limit the rights of free speech and expression.

As long as overly zealous religiously inspired prosecutors have the power to arbitrarily drag people into hugely expensive court fights and win convictions that are completely unpredictable as in this case, free speech is only a quaint notion we give lip service to but neither have nor fully understand.

 Entertainment

Congratulations to Ellen DeGeneres. This weekend she legally married the beautiful actress Portia de Rossi in a California ceremony. Hopefully, the citizens of this state will not force them to become divorced by voting yes in November on an initiative to once again ban gay marriage. Ironically, the people voting yes on this initiative will be breaking up marriages like Ellen’s under the bizarre notion that they are somehow saving marriage.

And in Who is Getting Naked Now, its Olympic swimmer Amanda Beard. She unveiled her new anti-fur naked poster for PETA at the China Olympics. Her poster, sadly, made a much bigger splash than she did, as she failed to make the semi-finals.

And since naked news is about the only thing I find interesting about this year’s Olympics, there is news that Olympic javelin thrower Leryn Franco, competing for Paraguay, and also runner-up for the 2006 Miss Paraguay pageant, put out a personal calendar. It includes some very discreet, meaning you really can’t see much, topless shots.

But Laure Manadou, gold-medal winning French  swimmer, takes the gold for her combination nude photos and sex tape. She claims the pictures are not of her, but the woman looks exactly like her and has the same tongue stud, as we can see in a picture of her sticking out her tongue while holding a penis. I’d take credit for the pictures, as her performance there is much better than her Olympic performance, where she came in last.

And I find this all a little disappointing. If the word got out for the next Olympics that it takes skin to win, the next Olympics would be a lot more interesting for me.   

You know it’s not a comedy when Variety describes a film as “miserable but masterful” and an “unrelenting gaze into despair”.  Grab the popcorn, kids. Import Export is a foreign film about being a poor struggling immigrant in a country where you don’t speak the language.  To try and make it a little more tolerable, they throw in some full frontal nudity and an explicit doesn’t look like they are faking it blowjob scene with Anastasia Sergeyeva. That kind of going down does make the misery go down a little easier, along with additional nudity and female masturbation by Ekateryna Rak and Natalya Baranova.

Bummm!, spelled with three Ms and an exclamation point, takes its bleakness into suburban French family life,  Hannah Herzsprung as a self-destructive young woman who enjoys an occasional underwater swim in the buff just before she seduces someone, something I happen to enjoy watching on film and in real life.   

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Its naked girls Jocelyn Binder and Deon Stein kissing in a hot tub bubble bath in the middle of a party with lots of happy onlookers in Never Back Down. But the happiness soon ends when lead teen Sean Faris gets into a fight and badly beaten. He then finds a wise instructor who teaches him patience, martial arts, how to kick ass as an art form and learn to be a man, while we wonder if we haven’t seen this same story an awful lot of times before. Instead of getting his ass kicked at the party, he might have been better off kissing some ass in the hot tub.

I have to admit, I’m not much of an opera fan. But add lots and lots of nude scenes with Paz Vega and I can get to like it. It’s the 2003 film version of the classic opera Carmen, out in a new edition on DVD. Actually, it goes back to the source of the original Prosper Merimée’s novella the opera was based on, and takes the story back to Spain. Vega plays the gypsy seductress who turns her lover into a broken man overcome with murderous jealous rage after she leaves him for another.

Nothing ruins a hot session of sex on a pool table than to have the guy secretly filming you fall through the ceiling. And then to find out that the girl you were with, in this case played by Veronica Echegui, set you up. But things were pretty hot up until the roof literally caved in, in the Spanish film El Menor de los Males, or the Lesser Evil.

And in the world of porn, Mayhem brings us Menage a Twat, focusing on threesomes with two women and a men. It stars Allison Pierce, Emma Cummings, Kyanna Lee, Marie Luv, and a whole bunch of other attractive women. Nineteen in all, actually. And half as many guys. I did the math.

From Hustler comes Barely Legal Boot Camp Class of 08. Rod Fontana acts as director and drill instructor, with the assistance of Daryl Hanna, where they put them through a rigorous workout of boys, toys, girls, and orgies. It offers up rookies Natalie Sky, Jayden Rose, Bailey Brooks, Kortni Kiss and Arianna Armani.

Hustler also brings us Real College Girls: Lesbian Stories, which is a bout real college girls and their lesbian stories. Directed by Andre Madness, it features Charlie Laine, Andie Valentino, Karlie Montana and 7 others. It uses the interview format, where they do an interview about their college experience, then they do a striptease, then they do a girl.