AIDS Healthcare Foundation/AIM/FSC- Whiteacre’s Part 2

NL- If anyone mentioned or involved in this story wants to tell their side of thingsj, please email it to me at Cindi@lukeisback.com and I will post it.

Op/Ed by Michael Whiteacre

Why we fight

On June 18, 2010, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), responding to a complaint from AHF, opened an investigation into AIM Healthcare, the clinic that served porn performers and maintained the centralized testing database used to verify performers were available for work under the industry’s self-enforced protocols.

Free Speech Coalition’s Diane Duke, quoted in XBIZ, was incredulous at AHF’s action: "The fact that AHF wants to take this tool away demonstrates that [its] concern for people who work in our industry is insincere and proves that Weinstein is doing nothing more than supporting his personal agenda. How can any legitimate AIDS group oppose testing?”
The question was rhetorical, but an answer lay right under everyone’s nose: because in the eyes of AIDS profiteers like Michael Weinstein, testing is only a means to an end.

Weinstein is one of the most successful drug dealers on the planet. To him the only purpose of testing is to identify as quickly (and as inexpensively) as possible as many potential AHF pharmacy clients as they can, so that AHF can sell them costly AIDS drugs. That’s why AHF uses cheap, fast ELISA-based rapid tests at its testing centers. To AHF, a positive HIV diagnosis is really just phase one of marketing: identify the consumer.

Why didn’t Weinstein simply offer to take over and improve industry testing?

Tim Tritch answered that in an email to this author, “as one who knows EXACTLY how much money there is in the adult industry testing, and I mean I know EXACTLY, to the penny, how much money is involved, I guarantee you, it isn’t that profitable.”

Also according to Tritch (as “Joe Know” on LukeIsBack.com): “AIM receives about 1.1 million a year from talent for their tests, of which about 65% goes directly to pay the labs that run the tests … then they have rent, employees, workers comp ins, and everything else it takes to run a business (electric, water, phone, office supplies, etc)…”

The bottom line is, Weinstein is a businessman who only pushes what is profitable to him, and AHF doesn’t make real money from testing; it makes it from selling AIDS drugs in its pharmacies.

Another assault on AIM

AHF had been soliciting for plaintiffs to sue AIM since at least February 2010, and its search eventually bore fruit: on June 28, 2010, AHF announced that disgruntled former performers Diana Grandmason (aka Desi Foxx) and her daughter, Bess Garren (aka Elli Fioxx) would be filing a lawsuit against AIM alleging privacy breaches and seeking class action status for similarly situated parties — and that AHF’s in-house lawyers would be representing them pro bono.

The lawsuit alleged, “AIM violates the privacy rights of performers in the adult film industry by allowing the producers of adult films online access to workers’ health care information without the individual consents and releases required by federal and California law. AIM knowingly and intentionally provides this private information to producers of adult films in order to facilitate the production of adult films.”

“AIM further jeopardizes the health and well-being of performers in the adult film industry by discouraging the use of condoms and other safer-sex practices known to prevent and dramatically reduce the spread of STDs….The actions of AIM violate Grandmason’s and Garren’s rights to privacy, the rights of individuals similarly situated to Plaintiffs, and further constitute an unfair and deceptive trade practice under California law.”

AIM’s attorney Jeffrey Douglas was quick to point out that all adult movie performers sign waivers agreeing their data can be seen by anyone who makes or distributes their films. "Just being in one movie means, odds are, your ID and personal information is in the hands of dozens of entities," he said. "The choice is [that of] the performer. Not AIM."
Under the Health Information Patient Protection Act (or HIPPA), it is illegal disclose a patient’s confidential medical information unless the patient allows this information to be disclosed. However, if these performers signed a release (as all performers did at AIM), these claims in the AHF/Grandmason suit against AIM were baseless.

The claims were also predicated upon the notion, propounded by AHF, that AIM was an arm or production and thus, itself, a kind of employer. That concept (since soundly rejected by the courts) formed the rationale for Cal-OSHA storming into AIM’s offices and demanding records to which it had no right (and then brow-beating AIM clients in the waiting area and on the street in search of “information”).

Then, on July 14, HHS determined that it did not have authority to investigate AHF’s complaint regarding AIM, and closed the matter.

In the adult industry, a false sense of relief settled in. Adult producers, and the trade group Free Speech Coalition (FSC), believed that Cal-OSHA was interested in using the issues raised by AHF as an opportunity to create new, “industry-appropriate” regulations for the adult industry. The existing regulations were actually written for health clinics in the 1990s, and were haphazardly applied to the adult industry in reactionary fashion following an HIV outbreak years earlier – without ANY consultation of the industry being regulated. This was literally unheard-of, but since Cal-OSHA had never expressed any interest in enforcement prior to AHF’s complaints, no one had pressed the issue.

With the hope of new, fair, industry-appropriate regulations in mind, FSC refrained from making a public spectacle of the meetings in the Cal/OSHA process; it didn’t fight fire with fire; and it didn’t stage outlandish protests or media spectacles

But in fact, the adult industry was walking into an ambush.

On October 25, 2010, at the Cal/OSHA Advisory Meeting in Oakland, it became painfully clear that, with the at least implicit approval of the OSHA representatives, AHF seemed to not only be driving, but gaming the process. In addition, the openly (and somewhat militantly) gay leaders of the OSHA team looked and acted palpably put-off by having to deal with discussions of heterosexual, or hetero-friendly on-camera sex.

Following the meeting in Oakland, AHF’s Whitney Engeran-Cordova wrote Weinstein, “This is a war of attrition….” and he was right.

After hearing Whitney’s account of the meeting, Weinstein replied, “It really sounds like a great day – a coup.  The hearing combined with the LA Times editorial was really a blow to their solar plexus….”
 
“The next thing would be a ‘Safer Sex Initiative’ in the city of Los Angeles.”

The next month, in response to a comment I left on an LA Weekly blog post by Dennis Romero, AHF’s in-house “AIDS Advocate” Miki Jackson tipped AHF’s hand:

“[T]here are ways to have the industry basically pay for it’s [sic] own enforcement through fees, restaurants have to … and so should the Adult Industry. It’s just that the big shots and elected officials – from State to local – won’t go after the Industry – they are all scared of it. We’ve gone to them and been refused and stonewalled. The Cal-OSHA folks are great, but they need the support of our chicken elected officials to really put teeth in this.”

What AHF refused to acknowledge publicly is that companies driven out of business — or out of state — don’t pay taxes and fees to fund California programs. This is reminiscent of the problem that anti-smoking groups ran into: when you seek to fund a medical program through a cigarette tax, you cannot then go and work to stamp out smoking — fewer smokers means less fees paid into the program. A successful program or regulatory regime of the kind they hypothesize requires thriving businesses to fund it.

It would be naïve to assume that a strategist such as Michael Weinstein is not aware of this reality.


Enter the Rentboy

I’ve already written extensively about the case of Derrick Burts, the admitted active Craiglist escort and bareback bi-swinger who also shot a few “hetero” porn scenes and a lot of gay scenes in a brief porn 2010 porn career during which time he was also a counselor at a Christian youth camp. Burts later took out an ad on the gay hook-up site rentboy.com, but claimed he never actually had sex with anyone from that site.

Burts also speculated, at an AHF-hosted press conference in December 2010 at which he outed himself as porn’s HIV-infected “Patient Zeta,” that he contracted HIV during a gay porn shoot in Florida (in a scene where a condom was used for penetration). The subject of his criminal record, however, was not revealed at the press conference. Neither was his escorting and his moonlighting at the Christian camp.

Now, thanks to the AHF email leaks, we know a little bit more about Burts and AHF. Not surprisingly, it was AHF that facilitated communications between Burts and Cal/OSHA’s Deborah Gold. In December, shortly after the press conference, Cal-OSHA’s Gold contacted AHF’s Brian Chase in a very friendly email which included her work and cell phone numbers, seeking to interview Burts about the shoots he booked, in order to “ensure that appropriate measures are being taken to protect employee health in these workplaces. We’d also like to learn more about what happened in Florida.”

Burts apparently filed several complaints against mainstream “straight” porn producers who had hired him for condom-less scenes, resulting in thousands of dollars of fines.

There was no reckoning for Burts, however, who returned from shoots in Florida in early October, and shot a gay sex scene with model Christian Mohr after allowing his AIM test to lapse by four days – because since the gay side of the industry does not universally require testing, on the October 6th shoot, the issue never came up.
In the media, Burts concealed his background, and AHF presented him as their new clean-cut Poster Boy for porn industry victimhood: a mostly straight young man in a committed relationship with a beautiful blonde California girl who was lured to his doom by evil greedy pornographers.

Burts embodied AHF’s self-serving parable, and the media, reflecting societal biases about the porn industry perpetuated by the Shelley Lubbens of this world, was happy to eat it up without investigation.

But Lubben herself was nowhere to be found in AHF’s press materials around the time of Burts’ day in the sun. That’s because, quite simply, Burts was intended to be Lubben 2.0 – someone more like the boys at AHF, who not only wasn’t judgmental of gays but had actually had lots and lots of gay sex.

Better yet, unlike Lubben with her claims of herpes cured by God, Burts was a bona fide “victim” – and he had the HIV test to prove it.

A key element of the Burts parable was the personification of AIM Healthcare as the evil porn industry incarnate. Burts and AHF laid the blame squarely on AIM’s shoulders. AIM had failed Burts, the story went, just as it will continue to fail performers if it is allowed to continue to exist.

Almost immediately, however, the cracks in Burts’ contrived story began to show. The revelation of the Rentboy ad had already undermined his public image enough that his public appearances were scaled back and AHF reluctantly had to make room at the table for Lubben again. Burts quietly backed out of an appearance at a UCLA panel that, in the absence of another AHF-friendly voice, ultimately turned into the Shelley Lubben show.

AHF knew that such turns of events were only “set-backs” if they were acknowledged as such, so it issued no retractions and marched full speed ahead.

AHF was not through with AIM Healthcare yet. Not by a long shot.

To be continued…

 

13 thoughts on “AIDS Healthcare Foundation/AIM/FSC- Whiteacre’s Part 2

  1. Ari, God wants me to give you a message.

    When you fight against our good work, you fight against God, not humans. We are the ones who care about the health of performers and you care more about if you are heard.

    You’ve been wanting attention since you were a very young boy. God saw that. God also saw the injustice done to you and He wants to heal you from that injustice.

    You don’t have to be angry anymore. You don’t have to scrutinize everything that has breath. You don’t have to be the hero for a demonized industry. God has SO MUCH MORE for you.

    This isn’t easy for me to do this because I am just a human but God wants me to love you. I actually pray for you often, even though it’s very hard for me because my flesh wants to fight with you. But I refuse to give in and fight with you.

    I want to please God and love you. Is there any way you would meet me in Las Vegas on Saturday night for dinner?
    I want the opportunity to speak with you myself.

    Just like when you took the opportunity to film me at the Rainbow Club. Will you be courageous and meet with me in Vegas?

    You are very courageous with your words against us but will you be as courageous to meet with me for dinner?

    No cameras. Just us.

    God loves you Ari and I have tried hard to love you. I hope you will take me up on my invitation.

  2. Michael Whiteacre says:

    My dearest Shelley, I have a message for you, too.

    I gave you every chance in the world to do the decent thing, and to come clean once and for all. Had you done that, I would have embraced you like a sister and supported you.

    But I knew that you would never do it, for that is not your destiny.

    You’re weak, Shelley; I understand. You’re a damaged, hurt little girl with a fractured mind and a tortured, addiction-ravaged soul. All the nonsense that you just wrote about me as a child is your own projection. It’s YOU, Shelley — right out of your own book. It’s so sad. Everyone in the world can see it but you.

    You have sinned, Shelley, You have spit in the face of every thoughtful, honest, caring, trusting person on this planet, you have acted dishonorably, you have betrayed and abused others, you have lied and blasphemed — and worst of all, you did it in G-d’s name.

    Shelley, oh Shelley, I am so sorry but there is not one thing that you can EVER do or say that will stop me from pursuing righteous justice against you. To do that would be to sin — to sin against you, my poor sister, and to sin against G-d’s Holy Word.

    Shelley, I will see you humiliated and ruined (these revelations about what the sodomites at AHF really think about you is only the beginning). You will face legal action after legal action. You will be forced to sell all your ill-gotten possessions. Your ministry of fear will crumble like the walls of Jericho, ground into dust and scattered in the wind.

    But unlike you, who danced when AIM was shuttered, I will not gloat. I will quietly pray and I will know that I have done God’s will.

    And do you know who will be standing beside me, praying? Your own family, Shelley. Your parents and your brother, whom you have punished by denying them the chance to love your children because they dared speak the truth about you. You are so sick that you call the truth blasphemy against the Gospel of jesus Christ when it does not fit your self-created myth.

    You are a weak backslider, Shelley. But no one has can rightly forgive you until you forgive yourself. You are so weak Shelley, but I am going to help you.

    You could say that we two are alike Shelley. We both undertook a self-proclaimed calling. We were drawn toward each other, Shelley; can’t you see that? We are like magnets, you and I. It was planned that we meet. I am the fulfillment of your destiny. I am your shepherd. I am your destroyer.

    I AM THE PATH TO YOUR REDEMPTION.

    You will have nothing, Shelley; you will be humbled and then you will be free. All the sycophants that you currently pay to be around you will fall away, and you will finally be free. Praise G-d you will be free!

    It has been a terrible burden having to think about you — to listen to slur your lies in that Bobcat Goldthwait rasp; to read your blasphemy and libels; to watch you stumble and mumble and sputter, and make a public spectacle of yourself again and again; to subject yourself to painful scorn and ridicule; to have to hide the fact that you needed to spend time in a mental ward in February, and then in rehab this summer; to watch you alter and distort your body and face in the name of vanity — always searching for something you can never have, always trying to fill that un-fillable hole inside you.

    It hurt me to see you like that, Shelley, because I know how much you are hurting inside. G-d showed that to me, Shelley, and He showed me what I had to do. That has been MY cross to bear, if you like. I did it not to be a hero for an industry that your illness prevents you from consciously admitting you are still drawn to — I did it out of love, Shelley. Out of the greatest love there is — G-d’s love for all of us.

    There will be no compromise, there will be no olive branch — there will be a reckoning, Shelley.

    A reckoning.

    That is what G-d wants for you. Pray Shelley — not that my justice does not find you; pray that it does.

  3. I discovered a scene with Shelly (Roxy) and it looks promising

    According to IAFD, she does an anal and facial with Tim Lake

    The movie is called “bun busters 16”

    I saw the thumbnails for it at Hotmovies.com and it looks like a scorcher

    Im thinking of grabbing baby oil and jerking off to it.

  4. Sean Tompkins AKA TRPWL says:

    Shelley YOU WILL NEVER get his secret bag of gold…give it up…

  5. Shelley is only concerned about lining her pockets while she pretends to really care.

  6. Michael Whiteacre says:

    Shelley is not conscious of just how bad and transparent it looks to do and say the things she does. In her conscious mind, she’s completely UN-self-aware. Yet she’s both extremely defensive and coincidentally obsessed with Defense Mechanisms in others.

    There’s an amazing piece of unwitting autobiography in Shelley’s book: a list entitled, “TOP TEN PORN STAR DEFENSE MECHANISMS”

    Her list of so-called Porn Star Defense Mechanisms is remarkable in that she clearly is not conscious of the fact that she’s talking about herself.

    She writes about Acting Out; Denial; Displacement; using Fantasy to escape to a make-believe world of success, happiness and glory; Acting as if one has special powers; and – most amazingly – Projection.

    In her section on Projection, she uses herself in her example – thereby demonstrating virtually all of those defense mechanism traits in a single sentence, which reads: “For example, accusing Shelley Lubben of being an attention whore.”

    She couldn’t even resist using her own list about others as a vehicle to rationalize away her own issues.

  7. RickMadrid says:

    Micheal shelly is offering to buy you dinner in Vegas. And Prime rib dinner on Las Vegas Blvd Right now is $ 7.99 a plate. That means she cumming to town that night. Damn!. More LA drama.

  8. Michael Whiteacre says:

    @Rick — LOL I’m kind of insulted; she spent over $600 on a date with Ron Jeremy but she wants to have dinner with me for free. Sure he’s the hedgehog but, hey, I thought I was Shelley’s “Jewish Treasure.”

    In all seriousness, I would never let her spend her donors’ money on me. She’s going to need it for lawyers.

  9. Larry Horse says:

    Shelley, shut up and show us those man made tits of yours, that’s why Jesus gave you that money to get them, maybe have Ron take his “pink cross” and bless them and baptize you with his holy…er…, might be your most serious porn look with some cum on your fach-ey.

  10. jeremysteele11 says:

    Why haven’t any of our creative genii in porn made “The _________” yet? (Sorry, not giving shit away, anymore).

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