Pittsburgh – Indicted California pornographer Robert D. Zicari had a message for everyone yesterday after a federal court hearing to determine if he committed a crime by selling films showing women being raped and murdered.

“Order ‘The Federal Five!'” he said, referring to the five hard-core porn movies on which federal prosecutors in Pittsburgh have built the first major U.S. obscenity case in a decade.

“We’re not talking about bestiality and child pornography,” said Zicari, 31, who owns Extreme Associates with his wife, Janet Romano, 27. “We’re talking about consenting adults.”

In a case being watched nationwide, Extreme Associates defended itself for the first time in court, asking U.S. District Judge Gary Lancaster to throw out an indictment for distribution of obscene materials brought last year by U.S. Attorney Mary Beth Buchanan.

Possession of obscene materials is legal, but production and distribution is not.

Extreme’s lawyer, H. Louis Sirkin, of Cincinnati, argued that federal obscenity laws are unconstitutional.

He said people have the right to view porn videos in the privacy of their homes, but that right is infringed if they can’t get the films anywhere.

“If I can’t buy them, there really is no right,” he said. “In order to be able to possess it, I need to be able to buy it.”

Sirkin said people’s sex lives are none of the government’s business and that obscenity laws “violate the substantive force of liberty as guaranteed by the due process clause of the Constitution.”

Buchanan and Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen Kaufman said the Lawrence decision doesn’t apply because the Extreme prosecution is about a porn company selling violent sex films for profit, not an invasion of anyone’s privacy.

Kaufman said Supreme Court case law supports the prosecution.

“If you have the right to possess, does that mean someone else has a correlating right to distribute?” asked Kaufman. “The cases say no.”

He cited a 1973 Supreme Court case, U.S. v. Twelve 200-Ft. Reels, in which a man was prosecuted for carrying obscene material into the country from Mexico. The high court rejected the man’s argument that the right to possess obscene material in the home creates a right to acquire it or import it.

Lancaster grilled Kaufman about why the government brought the Extreme case.

As an analogy, he said that if newspaper reporters in the gallery wanted to criticize him or the prosecution in print, could the government then restrict their ability to do so by taking away their tools?

“Could you pass a law preventing the sale of ink?” he said.

Kaufman said the state interest is to prevent the distribution of obscene materials in communities that object to them. He said people are free to have any kind of sex they want in private, but “the crime is in filming and distribution of that sexual conduct.”

Lancaster said he’ll rule as soon as possible, but he didn’t give a time frame.

The Zicari case represents a renewed effort by the Justice Department to combat what it sees as the proliferation of extremely hard-core and violent pornography.

Buchanan has said the government all but abandoned its policing efforts in the 1990s, and in the meantime the industry has mushroomed and become increasingly accepted as part of American culture.

Zicari and Romano aren’t the only defendants being pursued. In Texas, federal prosecutors in June indicted a former Dallas police officer and his wife on charges of selling rape videos online.

And in West Virginia, a couple pleaded guilty this year to mailing videos depicting sexually explicit scenes that included defecation and urination.

But the Zicari investigation, which began with a Los Angeles Police Department probe, is seen as a benchmark.

Zicari, who calls himself Rob Black, and Romano, who goes by the name Lizzy Borden, have vowed to go to trial, and they remain defiant in denouncing what they see as government intrusion into Americans’ sex lives.

Zicari, who has taunted the LAPD and the federal government on national television, bragged yesterday that he’s still in business and will keep doing what he does. “We’re building a new Web site,” he said.

One of the keys to the case, of course, will be defining obscenity.

“One man’s obscenity is another man’s art,” said Sirkin. “We didn’t ban the Jodie Foster movie where she’s gang-raped in a pool hall (‘Accused’). We didn’t ban ‘Pulp Fiction.’ It showed mass murder. Where does it end? These are movies. They’re illusions.”

The Extreme films depict real sex, but the violence, including women having their throats slit after being raped, is simulated.

To win a conviction, the prosecution will have to rely on a 1973 Supreme Court case that provided guidelines for establishing that something is obscene.

The jury must decide whether the average person, applying “community standards,” thinks the film appeals to a “prurient interest,” whether the film shows sex in a “patently offensive way” and whether it lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.

When she announced the indictment last year, Buchanan said Extreme Associates fits the bill.

“This is not a case about limiting personal sexual conduct,” she said. “It is not a case about banning sexually explicit material. This is a case about a pornography producer who has violated federal law. Extreme Associates has engaged in criminal conduct by producing and distributing material that violates our contemporary community standards.”