Tod Hunter posts on www.tod-hunter.net: Gene lit into me pretty good on Adult FYI yesterday. Yeah, it is too bad that I wasn't on the mailing list for Jennifer's lawsuit, and perhaps I gave Our Australian Friend more credit than he deserved for opening his e-mail.
Despite your beliefs to the contrary, Gene, Mike Ramone and I had a cordial relationship when he was editor-in-chief. We didn't have a lot in common, and we didn't hang out together, but we got along well enough. In fact, it was a lot like the relationship you and I had when you were my boss at AVN.
I don't know who told you "one of the parting conditions when you left AVN was money and a gag order" but it wasn't true. (You would know better than I whether the person who said it was "lying" or "mistaken," so I won't go there.)
When I got the heave-ho, I got a check for unused vacation pay and I stayed on the payroll for a big fat six weeks: One week for every year I had been there. A golden parachute it wasn't, more like a tinfoil umbrella. There was - is - no gag order, never was, although Paul seems to think I did sign some kind of corporate loyalty oath; Paul even threatened me with Paul Cambria when I ran a "What I've Learned" piece on Adult FYI and he thought you and I were going to team up and "bring down AVN." Maybe Paul thought he could sue me and get back that six weeks of severance, who knows.
The current regime at AVN is more corporate than the seat-of-the-pants operation you joined in Philadelphia and I joined in 1997. There are a lot of "managers meetings" now and they probably do corporate retreats. They certainly want the upper-echelon manager-types to lord their inflated salaries over the workaday peons by buying luxury cars. Remember when we ran the obit of my old car The Deathtrap in the Boneyard? That wouldn't happen today.
I still think that the business-major corporate groupthink at AVN would be to isolate and fire one of Jennifer's anonymous "John Does 1-10," and then parade the severed head (figuratively, of course, they don't want to mess up the carpets with anything but dog crap) as proof positive no more sexism here, nossir, we done found that mean ol' sexist person and fired his recalcitrant ass.
And Ramone can be shaped up into Public Enemy Number One pretty easily. He is a devotée of let's-call-them-"rough" videos, and a quick scan through any issue of AVN in the last couple of years can hang him with his own words. (His less-than-sensitive remark about temporary tattoos has already been removed from the AVN Insider article I linked to.) Editors who know the porn business don't exactly fall off the trees, true, but they grow fast, and a help-wanted ad in the back of AVN will pull hundreds of candidates.
That's how I got my job there. Remember?
Gene replies: Tod, you're so wrong about my "dissing" you. I've always respected you and your amazing accumulation of knowledge. Like who else could come up with the name of Jimmy Stuart's horse in Winchester 73 without having to look it up. See what I mean? But all kidding aside, if threatening you with an attack dog attorney is not some form of gag order being put into place, then have it your way. It's the car being parked in the garage next door to it. And while we're putting out notions, allow me to correct another one of yours, that I joined some seat of the pants operation. I was the seat of the pants operation. And for many years.
While I don't think there's a day that goes by in which I'm not told AVN was a far more entertaining read under my regime than the humorless, self-important sack of corporate words it's become, I don't see anyone taking the fall over there. For anything. As I understand this lawsuit, it puts two bodies square in the gunsights. And while you've acknowledged that neither of these indivuals lack for job security, at least this suit lifts the rock and allows the cockroaches to breathe some.
