Check out our new advertisers www.cammansion.com andwww.eruptionxl.com Follow AdultFYI at twitter@adultfyi1; Follow Gene Ross at twitter@GeneRoss3
from www.arstechnica.com - The saga of West Virginia's homegrown P2P porn lawyer appears headed to a strange, sad end after felony charges were filed against him in state court.
Lawyer Kenneth J. Ford of Martinsville, West Virginia filed more than 22,000 "John Doe" lawsuits in 2010 against people across the country, accusing them of downloading super-raunchy films like Teen Anal Nightmare 2 and Juicy White Anal Booty 4 from the Internet.
2,000 miles away, Colorado lawyer David Kerr found out about the cases in an odd way. "The first client that walked through my door was a young woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown," Kerr told me last year when I profiled Ford and his work. "She had never illegally downloaded anything in her life, and now she was getting a letter from some attorney in West Virginia accusing her of downloading hard-core pornography."
If people would send Ford (and the studios he represented) a few thousand dollars, the lawsuit would go away. An irritated chief federal judge in West Virginia eventually "severed" all of Ford's file-sharing cases to a single defendant, hobbling this mass litigation strategy and essentially ending such cases in the state. But Ford pressed on by joining forces with law firm Dunlap, Grubb, & Weaver and moving his cases to Washington, DC.
In digging into Ford's practice, I found that he had been the target of numerous official complaints, complaints for which he had been admonished several times. He had also had his law license suspended five times since 2006. Through his new porn work, Ford apparently hoped to move beyond the divorces and landlord cases he had handled in the past. He even started the "Adult Copyright Company" and launched a website to drum up business.
But this month, the government came after him. Edward Marshall, a reporter for a Martinsville newspaper, notes that Ford was recently charged with forging a court order and with defrauding a client.
On Monday, Ford allegedly admitted to West Virginia State Police Cpl. J.M. Walker that he forged the Berkeley County Family Court order because his client, identified in records as Kevin Pittsnogle, was "bugging him about doing (his) job."
"When questioned further, Mr. Ford indicated he was able to forge the court order because he had a previous court order signed by Judge William T. Wertman and Berkeley County Circuit Court assistant Vicki Robinson. Mr. Ford advised he cut and pasted the signatures and used a photocopier to produce the counterfeit court order," records show.
The court documents also show that Ford's marriage recently crumbled, making the whole situation that much more depressing. Ford no longer appears to be listed on the Dunlap Grubb & Weaver cases in which he was previously named, and the firm did not respond to a request for comment about its relationship to Ford.
Update: In a new story today, Marshall writes that Ford has just been hit with two more charges, one of them a felony. Ford is again accused of not doing the work for which he was paid, including in a divorce case.
MARTINSBURG, W.Va. — from www.herald-mail.com - An attorney who faces multiple felony charges of false pretense no longer can practice law in West Virginia, according to a state Supreme Court of Appeals order.
The state high court’s March 29 order to annul Kenneth J. Ford’s license came at the recommendation of the hearing panel subcommittee of the Lawyer Disciplinary Board, according to records released Tuesday by the Supreme Court.
The disciplinary board recommended the 37-year-old Baltimore attorney’s license be annulled. It also stipulated that his law practice be supervised for two years and be required to complete 12 hours of continuing legal education in ethics if his license ever was reinstated, according to the order. Ford also was ordered to reimburse the Lawyer Disciplinary Board the cost of its proceeding.
A statement of charges filed in 2011 with the Lawyer Disciplinary Board contains six complaints by individuals who indicated they retained Ford, who was admitted to the State Bar in September 1999, according to court records.
In an April 2011 order, the chairperson of the investigative panel of the Lawyer Disciplinary Board said it had found “probable cause exists to formally charge (Ford) with a violation of the Rules of Professional Conduct ...”
Ford was arraigned on Jan. 11 in Berkeley County Circuit Court on allegations that he forged a court order after being paid by former West Virginia University basketball standout Kevin Pittsnogle for legal services that were not provided. He also was charged in March on an additional felony charge of false pretense after allegedly failing to provide legal services to a client who paid him to represent her in a child custody suit in Berkeley County, according to court documents.
