Responding to a Boing Boing post from earlier today, Steve Simitzis of Suicide Girls says:

Well, since you posted about the criminal case (which isn't over yet), the case is United States vs Chad Grant, not Suicide Girls vs Chad Grant. It's a criminal case - your post would imply that it's a civil dispute between us and him, which it's not. We reported the intrusion to the FBI, and from there, the government decides whether or not to prosecute. I already gave my testimony (yesterday) so I feel okay talking about it.

But anyway, the reason why the two situations (the criminal case and the upcoming government crackdown) are connected:

During the investigation, the FBI asked us to provide them a list of every single photo set that contains bondage, blood play, urination, etc. In short, anything a jury might find "obscene". The idea was that the defense would try to discredit SG by displaying in graphic detail how we're disgusting and therefore evil. And the prosecution wanted to be ready for this attack, by knowing everything we had in advance, so they could either try to downplay it or make some other point about it. Either way they wanted to be prepared. But of course that's irrelevant to the case, since the defendant (a) also worked for an "adult entertainment" company, and (b) we're not on trial anyway - he is, for computer intrusion.

So, as requested, we started assembling the list of photos containing said naughty content, when news of the upcoming crackdown started to surface. And it immediately became crystal clear: if we were handing over a list of every photo on our site that contains the content they're about to start prosecuting, and if someone in the Attorney General's office would have that on file, it would be a quick and easy few steps from there to going after us, a fairly well-known site. We felt that we were too close to the fire at that point, and took the content down.

So - were we contacted by the FBI specifically because of the "war on porn"? No. Were we contacted by the FBI and asked for a list of all our "obscene" content? Yes. So when people were asking "were you contacted by the FBI?" we really couldn't give a straight yes or no answer without talking about something we couldn't talk about.

Suicide Girls: rumor-debunking time

Reader comment: Shannon Larratt of BMEzine responds to Steve's statement:

So you took down content to help you win a case against a competitor (even if by proxy), effectively admitted on the public record that you feel this content is legally obscene and you're ashamed or afraid to show it in court, played a highly misleading PR game, and didn't come clean about it until the PR started to go bad?

As I said before, as someone who really has had a real threat of prosecution and had to uproot my whole life and company to avoid being shut down due to being unwilling to compromise the ethics of my site, I really think it's unfortunate that you guys did not have the strength of character to do the same, and I think it's even worse that you'd manipulate the courts by playing along with the FBI like this. It's not going to be helpful.

I'm sorry to be so blunt about this but I really feel you guys need to take a stronger stand, especially because if they ever actually did come after you on this point you're such an easily defendable target.

PLEASE restore the content, along with a pledge to fight to protect it.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 08:40:31 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments