It's Not About Porn, It's About Free Speech

Venezuela, check. Africa, check. Syria, check. Robot army...check. Yep I think I've shot my load on foreign policy blogs for this week.

And speaking of shooting ones load (cue rim shot) my old boss is in the news again. Rob Zicari AKA Rob Black was indicted in August of 2003 under former Attorney General John Ashcroft's Justice Department for distributing obscene material. Every once a while it seems somebody gets tagged with this charge and seldom is it proven credible. Former punk rocker Jello Biafra was also once brought up on charges for distributing harmful matter to minors. The matter in question was a painting by HR Geiger (he also designed the sets for Alien) that came in the liner notes for the Dead Kennedy's "Bedtime for Democracy" album. He ended being acquitted and now he goes on spoken word tours promoting the Green party and anti-globalization.

But going back to Rob, this is the story today from the AP: "WASHINGTON (AP) - The Bush administration said Wednesday it would seek to reinstate an indictment against a California pornography company that was charged with violating federal obscenity laws. It was Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' first public decision on a legal matter.

Billed as the government's first big obscenity case in a decade, the 10-count indictment against Extreme Associates Inc. and its owners, Robert Zicari, and his wife, Janet Romano, both of Northridge, Calif., was dismissed last month by U.S. District Judge Gary Lancaster of Pittsburgh."

Let me take you back to 1999. We were in the midst of the Monday Night War between WWF (now known as WWE) and Ted Turner's WCW (pronounced dubya see dubya). I was living in LA trying to become a professional screenwriter and failing miserably. I had lost my job teaching special ed. students in an East LA junior high and by August was nearly homeless as most of my family was back in NY and unable to support me. I finally ended up getting a job working as a customer service rep. for a large health care company and slowly got back on my feet. It was during this time that I got hipped to a new indie wrestling company that was attempting to pattern itself after ECW. Now me being the obsessed wrestling fan that I was at the time (I don't bother with it anymore) I sought them out and volunteered on their ring crew. As it turns out, this wrestling company, called Xtreme Pro Wrestling (XPW) was actually owned by a pretty famous porn company, Extreme Associates, of which the owner was Rob Zicari.

After a couple of months of dedication and hard work he ended up giving me a job in the porn office during the day and I did double duty at night working on XPW stuff. I got to learn to wrestle, participated in some of the shows and I met some famous wrestlers. Once I got lost in Compton while attempting to drive Shane Douglas to the airport so he'd be on time for a PPV the next day. Luckily he made his plane and I managed not wreck Robs BMW (though I think I scratched it once).

Anywho, the point is that while I worked in Robs porn office (writer PR material, sorting chromes, making deliveries, getting smashed on the head with a non-gimmicked acoustic guitar, etc) I saw many scenes being filmed and I can attest to many dirty deeds done dirt cheap but I'm fairly certain nobody broke any laws. I think the only thing one can accuse Extreme Associates of is putting out a terrible product. Have you seen some of these videos? You know, even porn has to have standards.

However, the Justice Department feels otherwise; "Prosecutors charged Zacari and Romano and their company with distributing videos to Pittsburgh through the mail and over the Internet. Mary Beth Buchanan, the U.S. attorney in Pittsburgh, has said the case was not about banning all sexually explicit materials, just reining in obscenity. Extreme Associates' productions depict rape and murder, Buchanan said."

And so do a number of Hollywood and foreign films. I can name about a dozen films that are sexually explicit and depict rape and murder. There's a French film called, "Baise Moi" which isn't porno per se, but it does show prolonged scenes of rape, murder and other explicit material. Any kid can buy this on Amazon with his mom’s credit card. For all you of civil libertarians and free speech advocates, this is a violation of the First Amendment, not Ward Churchill's right to teach in a taxpayer-funded university. Ward Churchill may only be fired; the Justice Department is trying to imprison Rob. That's the difference folks.

I don't like Rob. Working for him was the worst 7 months of my life. Frankly, seeing the dark underbelly of both porn and wrestling is what drove me out of the entertainment industry and into social work in the first place. I'm not defending him personally. I'm defending is right to free speech and I don't do that lightly, especially for scum like Rob Zicari. He was a psychopath and a terrible boss that hurt a lot of people and will most likely die alone from illicit and prescription drugs. I don't wish death on the man, in fact, I hope some day with all the therapy and medication he's paying for, he gets to the bottom of all the psycho-social ills that have plagued him and made him into the monster that I knew him to be in 1999-2000. But from what I saw when I worked there, the Extreme Associates product was on the level. Again, I've seen worse in Hollywood films. Rob's crew was fairly meticulous in following the laws of the land regarding porn production. This indictment holds no water and that's why it was dismissed in the first place. Gonzalez appears to be trying to make a name for himself by going at Rob again because frankly, nobody will be sympathetic to a disreputable porn mogul, especially one as hated as Rob Zicari.

As I stated above, while Rob's product may suck even by porn standards, it's not against the law to make bad porn. None of what he's filmed breaks the barrier between what can be legally shown and what can't. This is a witch-hunt and it's wrong. When the government directly intervenes and tries to lock you up for your art or something you've said, that's a violation of the first amendment. So long as the models in the shoots are willing, as the videos certify they are usually, then the fiction you are being presented is protected free speech. The bottom line is that Extreme Associates is a private enterprise that distributes adult’s movies to consumers who pay for them. The legality of the case is a stretch and Gonzalez knows that.

Most likely the case will be dismissed again and the Justice Department can move on to more pressing and important business.