Porn Valley- America’s adult-entertainment industry is facing the strongest legal pressure in more than a decade amid heightened monitoring and obscenity prosecutions targeting two Los Angeles firms.
While the U.S. Department of Justice continues to focus on child exploitation and pornography, the FBI has stepped up its inspection of production company documents verifying that all performers are 18 or over.
Originally enacted in 1988, the regulation has been fought for years by the porn industry. The DOJ dusted off the regulation three years ago and adopted revisions in 2005. The FBI now has two supervisory agents and four retired agents working as independent contractors nationwide to enforce it.
The first 10 regulatory inspections came last year to Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley, where eight companies were cited for improper record-keeping. However, none has been prosecuted, FBI Special Agent Chuck Joyner said.
Lawyers for the adult-entertainment industry call the audits thinly disguised harassment.
“The whole thing is a joke, which is what aggravates the industry,” said Clyde DeWitt, a lawyer who specializes in adult-entertainment cases with Weston, Garrou, DeWitt & Walters.
“It’s designed to harass people who make this kind of movie so the FBI can snoop around and learn about them. It’s an end run around obscenity laws.”
DeWitt said the industry polices itself rigorously, knowing that a conviction for employing anyone under 18 carries a minimum 15-year federal prison sentence.
Steve Orenstein, president and owner of Wicked Pictures, said he found satisfaction in having the FBI investigate his company and issue no citations.
“It’s easier to sleep at night knowing what we’re doing is right,” he said.
Orenstein said agents conducted the inspection in a professional manner, but that the record-keeping remains a chore.
“It’s just an additional source of time, energy and money,” he said.
Meanwhile, two cases are testing the parameters of obscenity.
Extreme Associates and Rob Black, the president and CEO of the Canoga Park-based company, were charged by federal prosecutors in August 2003 with distributing online obscenity, mail-order obscenity and mail fraud.
A central element in the case is determining the community standard that should be applied by a jury to determine whether material is obscene. The defendants want the Internet declared the community standard.
“That would be groundbreaking,” said Jennifer Kinsley, an attorney with the Cincinnati firm of Sirkin, Pinales & Schwartz, the law firm defending Extreme Associates.
In a second case, a grand jury in Phoenix indicted several individuals and companies, including JM Productions in Chatsworth, on obscenity charges after an FBI sting netted videos made by JM. A federal jury would have to make the actual finding of obscenity at a trial slated for July 10.
Santa Monica attorney Jeffrey J. Douglas, representing an Arizona defendant in the case, said an obscenity trial over commercially produced adult porn raises broad First Amendment and community-standard questions.
Obscenity long has been tested against whether it lacks scientific, artistic or political value; appeals to prurient interest; or offends community standards.
But Douglas said that with the advent of the Internet, it has become virtually impossible for communities to limit porn by restricting adult-entertainment retailers.
“The more judges rule that what is available on the Internet is part of the community, prosecutors face the daunting proposition that there are many other Web sites with content that’s much, much worse,” he said.
Dean Boyd, U.S. Justice Department spokesman, said as of February, there had been 52 obscenity convictions nationwide since 2001. The DOJ has obscenity indictments pending against 17 people or entities.
“The Justice Department continues to make the prosecution of adult obscenity a priority,” Boyd said in a statement.
In 2005, the department established the Obscenity Prosecution Task Force, which became fully operational in January 2006.
“The task force’s singular focus is the prosecution of adult obscenity as it has been defined by the Supreme Court and related offenses, such as record-keeping offenses, designed to make sure that children are not used in the production of sexually explicit material,” Boyd said in the statement.
Local law enforcement, meanwhile, is part of the federal task force but no longer has a leading role.
The Los Angeles Police Department played a key role in criminal prosecutions until the mid-1980s, when the California Supreme Court ruled that police cannot arrest producers on pandering charges for paying for on-film sex performances.
“(The court) felt that sexual activity being filmed and being compensated for a commercial film was not the same as a pimp on the street providing his girls for a service, and then taking his cut of the money,” said Detective Steve Takeshita, who oversees the LAPD’s four-member porn unit.
“Because of that, the porno industry or any other person who wants to film a film can do that as long as they abide by the rules and regulations set forth either by the county or the municipality that they’re filming in.”
In the city, that means paying $450 per movie shoot to Film LA, which coordinates city permits required for filming. Adult filming is treated exactly like other movies, except that any nudity or sexual activity during the shoot cannot be visible to the public.
It’s difficult to estimate how many of the 7,000 or so new porn titles every year are filmed in the Valley.
A review of thousands of film permits issued over a three-month period found more than 50 for adult films at locations ranging from remote homes sequestered by overgrown bushes to multimillion-dollar gated mansions.
“Obscenity is a difficult subject to explain,” Takeshita said. “There’s no black and white that is considered illegal or legal.”
There also aren’t enough investigators to evaluate all the items in the porn market.
“Just because a product is being distributed and not being prosecuted,” Takeshita said, “doesn’t mean it’s a fine product.”