Wednesday, September 29, 2004

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Jewel DeNyle On Scott Taylor's Sex Life

Jewel writes: "I know he was doing Corina Taylor last year and that was a nightmare you would of thought he'd learned his lesson. That's why she changed her name from Corina Davis to Taylor. He denied it at AVN but she was all upset over him blowing her off after he already got some."

Wake Up AVN

Cris Kline (a psuedonym for a former AVN employee?) writes about Jennifer Rosenblatt's broken contract and sexual discrimination lawsuit against AVN:

What a crock a crap to wade through (Gene, Todd, Luke) poor fools stumbling around in their own personal idaho. The law suit is about not getting paid what is owed within the time alotted by law. Employment laws were broken, as well the pain and suffering endured during time of employment. This is an adult gossip site, so of course you would mine the fine detail out of the bigger picture (sexual harrasment). In the whole scehme of things not being paid, and not able to pay your bills is the injustice.

Paul and Darren have always run a good cop bad cop operation. Darren being the bad cop. One will make deals with you the other will step in and break them. It's allways about the money. They are business owners. At the end of the day, friend or no friend, the wallet will win. The constant snivel of "money is tight over at AVN" would most likely be the reason Jennifer was not paid. It's a huge sum of money, and you bet neither Paul nor Darren would take a pay cut, or dip into their personal stash to cover AVN's debt.

Everyone knows Paul has been approached, and is interested in selling AVN. Jennifer's contract/payout isnt exactly appealing to prospective buyers. There were a multitude of reasons to get rid of Jennifer.

From my perspective, this whole mess is just another example of bad business decisions. Paul is crying how dare Jen file, when it was them that put her in the position to file in the first place. Seems to me the ramifications of tweedle dee and tweedle dumb were not thought out as per usual around AVN. Good employees are f--ked over and turned over at the speed of light at that place. The employees that create the problems are never dealt with, the good employess are forced to put up with it. The magazine generates its millions from ad sales, we've all been around to see the magazine pre Jennifer/post Jennifer. You figure it out! Bet the magazine sales have dropped since she left. Part of buying the product is the salesman. It's a relationship. Part of the reason we spent so much with AVN was due to Jennifer. F--k them! There is no doubt in anyones mind, that those greedy f--kers made a truck load off Jennifer. She was a class act compared to the outkast, freakshows that are generally employed over there.

Paul, Darren. Pay the money owed and move on! Everyone knows she made you millions more per year in ad sales than you generated without her.

Tabetha Stevens Update

Tabetha was on the plastic surgery show Dr. 90210 on E!

"I have Dr. Kerner in the Valley. He hooks me up bigtime so I never have a problem [getting all the plastic surgery she wants]."

What about when you're 50?

"I'll still be doing Botox. I think I'll have so much poison in my body from the botox, I'll be like a pickle."

Does your face?

"My mouth. I flare my nostrils more. I grind my teeth because I can't move my head. I think that's happened because of the botox. I have TMJ. My dentist has told me."

Tabetha has dated Nick Manning for the past six weeks."

How did you guys hook up?

"We were at the Sagebrush Cantina in Callebasas. I hadn't seen him for a while. We were just hanging out. Next thing you know, we started kissing. He said, do you want to go out to dinner? We went out that night.

"He said, 'I've been wanting to date you for four years. We're going out tonight.' We went out to dinner. I told him, 'You're not sleeping with me tonight. If we're going to do it, we're going to do it at a neutral place. It's not going to be at your house or at my house.'

"So we went to the St. Regis in Dana Point for four days.

"He gets mad at me for saying this, but he's messy. I always have to clean up after him. He's gotten better. He squeegees the shower at my house. I give him his own bathroom.

"I walked into the bathroom. I thought he was singing. He said, you caught me squeeging the walls and complaining.

"All we do is go to the gym. He's a freak about it. We go twice a day. After nine years of me not going to the gym, he's finally got me going. I have these little teeny muscles everywhere. I look like a little fitness girl. I look really good. I'm still tiny but I'm a little bit thicker.

"We eat well. Drink tons of water. Work out. That's my life. That and getting botox. I go on a bunch of TV shows. I must do something with the WWE. I'm friends with China the wrestler. I went with her to an event and she had me sit on stage when she sang."

Is Nick Manning younger than you?

"Hell no. I've told him to get some botox but he's not into it. But he's totally cool with me doing it. He is the first actor I've dated in the industry. Kenjy owned a company. Don [Osterhold] owned an Internet company.

"I told my parents about it. They're like, that's probably the best thing for you.

"Every time I date a civilian, it doesn't work. They don't understand my past. I have no hangups about him working. Go pound her, baby! If you get a disease, make sure I get the medication for it. I'm in full support of what he does."

Porn Stars On MySpace.com

The guy from Contactpornstars.com writes on his MySpace profile:

It really seems to be blowing up with the XXXers all over that thing. Just on my friends list I have Tera Patrick, Renee Pornero, Jules Jordan, Miss Gen Padova, Teagan Presley, Eon Mckai, Trisha Deveraux, Jesse Jane, Spyder Jones, Ashton moore, Asia Carrera & Gauge I have also seen Craven Moorehead, Belladonna, Kimberly Kane & Michael Stefano on there too.

"What the hell is My Space?" you may be asking... wull for those not hip to it (& i assume MY readers are hip.) It's an on-line forum where you can go on there, make a profile and connect with your friends as well as meet new [ones]. There are groups on there of various interest. I have joined a few myself relating to Glam, Tattoos, Metal, etc...and even started my own called Official Pornstars Group. It's a pretty fun gig. i catch myself on there a lot. and I have noticed many chix using the website as a promotional tool.

Carmen Luvana, Adam & Eve contract girl, writes:

I had received many e-mails from people asking if it was me on there. Well somebody used information from my bio in the internet, and pics of me and was (impersonating) going as me, when I check it out it was so believable, all the information was accurate, of course exept the e-mail that he was using for people to e-mail (Him/Her). I e-mailed that person to take it down because if not I was going to take extreme matters, and so he did. But he had me as long time there (Who ever this person was) and thousands of people actually really thought it was the real Carmen Luvana. So my point here, probably some of the names on there are just people stealing bios and going as the (porn stars) and are not really them. I could be wrong. I am just talking by my experience.

Brandy Alexandre Update

We started out as enemies in 1997-98. In 1999, we became friends. We chat regularly via IM.

She's now a sales tax expert for company in the Mid-West. She might move to England for love. "It *wasn't* a fan," she writes, "or over the net, or knowing about "Brandy" first. It's true friendship turned honest acceptance. How novel!"

It is a neighbor with a strong bass.

Reading my site, Brandy, 40, writes: "About Eric Edwards, when I hopped a plane to Washington DC for my interview with the State Department, he was on the same plane. I think it was the Phoenix leg of my journey. I was a alone, but he was with someone. We looked at each other, and I think we acknowledged that we knew each other, but left it alone. People move on. Time passes. I've always liked him, and my only scene with him was a nominated Best Sex Scene (Making Tracks)."

Kat Kleavage Has Her Los Angeles Real Estate License

She hasn't sold any houses yet but it may be her way out of sex work. I called her while she was in the middle of an interview for a DVD sales job.

Tom Zupko Interview

In the past, Tom Zupko has caused more than his share of grief with his outrageous movies (in one he has Kendra Jade stuff pages of the Bible up her ass) and his hard-drinking ways.

In the past, I've caused Tom Zupko more than his share of grief by peeking at the list of salaries for his movie Opera.

Tom and I have not spoken for almost two years.

We had a chat by phone Wednesday. It felt like all was forgiven.

Tom's shooting gonzo movies for Elegant Angel. Zupko is best known for his outrageous features such as Anal Ball. He used to shoot for Extreme Associates.

"For many years, my movies were based on me and the whacky visions I had. I decided to just make movies based on the sex and let the movies and the girls speak for themselves, and to put myself in the background."

You seem quieter.

"I am. I've become like a senior citizen. I'm abandoning my bad ways."

You're not like the Anal Ball guy.

"You grow out of it. It gets silly.

"I punch the clock. I go to work. I do the best job I can."

Tom says he's been so busy with work that he hasn't read a book in months.

"I've cut back on drinking. I stay at home. My one vice is the NFL. I like the New England Patriots. They play as a team."

Would you feel that your artistic vision was severely cramped if you could only shoot porn with condoms?

"At one time, I would have. But now I think of it as a challenge."

Where do you want to be in five years?

"Still doing what I am doing.

"People say, 'Man, I thought you were different.' That's what happens when you get older."

Tom now has short hair.

Mary Carey: 'Leave A Message. I'll Call You Back When I Feel Like It'

I called her cell phone and that was the message. It must be good to be at the top of one's chosen profession.

Tom Zupko's message says: "Maybe I'll call you back. Peace."

Porn Suits

Mike South writes: "Just wait till the pornettes learn that they can sue for that nasty throat infection they got from doing ass to mouth, or for the surgery need on their assholes after a double penetration, or for the chlamydia they got in the workplace. Just wait for a hungry lawyer to come in and make a practice of this type of litigation."

Dissed by my ex-boss

Tod Hunter writes on Tod-Hunter.net:

Gene lit into me pretty good on Adult FYI yesterday.

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.

Asia Carrera: Suspiciously Fat Or Glowingly Pregnant?

Asia Carrera writes:

Wahhh!! I hate having to turn down cool mainstream work offers because I'm too fat to go out and play!! There's this extremely popular Japanese anime series called "Dragonball Z", and you can see at this site that there's all this speculation on whether they're ever going to make a live-action movie of the series. Well I can tell you the answer is "yes", because the producers just contacted me about being in it. Don't ask me who they wanted me to play, because the conversation didn't get that far - I just told them "thank you for asking, but I'm 4 months pregnant and getting fatter every day!". And then I went off to sulk, because it would have been really cool to see myself up on the big screen again like when I was in "The Big Lebowski". Sulk. Sulk. Sulk. Oh, a lot of fans have been getting all upset because I'm not posting any pregnant pics of myself, and they're bombarding me with emails begging for some preggo-Asia pics. Patience, patience! Right now I'm only four months, and I'm at that awkward stage where I just look like a chubby buddha instead of like a basketball smuggler. In other words I look suspiciously FAT, instead of glowingly pregnant.

Hayley Rivers Attacked By 11yo Boy

Former porn star Hayley Rivers is working fulltime these days as a production assistant. "I bring coffee and food and keep everybody happy."

On weekends, she acts in independent films and student films. "On this film set on Saturday, I had an eleven year old boy, the whole time, running into me full-speed-ahead, knocking me off my feet and trying to tickle me and take all my clothes off. He wanted to molest me. As part of the script, I had to kiss and make-out with this guy who was damn fine. And when we were kissing, the little boy would run up and say, 'Can I try? Let me in. It's my turn. Let me try.' Oh man, you're going to send me to jail. I normally go out with guys who are 15 years older than me.

"The kid managed to rip my top off several times. He was persistent. He did plant his lips on mine several times. He was a shrimp. Like three feet tall. He was up to my waist."

Did he have an erection?

"He said he did. I was just scared. I didn't know any of this stuff when I was eleven. He had no role in the movie. He was the son of one of the girls playing a hooker in the movie."

New Sensations Owner Scott Taylor Sued For Sexual Discrimination

Read all the lurid details here.

Case No. BC318102

Attorney K. Arianne Jordan

First Amended Complaint For Damages

1. Sexual harassment

2. Retaliation

This is a classic case of quid pro quo sexual harassment in which Scott Taylor, the President of several adult entertainment companies, pursued and became obsessed with a salacious sexual relationship with his 18 year old employee, Deena DeRosa. Despite the fact that Ms. DeRosa was his employee and more than 20 years his junior, Mr. Taylor used his power and position as President of the Defendant Companies to entice her into a lurid sexual relationship in which Mr. Taylor demanded that Ms. DeRosa make herself available for sexual trysts at all times convenient for him, notwithstanding the effect that this would have on Ms. DeRosa's ability to perform her job duties. When the sexual relationship between Ms. DeRosa and Mr. Taylor ended, the Defendants retaliated against her by demoting her from Vice President of Sales to data processing assistant, a position that paid substantially less, with the goal of forcing her to resign from the Defendant's employ. In addition to this treatment, Ms. DeRosa was forced to work in an environment pervaded by sexual hostility towards women including...offensive behavior and comments. The unfair and illegal treatment that Ms. DeRosa was subjected to by the Defendants has caused her substantial psychological and economic damages.

[Deena DeRosa] began her employment on September 25, 2000.

11. Ms. DeRosa was initially employed as an assistant to Leilani Whitney, the managing director of the companies. Thereafter, due to her exemplary performance, she was promoted to Vice President of Sales in or about March 2001.

12. Beginning in or about January 2001, Defendant Taylor initiated and pursued an obsessive intimate relationship with Ms. DeRosa. The relationship lasted approximately two years. Defendant Taylor's affair with Ms. DeRosa included unannounced visits to her apartment very late at night during the work week. Defendant Taylor initiated sexual liasons in his office before work, during work hours, and on weekends. Defendant Taylor took Ms. DeRosa to numerous locations to have sex including, but not limited to, a Hyatt hotel at a "Park-n-Ride" location in Porter Ranch and in a parking lot at Chatsworth Park. Defendant Taylor bought Ms. DeRosa expensive jewelry and other gifts and contributed monthly payments for her apartment. Defendant Taylor communicated with Ms. DeRosa during the work day by instant messaging her and by calling her into his office whenever he desired. These communications and visits to Defendant Taylor's office decreased Ms. DeRosa's ability to generate telephone sales, which was her primary function as Vice President of Sales.

13. Defendant Taylor spied on Ms. DeRosa in order to know what she was doing at all times when he was not with her. He demanded that employees of Defendant Companies report to him regarding their knowledge of Ms. DeRosa's personal life. As a result of Defendant Taylor's actions, Ms. DeRosa was worried and concerned that if she did not participate in the relationship, that her job as well as that of her mother (who also worked for the Defendant), would be placed jeopardy.

14. The intimate relationship between Defendant Taylor and Ms. DeRosa ended in or about March or April 2003. Defendant Taylor's wife discovered their relationship and demanded that Defendant Taylor end it. Defendant Taylor's wife also demanded that he fire Ms. DeRosa as soon as possible.

15. In or about April 2003, Ms. DeRosa was demoted...and her salary was reduced from $20 per hour to $12...

16. [I]n April 2004, Ms. DeRosa filed her administrative complaints with the California Department of Fair Employment & Housing (DFEH). Ms. DeRosa was placed on paid administrative leave.

17. Ms. DeRosa's mother, Penny DeRosa, was terminated from her position at Defendant companies in or about late March or April 2004. Ms. DeRosa is informed and believes and thereon alleges that the termination of her mother's employment was a further act of retaliation against her for her complaints of sexual harassment and for her termination of her sexual relationship with Defendant Taylor.

18. Ms. DeRosa is informed and believes and thereon alleges that Defendant Companies and Does 1 through 25 knew or reasonably should have known that Defendant Taylor was sexually harassing, discriminating, and retaliating against her and that, as a direct and proximate result of those violations, she would suffer injuries as alleged herein. Moreoever, Defendant Companies and Does 1 through 25 created and fostered a sexually hostile work environment wherein offensive and derogatory statements and conduct were directed towards women.

21.

C. Defendant Taylor's expectation that Plaintiff engage in sexual relations with him in return for preferential treatment in the workplace.

D. Defendant Taylor's unwelcome visits to Plaintiff's apartment very late on week nights and insistence that Plaintiff make herself available to him for sexual relations very early in the morning before work.

F. Defendant Taylor's inappropriate sexual comments to Plaintiff including comments about giving her a "birthday spanking."

H. Defendants' acts of permitting male employees to watch sexually explicit films in the workplace, unrelated to their work duties, and allowing those employees to openly make comments in the workplace about the "sluts" and "skanky hos" in the films.

I. Defendants' acts of permitting male employees to write sexually offensive and derogatory comments about women on posters bearing their likeness that were posted on walls in the workplace.

48. Plaintiff has been caused to suffer and continues to suffer severe emotional and mental distress, anguish, humiliation, embarrassment, shock, discomfort, and anxiety. The exact nature and extent of said injuries is presently unknown to Plaintiff, who will seek leave of Court to assert the same when they are ascertained. Plaintiff does not know at this time the exact duration or permance of said injuries but is informed and believe, and thereon alleges, that some of the injuries are reasonably certain to be permanent in nature.

I don't think any porn company owner in the past decade has had more porn women than New Sensations owner Scott Taylor, who is married with kids. A handsome charismatic guy with a ton of money, Scott has gone through porn stars by the bushel as well as some of his attractive female employees.

Scott had a long-running affair with one employee, Deena DeRosa, who was only 18 when it began (she's 20 years younger than Scott). It lasted two years. Soon after it broke up, he fired her and then her mom Penny. Deena then sued him for sexual discrimination in the Spring of 2004.

Other porn company owners who have had more than their share -- Gabor Esterhazy of Heat Wave (particularly likes black women, has probably had more than 100 porn girls), John Bowen, and, back in the day, Steve Hirsch.

From a www.adultbeat.com interview with Scott Taylor January 8, 2004

A former long-haired rock musician, Scott Taylor started in porn in 1985 as a salesman selling videos to video stores over the phone. "It didn't matter that you had long hair. I started with a one-stop distributor after that called National Video Supply. Through the profits of the distribution company, I started New Sensations (about 1990). For a long time, I was just doing Video Virgins, a one-room pro-am thing. We released nine movies a year. I started Digital Playground [in 1993]. We did that for five years together. I was the president of the company. I started with the guy who calls himself Joone."

What do you do in your spare time?

"Family time. I'm married with kids. I'll put in long days at the office five days a week, but on the weekend, it is time to go to the toy store, construction site, the park..."

Sex Worker Unions

Ira Levine aka Ernest Greene writes on Nina.com:

Having begun my career as a sex-worker advocate back in 1974 doing volunteer work for COYOTE, I have seen first hand, over a period of many years, how one sex-workers' rights organization after another has started with great promise, only to come to frustration from the combination of external pressures and internal divisions that plagued them all. Even the examples of the Lusty Lady girls and the original signatories to the Mitchell Brothers' suit are hardly encouraging. The former split into bitter factions and the latter ultimately failed to produce significant changes in the policies they opposed, while essentially ending their own careers as dancers in the attempt. The highly transient nature of the porn talent pool, as you've observed, makes such efforts even more complex and difficult.

AIM, of which Dr. Sharon Mitchell is currently compiling a comprehensive history, is a sadly atypical example of labor-management cooperation in the face of a common threat. It came about under a unique set of circumstances and succeeded where previous attempts had failed.

When I first got into the porn business in 1984, I already had a more personal familiarty with the AIDS epidemic and its potential to devastate large groups as well as individuals than most of the fairly sheltered and oddly parochial personalities who dominated the industry at that time. Back in 1980, my brother, in his capacity as chief medical correspondent for CNN, had been among he first national journalists to investigate the emerging crisis, and he had foretold what was to come in a chilling phone call. "Ever heard of this thing called the Gay Cancer?" he asked. I told him I hadn't. "Well, it's not gay, it's not cancer and you're going to hear more about it than you ever wanted to."

A couple of months later, the art director who styled the fashion layouts for the city magazine I edited, came down with a persistent cough that quickly developed into fatal pneumonia. The two men who owned the gentrified property to which the carriage house in which I lived was attached got sick a short time later and never recovered. This was the beginning.

When I moved out to LA, I quickly found my way to the local Leather Community, which was mostly gay at that time, and in the deadly grip of the epidemic at its peak. In my first two years out here, the entire memberships of the three oldest and largest all-male leather organizations was decimated. The regulars of several local leather bars seemed to go extinct overnight. The entire management of the largest bondage-toy emporium went next. The woman who founded The Society of Janus - the oldest pansexual West-Coast BDSM organization - died of AIDS, as did two of the three founders of Club f-ck, the first BDSM performance venue and dance club in Calfiornia.

It wasn't until I became embroiled in the contentious issue of HIV prevention in porn in 1993 that the doctor who created the WHO-administered AIDS-control program in the bordellos of Bangkok explained to me how what had happened in the Leather Community could happen in porn just as easily.

That was the first time I heard the term Tribal Epidemiology. When members of a socially or geographically isolated tribe are promiscuous only among their own kind, they aren't at any particular risk of infecting each other with anything very serious. However, if a sexually communicable disease breaches the tribe's isolation, not only will it meet an unresistant population, it will be passed quickly among them, precisely because of their expectation of safety among their own kind. "Everything's fine until one member of the tribe is infected," he warned, "but after that, the entire group is immediately at risk."

Dr. Stan Krysz had come out to LA at the request of a tiny group of performers, including Porsche Lynne and a few other, lesser names, but mostly unfamiliar faces, who had banded together to form the Adult Performers' Association in response to the first known HIV exposures in straight porn. At that time, there was only the most casual kind of testing regimen in force. The ELISA test, which reveals the presence of HIV antibodies anywhere between thirty days and six months after infection, was the best thing screening available, and performers used it somewhat haphazardly. Some producers took a direct interest in making sure performers had been tested, but many did not. There was an informal understanding that all performers should have current tests, but the definition of current varied from thirty- to ninety-day intervals, depending on who you asked.

A situation arose in which an incoming female performer was tested on a Friday and put to work by an over-eager producer over the weekend before her test results could come back. When they did, they came back positive. From only two working days, she had managed to expose seven other performers. That's how Tribal Epidemiology works. Though the porn industry was much smaller than it is today, I still find it remarkable that only about 25 of us thought this warning shot was serious enough to merit speaking out in favor of an industry-wide policy of universal condom use for all scenes involving vaginal or anal f-cking. With the minimum testing window of 30 days possible using available technology and the alarming rate of exposure we'd observed, that seemed like the only responsible position.

Not since the Harlan County Wars had such vicious anti-labor tactics been unleashed on a group of activist workers. After a noisy, angry all-industry meeting at the old Track Tech Studios which Dr. Krysz described as "the worst day of my entire career in public health," a group of anti-condom performers was formed with considerable "encouragement" from agents and producers. The Antis disrupted the Pros meetings, spread the ugliest personal slurs imaginable about their leadership and generally acted as scab unions do. There were many angry confrontations, out of which arose some of the hostilities, both individual and collective, that are still evident within our community today.

Meantime, without ever saying as much, the producers simply stopped giving employment to those they perceived as agitators. Efforts to persuade the largest producers with the most to lose to see, if nothing else, a liability interest in harm reduction, met with no success. Not a single company would commit to a condom policy.

After three harrowing months, an unofficial understanding was reached that ELISA testing would go to set, thirty-day schedule and that directors would be expected to ask for and examine tests before allowing performers to work. At that time, fed up with being called a Nazi and threatened with physical violence, I stood up in front of a panel of producers at the annual gathering of the industry's primary lobbying group the Free Speech Coalition and warned them that, with this miserable excuse for a policy in place "the only thing I can promise you is that we'll all be back in this room talking about this again, sooner or later."

Later came in 199[8] when Marc Wallice, who had been altering his ELISA test results, which came from one of a number of private clinics providing them at the time (all with different reporting forms), was suspected of infecting six female performers over a period of weeks. By this time, the PCR-DNA test, a much more responsive and accurate detector of HIV infection which was still under development during the 1993 incident, had become available, though not widely, and was used to conclusively determine the status of the entire talent pool, thanks to the voluntary efforts of Sharon Mitchell and Dr. Steven York. These two individuals, with a bit of help from a few friends, managed to get the PCR-DNA reduced in price for the whole community while persuading the now-very-frightened majority of producers to accept it as the new standard. Mitch acted as the laison who did all the contact tracing and established the geneology of the outbreak. Readers of this site undoubtedly know much of the history since.

There are all kinds of fascinating details, not to mention gripping human drama, to be assembled for a larger narrative at a future time, but those are the bare bones of how it all started. Mitch really gets the credit for making AIM happen. If I did anything useful, it was to put the scare into those producers four years earlier, creating the atmosphere of justified anxiety in which AIM was able to take root. I can't really blame them for not thanking me. Nobody likes the bearer of bad news.

The bottom line to which this all leads is that from AIM's experience, the only precautions that work in porn are those upon which performers and producers can agree with unanimity, which will never be as effective as some people wish, nor as reckless as others fear. Outside officials and some factions within the industry have tried to cast this whole issue as a matter of producers vs. performers, doing no service to either. The model that works here is cooperation for mutual benefit. Adversarial approaches on this issue aren't just unworkable, they're irresponsible and deadly.

Landmark Media International Honored at Exotic Dancer Expo

Steve Seidman writes:

This year's Exotic Dancer Expo Award Show turned out to be a special event for the principals at Landmark Media International. The founding fathers of Landmark Media International [Mike Moz from Nightmoves, Andy Weilblad from Xtreme and John Gray from Adult Quest] were honored by being added to the list of Industry Innovators for their joint venture in local publishing at the annual Adult Nightclubs Award Show last month at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino in Las Vegas.

Previous winners include Michael J. Peter, Harry Mohney of Déjà vu, David Fairchild of The Men's Club, Galardi South Enterprises, John Gray of the Spearmint Rhino and last year's winners Duncan and Scott Burch of Burch Management. Exotic Dancer's Entertainment Award Show is the highlight every year of a week in Las Vegas sponsored by the leading industry magazine that includes a popular Expo and fan fair.

Landmark Media International is a combination of Adult Quest, Nightmoves and Xtreme publications. These local magazines cover the Eastern Seaboard and Texas. Also to be added soon are Phoenix and Las Vegas.

Green Lantern writes:

The tall, bald gentleman in the center of the picture is Andy Weilbad, publisher of Xtreme Magazine. Xtreme covers the gentlemen's clubs & adult video and novelty stores here in the Northeast section of the U.S. from Maine south to Virginia just like NightMoves covers the Southeast. If you go to http://www.xtrememag.net, you'll see that LeeAnna Heart is this month's cover girl for the New England edition. I bumped into him @ Stagedoor Johnny's in New Haven, CT the Saturday night before the Super Bowl when LeeAnna was featuring there as a fill-in for another entertainer who didn't want to travel north from Florida. I introduced Andy to LeeAnna, they talked and she gave him a promo pack. 8 months later, she's on their cover! Pretty cool, huh.

Tod Hunter Analyzes Fallout From Jennifer Rosenblatt's Lawsuit Against AVN

Tod writes on www.tod-hunter.net:

So now, the question is, whose head is going to roll on this? Obviously the AVN Media Network will demand a blood sacrifice to show that "we fired the offending employee and fixed everything." All crap, of course, but the formalities must be met.

Paul and Darren are safe, of course. They run the place. They don't take the fall, they decide who takes the fall. And it ain't them.

Tim Connelly has a contract, no doubt, so he's relatively safe. The last thing they need is another breach-of-contract suit. Besides, Connelly got to the party late, having been there only about a year now.

Thanks to the sexual-harassment charge, Heidi Pike-Johnson's job is as safe as if it were in Fort Knox. They're probably prepping her for public appearances now - a crash diet to get her down to 300 pounds, speech coaching, and a quick trip to Stepford for final programming preparation right before CES.

So who is the poor bastard who's going to take the fall? It's gotta be Mike Ramone. It gives me no pleasure to say this. Mike has always been fair to me even though we never had a lot in common, and we have been cordial since I was fired from AVN. But Ramone was "Editor in Chief" for a while there after Bryn left, and although he is a nice guy, he can look scary.

Selective reading of his reviews from AVN could give Jennifer and her lawyers enough ammunition to shoot more holes in him than a screen door. And AVN Insider isn't doing him any favors. Take a look at Ramone's remark about temporary tattoos in Friday's Seen/Heard story. Not exactly the words of the Post-Oprah Sensitive Male.

Anyway, that's my guess. If you have an idea of who's going to take the fall, I'm setting up scapegoat@tod-hunter.net for guesses.

The comment of Mike Ramone's that could have caused him so much trouble is GONE from Friday's Seen/Heard on the AVN Insider site. But a copy was saved:

Wetscrog Gets a Tat

What do we AVN editors do on Friday afternoons? Well, on this particular Friday afternoon, as this particular AVN editor sat at his desk, brainstorming what to write about California Exotic Novelties' new Glitter Tat kit, I was struck with an idea - a little something to break up the ol' monotony, if you know I'm sayin'.

So I stepped lively down to Heidi Pike-Johnson's office, and asked her if she'd like to apply the tattoo on me, anywhere she liked, you know, for work's sake. Heidi jumped at the opportunity to create a beautiful work of art on my body, so we grabbed art guy Ed Webb to document the event.

After all was said and done, I went to AVN Managing Editor Mike Ramone - the most tattooed person in the building - to get his opinion of my new body decoration. His comment: "Temporary tats are for pussies!" A photo essay of the entire process will be featured next week, courtesy of Ed Webb. -- Pete "Wetscrog Rex" Warren

Duke says: Tod has worked at AVN. I never have. I respect his analysis here. I know female employees of AVN who have said that Mike Ramone was misogynistic and a bear to deal with. But I don't think this case has anything to do with Mike Ramone or sexual harassment. It's a complaint about breach of contract and gender discrimination and that AVN tolerated, according to Rosenblatt's lawsuit, Darren Roberts' crude and unwelcomed sexual remarks and gestures towards AVN's female employees. This is not a lawsuit claiming that Jennifer was sexually harassed by AVN's hierarchy. She had a close but platonic relationship with AVN President Paul Fishbein, as have several other AVN employees, such as Juliet Lowry, Ashley Kennedy, who still say glowing things about Paul.

I sense a lot more hostility in porn land these days towards Darren Roberts (AVN VP) and Tim Connelly (AVN publisher and editor) than towards Paul Fishbein.

Gene Ross writes on Adultfyi.com: "In his litany of AVN sleaze, what Lukeisback forgot to include was another sexual harassment incident involving the receptionist at the time and a male employee who subsequently left the company."

Paycom/Epoch Suffers Massive DDOS Attack

Paycom.Net just suffered a 3 hour DDOS (distributed denial of service attack). The rumor it was by people associated with iBill. Paycom is publically supporting iBill but rumor has it that Paycom is working behind iBill's back at Visa.

Ira Levine's Reflections From Ten Years At The Front

Ira Levine writes on Nina.com:

I've been down this road three times before. I've heard the owners of major companies declare themselves all-condom producers from that day forward, only to quietly reverse course six months later. If big, rich players in this industry can't hold the line with all their money and resources, just imagine what the extraordinary market pressures of a business that has to roll over its entire inventory every six weeks will do to the shaky resolve of people living paycheck to paycheck.

Christian Mann, one of the smartest, nicest, most thoughtful and most capable execs ever to run a porn company, spoke with poignantly at a meeting last spring about what happened when he tried to take his productions all-condom. He watched his market share plunge for a year before finally deciding that allowing himself to go broke wouldn't help anybody. His competitors would simply pick up the slack. Now he's a condom-optional producer and he reports that his sales have gone right back up.

Looking at this issue in the cold light of self-interest, which is the one that best illuminates people's economic behavior, the directors and producers have vested interests in making the most commercial pictures possible. That's what keeps them employed.

Performers have a vested interest in making commercial pictures also, as this is their source of employment as well, but they also have a direct interest in protecting their own health. To the extent that producers may be influenced by liability concerns, the prospect of government intervention, public image considerations and some measure of common decency, they may have a bit of overlapping investment in the well-being of performers, but that is an indirect interest.

So, based on experience, who can we realistically expect to lead any fundamental change in the status of safeguards for performers? Who has done so in the past? Let's not forget that AIM was founded by performers and that most of the time and effort invested in AIM has come from performers. However unhappily, performers will have to shoulder the burden if further protections are to be effective.

Government agencies are attempting to impose their own strategies for changing behavior in the industry, but they would need an army of inspectors and millions of dollars in taxpayer funding to make a significant difference in the way most porn is made. Those resources aren't there. Instead, these agencies are likely to pursue selective enforcement that won't have much impact on what happens on most sets on most days. At the end of the day, it will be up to performers to protect themselves.

The government, at least the Cal-OHSA/LADOHS part of it, has made clear that they would like nothing better than for us all to pack up and leave. The Assembly, which is more sensitive to the tax-base in a state that is amazingly even broker than the rest of the country, would rather we stick around, but won't rush in to rescue us either. We have too many enemies.

[S]ome unelected bureaucrats have decided to short-circuit the legislative process and write some new laws on their own desks. They don't really have the power to do this, and either the courts or the Assembly will eventually rein them in, but not without some political risk from being seen as pro-porn.

I wouldn't be completely surprised to see some kind of LOTE regs emerge from the Assembly eventually, just to prevent zealots at unaccountable state and local agencies from doing worse. And all of it will be for nothing, because the institutional inertia of an industry this size will simply roll forward over almost anything put in its path.

Ren Galskap writes:

In theory, markets should pass all the costs of production to the consumer, so that each individual consumer pays the full cost of producing whatever he consumes. In practice, the market always partially fails and some of the costs are born by the people who do the producing. Miners and black lung disease are a famous example. Another example is the pollution I create whenever I drive my car. I pay for some of it by paying for the anti-pollution devices that reduce my emissions, but any pollution that passes out of my tail pipe is a cost to society as a whole, not to me. In theory, there should be a premium added to the price of any video that pays for insurance to cover the risk of infection for performers. The fact that this premium doesn't exist is a market failure; the risk is not passed on as a cost to consumers. If this were any industry other than porn, it might be possible to get Congress to impose a national porn sales tax that paid for health and disability insurance. That would affect all porn equally, so it wouldn't give foreign producers a cost advantage. Failing that, the only way to overcome the market failure is for workers to organize. Since porn is a global industry, performers all over the world would have to organize. This is making me sound like an Old Left unionist; workers of the world, unite.

In 1999, Sweden outlawed soliciting prostitutes. Being a prostitute is perfectly legal, but being a prostitute's customer is illegal. Supporters of the law point to the fact that street prostitution has virtually disappeared. The prostitutes themselves say that the prostitution still exists but has gone underground and is more dangerous for the prostitutes. The police say that they have no idea what's going on because it is no longer happening where they can see it.

Last fall, women's organizations in Norway started pressing for a similar law. A veteran prostitute known as "Gitte" organized the Network Against Banning Sex-purchase and succeeded in getting support from some prominent women in Norway, as well as off-the-record support from the police. The law failed to pass because it split the Norwegian government, which is an alliance between the Christian Peoples Party and the Conservatives. The Christian Peoples Party was in favor of the law and the Conservatives were opposed. Gitte and some other Norwegian prostitutes, male and female, are organizing a conference in Oslo next month for prostitutes all over Scandinavia. They've been in contact with the more political prostitutes and already know that they will attend, but they're hoping for a broader representation.

There's been an influx of prostitutes into Scandinavia from the Baltic states, Eastern Europe, Asia, and recently, Africa. These new girls haven't become politicized or developed a sense of their social and economic position. Frequently, they've been smuggled in by criminal organizations and live under the threat of violence. People from Norway, Sweden, and Denmark have similar languages and can understand each other, but there's a language barrier with the immigrant girls. In addition, there's some resentment from the fact that the immigrants will work for less money and without condoms. All in all, an organizer's nightmare. It remains to be seen whether Gitte and her fellows can overcome the barriers and create an organization for all prostitutes in Scandinavia, or whether they will become a lobbying group for native prostitutes.

There's an irony in the relationship between porn performers and prostitutes. Porn girls tend to look down their noses at prostitutes, but it is the prostitutes who stay in their jobs long enough to identify with the jobs and recognize the need for organization. In this country there are several organizations that supply services or represent prostitutes. Porn performers only have AIM, and even that depends on donations from the larger production companies to cover its budget shortfalls. The problem of protecting porn performers is part of the larger problem of protecting sex workers. An eventual solution may come as a side effect of prostitutes organizing to protect themselves, something that porn performers mostly seem unable to do.

'TT Didn't Rape Anybody'

Gene Ross writes about the former head of production at VCA, Stephanie Ross, a MILF (Mom I'd Like to F---). She had a complex on-set sexual interaction with TT Boy at The Stage in Chatsworth in early 1998 that has been called rape.

Stephanie and TT were in the bathroom. She apparently washed his penis. They had some sort of sex. She came out of it and claimed it was forced on her.

There was a movie being made at the time. Nobody heard any complaints or cries of rape or stop while it was going on. The men on the set took TT's side and the women took Stephanie's side.

VCA's owner of the time, Russ Hampshire, told TT to get anger management. TT refused. Russ and Stephanie called around the industry and essentially got TT blackballed from the industry for about six years.

TT started his own line and his own company.

Stephanie got into a nasty divorce. She had kids. She took a leave of absence from VCA and never returned.

Care Concepts buys stake in Penthouse publisher

Media holding company Care Concepts (IBD.A: Quote, Profile, Research) said on Tuesday it had agreed to buy about 48 percent of the non-voting common stock of General Media, publisher of the racy adult magazine Penthouse, from affiliates of financier Marc Bell.

The Wit And Wisdom Of Penthouse Publicist Lainie Speiser

At the S&M event, The Black and Blue Ball I spoke with one Orthodox man at quite a length about all this. I spoke with him because kept coming around the talent for foot worship (he was worshipping). He did say that his fascination was partly due to the domineering jewish mother very common in jewish families, and also because this was sexually gratifying contact without feeling he was cheating on his wife and mother of his children. I asked him if his wife knew he was there, of course she did not, though he did say he'd love to share this with her but he could barely get her into bed as it was. An very close long time friend of mine was once called Mistress Ruby and she has a book on Amazon, anyway, she told me the majority of her clients were either Catholics or Orthodox Jews. In fact one client would whole up in the dungeon for days at a time doing cocaine and having several doms service him, and they're job was to make sure he made it back to his suburban home in time for Sabbath. In this case, his wife KNEW of this and when he was missing for a few days she'd call the dungeon looking for him.

AVN Retraction

I've carelessly tossed around statements on this site that AVN had several lawsuits against it, and that some have been similar in content to Jennifer Rosenblatt's. According to the information I now have, AVN has never been sued (except for a minor case ten years ago from someone who was receiving the magazine and didn't want it).

Lynn LeMay told me in 1996 that she won a settlement from AVN regarding libel but when I check that claim out, I can find no substantiation.

Renee Johnson and Bryn Pryor (Mark Logan) had some screaming argument about six years ago. Though a harassment lawsuit may have been threatened by Renee, the matter was settled in-house. Bryn went to anger management classes and Renee got a car and a cushy job running AVN's tradeshows.

Juliet Lowry was the head of the AVN internet division. She's now out on her own. She's been heard making similar complaints to Jenn's about AVN but she remains friendly with Paul Fishbein.

I expect AVN will have to make a statement about Jennifer's lawsuit. Jenn and AVN publisher Paul Fishbein were platonic friends for years.

I also posted last week that Paul Fishbein was on a rampage to destroy the career of Jenn's husband Darren Blatt. According to another source, however, Paul does not even know what Darren does for a living, let alone has he tried to hurt Darren's business.

I expect that AVN will defend itself from Jenn's lawsuit by arguing that she was fired for just cause. That she wasn't doing a good job. That people were complaining. That employees were threatening to quit. AVN will have to name names and provide specificity to these allegations to be persuasive. Who complained? Who threatened to quit? How was Jenn's work incompetent?

I Like To Think About The Law

According to Yohanan ben Dabai, a man may do what he will with his wife; within the zone of the marriage bed all is permitted. I, however, side with Rabbi Eliezer who argues that, while having intercourse, one should think on arcane points of law.

Orthodox Sado-Masochism

VFB writes:

Ms. Speiser notes that she saw many Orthodox men at an S&M event. From various articles and anecdotes, it seems that a disproportionate amount of Orthodox individuals are into S&M. I wonder if this is not the result of a mindset that is deeply imbedded in Orthodox religious belief, which associates punishment with affection.

The Talmud states that the Jews acceptance of God at Mount Sinai was similar to a wedding, with Jews as the Bride and God as the Groom. They entered into an S&M relationship. Jews believe that they are the chosen people, and yet they seem to be abused a great deal by the one that chose them. This can cause people to believe that there is a relationship between affection and abuse.

Think into prayer. So much of it consists acknowledging our nothingness, referring to ourselves as a slave, and begging our master for forgiveness so that we can avoid punishment. If the master were not God, but Mistress Whoever, much of prayer would read like an S&M fantasy.

Ira Levine writes:

Funny thing, this. I think perhaps VFB, who confuses SM with abuse, has equally little insight into Jewish religious practice.

Years ago back in Denver, I was invited to Sabbath dinner at the home of legendary [Chasidic] Rabbi Solomon Twersky. A friend of mine was trying very hard, for reasons unexplained, to recruit me for Twersky's congregation.

After dinner, I was granted a brief audience with the imposing rebbe, who wanted to know, in that statement-posing-as-a-question way, why I shouldn't join. I told him that I thought my BDSM orientation might pose an obstacle.

What followed was a display of rabbinic thought that could have levitated the house. A veritable smoking factory of Talmudic cerebration, Twersky rocked back and forth, stroked and twisted his beard, mumbled to himself, looked heavenward, then pronounced his final conclusion with a shrug. "There's no rule against it!"

Since then, I haven't worried much about the theological implications of my kinks.

Valley Guy writes:

A friend's wife told me this summer that she works as a dominatrix. I was shocked, but intrigued also. It's not every day that a Nice Jewish Boy meets a dominatrix in a non-dominatrix setting, after all. Not that I've ever met a dominatrix in a dominatrix setting either, but anyway... So I asked her a lot of questions all about it. She said a lot of her orthodox male clients (who prefer Jewish dominatrices, btw) like getting spanked; they tell her they'd ask their wives to do it but they're too embarrassed. Are some hareidi societies as misogynistic as anti-hareidiists claim they are? No idea, never been hareidi. But according to the old New York Times (Magazine) article at http://tinyurl.com/6khr6 , if i remember it correctly, people in positions of power sometimes feel a need to be put in a position of anti-power for a while. Balance out the karma or something like that. Or maybe they feel burned out from the brainpower-intensive orthodox lifestyle. Always gotta think - is this food kosher?, can I do this action on shabbos?, what do I do if I come to shul late and have to skip something?, etc. Maybe it feels good to let someone else make all the decisions. Or I dunno, maybe the whole BDSM thing is so incredibly Other from the male-female relationships they've known that they're just curious?

Michael Stefano Movies From Platinum X Pictures To Red Light District

I believe both companies are owned (certainly RLD in its entirety) by David Joseph Giarusso, so it is not such a big move. Michael's ex-wife Jewel DeNyle was the key figure behind PXP but she is moving to New York.

Jager writes on AdultDVDtalk.com: "AVN's Male Performer of the Year, Michael Stefano, has sold off his interests in Platinum X Pictures, and has moved on to Red Light District Video. I have a tremendous amount of respect for Stefano and I'm just curious why this has yet to hit any of the adult news sites. One of the few directors you can build a company around, I'd like to wish him the best of luck and continued success."

Manuel Ferarra jumped from PXP to RLD a few months ago.

Ramsey writes: "I don't understand what the big deal is. I mean they're the same company just with different names. Just look at the male cast they use, they're always the same in both PX and RLD movies."

Bill the Moderator writes:

According to an AVN article, PXP started out owned 25% each by Dion, David Joseph (Dion's brother), Jewel & Stefano. At the time, I think that Jewel & Stefano were married, so it was essentially a 50/50 partnership between the two families. The other directors had a deal similar to what Evil Angel does. The director's own their own production companies, finance the movies themselves and PXP distributes those movies. The more those movies sell, the more money the director makes.

PXP also has "hired" directors. At the time of the AVN article, this included Julian, Sean Michaels, Mason and some others (the status of these directors may have changes since the article was written). These directors are paid to shoot a movie. The sales of those movies don't affect what they are paid (except for the logical conclusion that if they shoot movies that sell well, they will likely be paid more for future movies).

After the blowout late last year/early this year, Dion sold (gave, whatever...) his share in the company to his brother (as well as his share of RLD). So, at that point David Joseph owned 50% of PXP and Jewel & Stefano each owned 25%. The question now is: Who did Stefano sell to? If he sold to Jewel, then she's back in a 50/50 relationship with Dion's brother, if he sold to David Joseph, it's now a 75/25 partnership between Joseph & Jewel. Or it's possible that he sold to someone else (but I would doubt that).

Given Stefano's sale of his portion of the company (assuming that Chico's article is correct) and Jewel's announcement that RLD & PXP are pooling resources, including moving into the same building as one another along with the fact that Jewel is moving away from LA to NY, I would question whether she has also sold off her ownership interests in PXP or not. Could she now be one of the directors who own their own titles, but are not partners in the company?

Bridgette Kerkove writes: "Skeeter told me, David Joesph owns 95 percent of Platinum pictures. Maybe 100 percent by now. With Mike at Red Light, he will now make more money. He deserves more money."

Jewel DeNyle writes:

PXP and Red Light are moving into the same building and RLD directors will be directing for PXP in titles that David Joseph owns. Myself,Steve,Sean and Brandon own our own titles and I own Julian's, Mason's and Kylie's stuff. Jessica's stuff is owned by David Joseph and Red Light directors that direct for PXP their stuff is also owned by David. I have between 2 or 3 titles a month I own and David has 2. Steve,Sean and Brandon have one a month they own. The distribution part is owned by David he get's 30% distribution fee from all our movies and owns 100% of his stuff done by his directors. Stefano moved over but is still a part of PXP just won't be a director under the PXP name. It really doesn't matter as we are all the same team he just want's to put out one movie a month instead of 2 and David want's the 2 movies a month to own that's why the switch was made. Nothing crazy just financial stuff it's a lot of money to do more then one title a month each movie runs about 25 grand a month and I'm doing between 2 and 3 so now that Mike is on his own and we are no longer together his financial situation is all on him without us putting our funds together that's why he moved to RLD so he didn't have the stress of having to do 2 titles a month and to spend the extra money. I hope this makes it clear to everyone. I'm moving to NY [I bought a house on the ocean in Long Island, S.Merrick] but will still be directing same as usual just have to make trips to Cali or go to Europe and Canada to shoot every few months as I have movies in the can until March.

Michael Stefano writes: "I will continue to do exactly what I am doing now.I can use whoever I want in my movies, even girls with fake tits. Directors that own their own product do as they wish in their movies at Red Light District. I love all girls, even if they have a boob job. All that is important to me is that they have a great attitude and enjoy sex. Nothing is going to change from me going over to Red Light District."

Eric Edwards Update

Nina Hartley writes on Nina.com: "I last worked with Eric in '89 or so. It was fine, and he was fun to work with. I know he's divorced, and the father of two sons, who must be college age by now (!)."

Artdog writes: "Last I heard, Eric was doing "bondage" films for "Totally Tasteless Films/Video." Maybe he's developed his kinky side just like you Nina. He's done more than a few of them from what I can tell. I've seen Sharon Kane's name on quite a few of the titles, so he's definitely worked with her in some of them. Who knew "Mr. Sensitive" had it in him. I couldn't have called that one in a million years."

Nina writes: "Well, the bondage movies could be a natural extension of Eric's sexuality, but I"d bet that it's just a gig to him, with nothing personal about it at all."

Talon writes: "I'm a fan of Summer Cummings and just purchased the dvd- Skye & Summer's Bondadge Party #2. It was made in April 1999 and Eric has a scene in it with Layla Jade and someone called Gina Adorabella."

Nina Hartley On TT Boy

Nina writes on Nina.com a fascinating tale about TT Boy. Here's an excerpt:

He said,"What about me?" so I turned my ass toward him, expecting a little playful tap in return. Instead, he coiled his body like the boxer he is, and hit my ass so hard it left a full hand print on my ass cheek, even though I was wearing a thin cotton robe. Mark Kernes took a photo of it.

I had never, and have not been since, hit with such force, violence and anger. I was beside myself with, not anger, but astonishment.

Yes, T.T. is the company owner who is in trouble with Cal-OSHA. I believe he'll fold his business.

Ira Levine Reviews Jenna Jameson's Book

Ira Levine aka Ernest Greene writes on Nina.com:

Earlier this week, an advance copy of Jenna Jameson's auto-bio "How to Make Love Like a Pornstar - A Cautionary Tale" landed on my desk and Nina and I have been dipping into it since. There's already a lot of out-of-context dish from it showing up on various porn-gossip sites, and I just wanted to put in a quick two-cents-worth on the subject, with more to come after we finish reading it.

First, and most important, it's quite good - well-written, perceptive, eye-opening and brutally honest. It's no Cinderella story, that's for sure. Jenna owns up to the kind of tough early life and harrowing early experiences in this business that would have put a less determined, less resilient person on the canvas for good. She has a lot of insight into how she overcame all obstacles, which she shares without boasting. Though she does offer straight-up opinons of the characters she's encountered along the way, nothing comes across as bitchy or vengeful. She's just as candid about herself as she is about those who may not be too pleased with her assessments of them.

Happily, she confirms what those of us who know her and have worked with her have observed again and again. It's not just ambition, or luck, or a hunger for stardom that's made her who she is. She really does love sex and does give it up for the camera for real when circumstances are right.

Far from the fluff some might have expected, the book is like Jenna herself - funny, sexy, smart and well-stocked with the grit it takes to succeed in a very tough world. It's also a bit disorderly and reflects the inner conflicts that contribute to her unique mixture of light-and-dark appeal.

It's always a relief to read a friend's book and not have to struggle to find something nice to say about it. Congratulations, JJ. You done good.

Nina and I finished reading Jenna's book on the way home from SF today. It's really quite good all the way through, and quite a harrowing read. It's amazing she's survived to tell the tale. And we appreciated the unvarnished, unsentimental way she tells it. First impression that Jenna's showed a lot of guts is amply confirmed, not only by the book, but by the life it describes. She lets no one off the hook, least of all herself, for the bad news this business can bring to even the most resilient and determined performer. Jenna isn't a cheerleader for porn, nor does she repent her participation in it or blame it for self-inflicted injuries. I'd say that's fair enough.

The truth is that the entertainment industry in all its forms is pretty rugged and exacts a price in return for the unique satisfactions it provides. Nobody can thrive here without accepting this truth. Jenna's story isn't so different from Marilyn Monroe's story, as the retro-glam cover slyly hints, but so far, Jenna's handled her success somewhat better. At our scale the pressures, destructive as they can be, are still mild compared to what confronts mainstream stars every day. You only have to look as far as the evening news to observe the impact.

No, Jenna doesn't discuss race, or a number of other hot-button political issues in porn. Her book is not about interracial or HIV or The First Amendment or even gonzo v. features. In fact, we were both a bit surprised by how personal it really is, devoting much of it's length to growing up wild in Vegas, her early experiences as a dancer and her tempestuous relationship with her family.

If you're looking for a broader perspective, well, you'll just have to wait for Nina's book. I hope not for too much longer.

Nina Hartley writes: "Regarding her comment that, if her daughter wanted to make porn that she "would lock her in the closet," I thought it was very direct. Jenna has never been an apologist for, or a booster of, the porn industry. If she could have found her way to happiness and marriage without porn, she likely would have. As it turned out, porn was her vehicle for success and she does't resent the business. However, her vision is clear. As much as some of us might wish it otherwise, porn ISN'T the best way to go for most people, and she's not wrong not to want it for her child (should there be one)."

Ira Levine writes: "The truth, painful as it is to some porn fans, is that porn is probably a good thing for society, in that it brings with it an optimistic message about sexuality, but mainly a bad thing for those who make it, in that the actual process of doing so largely negates that optimism."

KB On VH1's When Stars Get Scammed

KB: "Did you see my VH1 special today?"

When is it playing?

KB: "All day. I've seen it four times already. I look like a fat Jew. I'm in the first five minutes of the show talking about Cameron Diaz for a c--- hair of a second. It's a very good show. They showed some filthy people, some celebrity lookalikes and people who conned Leo [DiCaprio] and Toby [Maguire] and Cameron... Assistants who stole money from Kate Hudson.

"I'm probably the only guy they spoke to who was not a homosexual, which is good. You know how they always have an US magazine reporter and they're all screamingly gay. Instead there's just me sitting there in the Red Light District office with my One Night in Paris poster behind me.

"They cropped the whole video poster out of it so you don't even know what it is.

"I'm petrified. I'm having a physical done. I haven't had one in three years."

Is he going to look up your ---?

"Sure. That's what he did to me last time. He tells me to roll over in the fetal position and grab my ankles. Then he sticks his finger up my ass. He says, 'Now that you are over 30, we have to make sure. Your father had prostate cancer.'

"An hour after my physical, I'm sitting in a sushi restaurant. And who comes sitting down next to me? My doctor. I look at him and go, 'I certainly hope you washed your hand.'

Internet Porn Gets A New Banker

Seth Lubove writes for Forbes:

IBill acts as a middleman between 4,000 small, mostly porn, sites and the banks that are critical to any credit card transaction. In iBill's case, the bank was an obscure unit of First Data, a financial services giant that expects 2004 sales of $10 billion. But apparently fed up with the connection to the controversial business, First Data finally got out of porn on Sept. 15 when its contract with iBill expired, leaving iBill in the lurch (but still holding $14.5 million of iBill's deposits).

For now, at least. iBill has another bank lined up to process its $300 million or so in annual credit card purchases. But the name of the bank may raise eyebrows amongst the tee totaling, clean-cut Mormons of South Jordan, as well as the heathens on Wall Street: Merrick Bank, a $500 million-asset bank whose parent company, credit card-servicer CardWorks, is partly owned by a fund controlled by Lewis Ranieri, the bond trading legend immortalized by Michael Lewis' Liar's Poker who is now chairman of Computer Associates.

Seth writes: I kept looking for references to porn on the bank's website, but they must have overlooked it. Go figgure. Just stuff about money they give to "The Kids Cafe: and the Utah Food Bank:

Jonathon David From Korn has Deal With Vivid

Mahoney writes on GFY: "Jonathon from Korn just got a dvd deal through Vivid. I guess he is shooting his wife [former porn star Deven Davis of JKP] for the first dvd. All models will be over 21 and all Male Talent will be required to use condoms."

AVN story Jonathan and Deven on cover of Swag magazine

'Rape a suitable punishment for mini-skirts'

Bus conductors in Swaziland have vowed to assault and rape female passengers who wear mini-skirts, sparking outrage among women's groups in the conservative African kingdom.

The threat followed this week's arrest of two conductors and a bus driver who were charged with indecently assaulting an 18-year-old high school pupil.

The pupil was attacked at a bus rank in Manzini, Swaziland's commercial centre, by a group of men who shouted at her for wearing a miniskirt, cut it off and then gangraped her, witnesses told local media.

James DiGiorgio On Cal-OSHA

James DiGiorgio writes on AdultDVDTalk.com:

I'm guessing agencies like CAL-OSHA and the L.A. Dept. of Health have now--in their minds-- classified ALL non-condom porn as extreme porn. But even condom porn can be made extreme, even from a pornographer's POV.

Here's a simple example: Some guy is f-cking some chic in the ass. He's wearing a condom. Shooter calls for ATM. The guy pulls his condom-sheathed dick out of the girl's asshole and pops it into her waiting-and-willing mouth. Hmmmm... condom porn AND extreme porn AND a health risk. This is gonna encompass more than simply wearing condoms because the extreme content guys in this biz might agree to have their meatpuppets wear condoms if the law says they have to, but then they'll strive to make the condom-content as extreme as possible (cuz that's the ONLY way they can compete in the marketplace) and we'll be right back where we are right now.

And trust me on this one: everybody in porn valley ain't pickin' up their sh-t and moving to Prague, or Canada, or anywhere else. Many of them will become pimps, hookers, drug dealers or used car slaesman before doing that.

20 Rules For Masters Of Imagery

James DiGiorgio passes along these tips:

Rule #1: Love what you do, and do what you love.

Rule #2: Never forget rule number one.

Rule #3: Do not allow others' fears to become yours.

Rule #4: The price of your passion is the forfeiture of everything else that is considered a luxury.

Rule #5: Always maintain your integrity and ethics.

Rule #6: Do not mix your personal needs with your artistic desires.

Rule #7: When money is involved, it's a business so keep it legal and ethical.

Rule #8: Art and business are compatible.

Rule #9: Get the best tools needed to do the job efficiently. (If you are saying "I cannot afford it," see rule #4.)

Rule #10: Master the tools (needed) to get the job done.

Rule #11: Taking your craft to the next level always involves additional people; treat them well and they will treat you well. Get rid of the ones who don't. And stay away from poison people.

Rule #12: Learn from those who have blazed the trail before you.

Rule #13: Being the best, successful, competent, popular or highest paid are not always mutually inclusive.

Rule #14: Once the medium has been mastered, it's all about aesthetics.

Rule #15: Ego will always bring you down a notch.

Rule #16: If you value your work, your work will be valued. (Ever wonder why you are treated worse when you are literally giving away your services?)

Rule #17: Never justify your price.

Rule #18: When starting out, only keep company with supportive people. 90% fail from peer pressure alone.

ule #19: If you are married (or in a relationship), and cannot discuss your passion with your spouse (or significant other) without he or she getting upset, then you are almost doomed to fail.

Rule #20: Have fun and don't take yourself seriously. It all ends eventually.

Stagliano Debuts Stage Version of Fashionistas

Mike Ramone writes for AVN.com:

The non-explicit, but erotically charged, multi-media dance review, which bears the same name as the film, but which has an entirely different cast, debuted to about 100 non-paying attendees, largely friends of the cast and members of the Evil Angel family, at the new Krave Las Vegas nightclub on the Vegas strip.

Reflections On My Victoria Zdrok Interview

Lainie Speiser, publicist for Penthouse, writes:

I just read your interview, its hilarious. Split work early for Yom Kippur didn't have time to read it till now.

I read your segment on the orthodox woman having a sexual awakening, yes of course orgasm is mental, in fact I daresay ALL orgasm is mental, but still it is a fact jack, its easier for get a woman off orally, period, end of discussion.

And as a survivor of 9 years at Yeshiva of Hudson County in Union City, NJ I can tell you, no woman can be possibly sexual AND orthodox at the same time. The rules of orthodoxy don't allow it because it doesn't allow a woman to shine in any way shape or form whether it be showing her hair or singing in public.

Last week at my gym, I noticed an orthodox woman (I go to an all girls gym) watching me work out. I knew she was orthodox from her wig and the fact that she was wearing an oversize dowdy floor length skirt. Anyway, she came by to ask me about some arm exercises I was doing, I gave her some advice and she walked away.

I wanted to ask her why the hell she was wearing her wig and skirt in the company of other women, it is after all an women's only gym. I felt sorry for this woman, really, really sorry.

I spent Yom Kippur at my mothers house. I struck a deal with her -- that I'd go to evening services Friday night and closing evening services on Saturday night. While my father, mother and sister were at the day services on Saturday I smoked pot like a teenager, with my body halfway out of the window, I napped, and I read a great book by a great pulp fiction writer.

I didn't eat, I didn't drink, but you see Luke I contemplate my existance every single damn day, I scold myself for any bad behavior every single damn day, and I try to be the best person I can be every damn day. Hashem knows this very well about me, and I think he would've approved at how I spent Yom Kippur. And more than anything I made my family happy by being there.

Nister writes:

The more you suppress sexuality, the more sexual desire morphs to accomodate the suppression. Wrap a woman in a sheitl or a burka, then the wisp of hair that escapes becomes intensely erotic. Send the hemlines to the floor, and the glimpse of stocking is something shocking. You can even argue, using the "don't think of elephants test," that all this suppression only intensifies the erotic atmosphere.

Go to a typical Reform Friday night service, where women and men sit side by side and anything goes dress-wise, and you'd find more of a sexual buzz at the Motor Vehicles Bureau. Head to a hasidische shul and note all the sweating, the tight-packed bodies, the swaying and moaning, the peeks over the mehitza (in both directions). You can tell me Orthodoxy has channeled sexual energy, but they have far from eliminated it.

Mike Davis Seeks $10,000 From Rob Spallone - Good Luck!

Mike Davis emails:

Rob-To update you I closed the Lowdown bank account this week at your Bank Of America branch.I signed over all rights to the films to Guenther.IM walking away with 13,000.00 after all the company bills are paid.My cash loss is 24,500.00 and 6 months of my time with a zero return on investing with you in an adult company.You on the other hand invested no money and took close to 30,000.00 in cash tax free.I tried to sell the films with Guenther and due to the poor quality and production value they have I was unable to sell them not to mention not having the proper releases that you still hold.This loss and chain of events that took place is totally unacceptable to me.I would like you to pay me some of the money you sucked out of the company,that was my money in the first place.I think a small gesture of about 10,000.00 would be a fair offer.Please get back to me as soon as you can to settle this matter.

I called Rob Spallone in Palm Springs about this. Rob just laughed.

NYC Fights X-Rated Industry

Almost a decade after Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani proclaimed war on the sex-shop business in New York City, the industry is alive and well and, at least in Greenwich Village, growing. The former mayor's restrictions on the industry, passed in 1995 as a centerpiece of his quality-of-life campaign, proved toothless after numerous court challenges, and an intransigent industry has found a way to dodge nearly every regulation imposed upon it.

"I wouldn't want a porn shop in my neighborhood," Mr. Bloomberg said at the meeting, "and you shouldn't have one in yours."

"The Giuliani administration was much more zealous just over closing the places at any cost, right or wrong," said Herald Price Fahringer, a lawyer who represents many of the sex shops. "I think the Bloomberg administration is taking a much more responsible approach. They respect the law. Under Giuliani, at any one time we had pending in the courts two active cases in all five boroughs."

Hayley Rivers Update

Since walking away from the porn industry, I have been working 60 hour weeks in a non-porn-related entertainment industry job. I am learning a lot and enjoying life as much as ever.

This weekend I played a drama queen version of myself in a film titled, "Hookers, Inc." It is a hilarious independent that takes a keen-eyed look at the world I have recently left. I auditioned for the role over a month ago, and the action played out on Saturday at a mansion in the hills, an area I became familiar while shooting sex scenes. It will appear on the festival circuit in months to come.

I also have a bit part in a USC short film, "The Wedding Gift," that will be playing between 10:15am-11:46am on Sunday, October 10th at the AFFMA festival at the Arclight on Sunset Blvd. Nothing like a bit of phone sex and masturbation to get things going.

Jenna Jameson on the Cover of the Sunday Telegraph

Links on AdultDVDTalk

What I'm Reading

LF Fan Blog: Our Moral Leader has a new book coming out, his third in four months. Amazing! This is Luke's fourth book. Impressive! (Although he's 619 behind Dame Barbara.) It's called Yesterday's News Tomorrow. Witty! It's about Jewish journalism. Fascinating! Luke has given me a copy to review for my website. Thanks! He'll have to wait, however, as I'm no genius. Duh! In fact, I'm really quite stupid. Really! It will take a week or two (or three) for me to read the book and write a review. Sorry!

LF Fan Blog: To celebrate my good fortune, I decided, using Luke as my role model, to start hanging out with hookers, strippers, and elderly p___ stars. Big mistake. You see these women are very, um, materialistical, and it didn't take them long to go through all my funds, what with all the diamonds, furs, and trips to Capri -- not to mention booze and drugs -- I was buying. Then, much to my surprise and disappointment, all my girlfriends left me! Bummer.

Cal/OSHA lays down the law

David Aaron Clark writes on AdultDVDTalk.com:

This is where we find out who's in the game because they believe in it and are compelled to do it, and who's here out of cynicism, laziness, and incompetence at accomplishing anything else in other arenas.

There was a time when the people who were committed to producing pornography -- the Henri Pachards, the Anthony Spinellis, the Gerard Damianos, the John Staglianos, the John Leslies, the Joey Silveras -- were here for reasons besides it was the kool, hip thing to do. They paid vast social and legal prices to be here, but stayed and contributed and pushed the medium forward, just the same.

Visionaries like these have worked through changing social mores and legal restrictions to create work on different points of the "hardness" spectrum that has successfully entertained and satisified fans. The anything-goes except five-fingers in the same-hole mores the porn industry has subscribed to in the past three to five years represents a blip on the history of porn -- the pendulum will always swing one way or the other.

Those who are mindlessly panicking in the industry over the current challenges that face us are those who left their creativity and love of eroticism at the door -- if they ever had it to begin with. They are in love with nothing more than the almighty dollar -- and it seems to me that the Good Book said that love of money -- not pussy -- was the root of all evil. Those of us who believe in what we do are not going anywhere, and will find a way to entertain people, help you get your ya's ya's out, help you maybe understand yourselves a little better (one of the higher purposes of art, which is certainly what good pornography aspires on some level to be). Maybe not everybody will be satisified, but certainly everybody is not being served well by the current state of affairs, either.

I am not the only lifelong advocate and fan of cinematic porn who finds a trip to the typical bookstore of today to be soul-sickening and depressing. And I'm no prude -- it was just a year or so ago that Michael Stefano told me I'd be proud of the d/s roleplay that he's learned to incorporate into his work, reminescing to me about our days back at Extreme when I'd try to explain to him how there was more to sex than turning 'em over, pumping them, and turning them back over to desposit one's load on their wrinkled schnozzes.

However, watching the finer points of the sexual dynamic be blunted and appropriated by the cynical, slope-browed idiots who have jumped on what they only see as the brutality-for-bucks bandwagon since then has indeed made me feel almost like a prude, and certainly caused many to accuse me of being such. But hey, tough luck. I'm not here to found the next Spahn Ranch, or to afford a Hummer, or to "get back" at all the peeps that dissed me in high school. I'm here cuz I am attracted to and fascinated by female sexual beauty and the lessons our sex drives can teach us about our own natures, and I really don't give a flying double-anal about what the "kool kids" think or say about me.

Yes, there should be some kind of collective bargaining going on with OSHA. And yes, it's not happening because of the very reasons you state. But porn will always survive. For those who can't stand the heat, maybe it's time to get out of the kitchen, and leave the field to the true believers, and not the carpetbagging hacks.

Ira Levine writes:

Nina and I both got in here because we care passionately about sexuality and how it is portrayed. We've done our best to be true to our visions, and while we haven't always succeeded, we continue to do our best to bring the subversive message of mutual pleasure to an audience that desperately needs affirmative messages about sex. Though I would never seek to obstruct the competition of opposing ideas, I still regard the presentation of sex-positive images as an important and worthy mission.

Chico Wang writes:

The industry is going to have to adapt to the coming changes if it gets that far. You can never predict the future, but the bottoms eventually gotta fall with the explosion in pornography over the past 10 years. That is inevitable.

Ira Levine writes:

AIM has always strongly advocated the universal use of condoms for both vaginal and anal intercourse. This isn't some nudge-and-wink, half-hearted recommendation. Before we test any new talent for the first time, we sit them down in the office and make them watch Porn 101, a detailed orientation tape in which we make the strongest possible case for condom use and clearly acknwoledge the limits of testing. This tape, and the policy it supports, have made AIM very, very unpopular among certain producers and agents, as has our unwavering support for performers who choose to use condoms.

We supply condoms. We deliver condoms to sets. We educate talent in the use of condoms. We counsel them individually to use condoms. We relentlessly advocate universal condom use in every single public forum where we make any kind of presentation. We have been pushing universal condom use since Day One and are about to issue a new, very specific, set of protection precautions which will stress, once again, the importance of condom use in all scenes involving anal or vaginal intercourse. I don't know how much more strongly we can make this point, but we will continue to harp on it for as long as it takes.

Before you accuse us of accepting "the lowest common denominator" where performer safety is concerned, you might take a moment of your valuable time to investigate our actual policy on the subject. We've been taking heat for pushing condoms for seven years, not only from producers and agents, but from many performers as well, who don't like having their denial in this matter challenged. We intend to continue our pro-condom education efforts, regardless of the outcome of the current controversy, and we'll be needing to do so, whatever official regulations are put in place, and here' s why:

Despite our best intentions, one thing we cannot do is go to sets, hold performers down and put condoms on them. If, in response to whatever pressures or inducements producers might employ, performers will not take the responsibility of protecting themselves, neither AIM nor Cal-OHSA can effectively make them do so.

And that is the root of our opposition to any scheme of mandatory condom use forced on this industry from the outside. There are 200 sex scenes (more or less) shot in LA every day. There is no way that even a tiny percentage of those scenes could be monitored by AIM or any government agency. By creating a rule that cannot be enforced, Cal-OHSA invites unscrupulous producers to take advantage of a perceived market opportuninty by making non-condom porn "off the books." That footage will go up in value, as things do if they becomes rarer, and there is no practical way to prevent greedy and unprincipled shooters from trying to exploit that edge.

The result of a mandatory-condom policy would likely be compliance by the larger, more mainstream companies, many of whom are already headed that way, and wholesale defiance from everybody else. Fewer condom scenes would be shot under a mandatory approach than under a performer-option strategy, precisely because of the market-premium created by any prohibition. By now, the war on drugs should have taught us all this lesson, but clearly it has not.

There is an issue of class discrimination built into a mandatrory-condom approach. The high-end performers who work for the cable-oriented, high-end companies will be protected. The newer, more vulnerable performers will be under even greater pressure to engage in high-risk behavior. Such a two-track system will work to the dangerous disadvantage of the most susceptible players in the industry.

You can claim, if you like, that adequate enforcement will mitigate this problem, but if you do, you once again betray your misapprehension of porn culture, where most people's best judgment is soluable in money.

The only effective alternative is education and consciousness-raising among the players themselves. Is it fair that this economically weaker group should have to take up the main burden of protecting their own safety, as opposed to having the industry or the government do it for them? No. Is any workable alternative ever likely to arise? No. In porn, worker safety has always been and will eternally remain a matter of individual responsibility, which is what AIM stresses in our attempts to educate performers concerning the importance of their own choices.

What I hear, underneath all the rhetoric about who should rightly be held accountable in this situation, is an understandable by wholly unrealistic desire for the industry or the state to act in loco parentis - making sure the kids put on their rubbers before they go out in the rain. Anyone who depends on that strategy is going to get wet.

One more time, neither producers nor the state have a commanding interest in protecting the health of performers, and neither has that as its primary agenda. The producers want to make the most commercial products they can. The state wants to use its regulatory authority to drive porn underground, out of California or out of business.

Only performers can make condoms standard operating procedure by insisting on them, and being prepared to lose work over it. That's why AIM focuses its efforts on them. They are the ones who have the most to lose and the only real power to change the situation.

I hope this clears up continuing misunderstandings about our intentions, but since a certain group of people in this community bear lasting personal grudges against us individually, I have no doubt that such misunderstandings will be perpetuated ad nauseum.

Interestingly, some of those grudge-holders are the very producers with whom we are accused of colluding.

Funny, that.

If AIM had chosen to take a confrontational, all-condoms-no-compromise stance at the beginning, we would never have gotten producers and performers to agree on testing standards. By now, there would have been a massive HIV outbreak in the industry that would have ended many lives and caused the collapse of the whole business.

What nobody seems to have noticed in the sudden flush of missionary zeal that invariably accompanies each new disease scare is that HIV remains extremely rare in the porn community. Four transmissions in seven years is not insignificant, but it is amazingly low compared with similar demographics of sexually active young people in LA County. This is entirely attributable to the routine acceptance of monthly PCR-DNA testing and reporting, protocols that would be endangered by anti-discrimination laws forbidding the requirement of HIV testing as a condition of employement that are already on the books here in California.

Many here seem to be arguing that the existing approach is reckless and imprudent. I maintain that any abrupt change in the current protocols would most probably elevate the level of risk rather than lower it. That prospect, and not any concern for producers' profits or some misguided idea of personal liberty, makes me extremely leary of what would amount to a science project carried on by ignorant outsiders at the jeopardy of the health of the entire community.

There is nothing utopian in my contention that the primary responsibility for the protection of performers' health will always, ultimately lie with the performers themselves. I regard this as an unfortunate reality.

I would prefer for all producers to adopt universal condom use tomorrow. However, they won't, no matter what coercive use of state power is deployed to try and make them do so. As stated earlier, the only group with the power to create real change in on-set practices in porn is the group with the greatest vested interest in doing so - performers themselves.

If the rise in condom use has been slow - and it has been to a disgraceful degree - the unwillingness of performers to demand safer working conditions for themselves, rather than pass up a paid day, has much to do with the seemingly intractible nature of the status quo.

It's easier to blame the evil, greedy pimps and producers (for whom I make no defense whatsoever) than to face the fact that labor reform invariably originates from the labor side, rather than from the altruism of employers or the paternalistic intervention of politically-motivated bureaurcrats. And if you really think the state couldn't do worse than the industry has done on its own, you just wait and see what happens if those Cal-OHSA regs go into effect and the California Supreme Court strikes down the mandatory testing provisions, which directly contravene laws they've already upheld. That's when the body-count really will start to rise.

The law that needs to be considered most carefully in this situation is the Law of Unintended Consequences. It could apply itself here big-time. Oh, BTW, there is no law against the portrayal of forced sex in porn per se. There is some case law under which depictions of forced sex have been ruled obscene in certain venues, but there exists no statutory ban on such content. That's not the way obscenity laws are written. Give Miller v. California a read sometime. You might find it educational. There are limits to what can be done by passing a law.

Ibill - Online Billing was just the beginning

Uchase writes on GFY: What else are they doing?

Rdun404 writes: Door to door billing coming soon?

Andre writes: Parties?

UChase writes: like tupperware parties?

iBill tornado and the winds have dropped

Steve_t_ok writes on GFY:

I'm currently attempting to integrate iBill Processing Plus Subscriptions into our new site.

iBill is closed until tuesday because of hurricane Jane, or perhaps hurricaine Court Case. Whichever it is, they're hiding in basements whilst the iBill pet monkey bounces on the big red buttons.

Has anyone here ever attempted to integrate their pay-site into iBill's system? Well let me tell you, it's a bloddy nightmare. The majority of technical support - if you manage to bypass customer and client support - have little idea how their own systems work or even if certain functionality exists. I've been on the phone to iBill in the US for 1 whole week, and out of their entire staff, I've found 1 person, yes 1, that is able to confidently provide answers to technical questions, which they should know about.

Let me give you an example...

Whilst adding Processing Plus Gateway functionality I wondered if CVV2 is an option and if it's required. Then I rang iBill, quoted my account information and asked the following questions, which are both direct and simple:

1) Does Processing Plus Gateway support CVV2?
2) If so, what variable name do I need to post to iBill transaction processing and is this variable mandatory.

The technical rep put me on hold to consult his fellow workers. He then returned after 2 minutes and said...

Rep: "I'm sorry sir we are unable to answer that question"
Me: "Why?"
Rep: "Because we don't have that information"
Me: "OK, where can I find that information?"
Rep: "If you go to iBill.com, you'll find setup instructions there"
Me: "I've been to iBill.com. The information is outdated, poorly written and mentions nothing about Processing Plus Gateway CVV2 variables."
Rep: "Err, ok then sir, please email support@ibill.com for an answer"
Me: "Is there anyone there who can answer this question?"
Rep: "No"
Me: "If I email support then it'll take 48 hours to respond and last time it took them 3 days to inform me they didn't know the answer. That's why I'm ringing technical support now. Where does my email get routed to anyway?"
Rep: "Well sir, it'll be sent to technical support and given to the person who is attending your case"
Me: "Who is that person and can I speak to them now?"
Rep: "That would be me sir and you are. Is there anything else I can assist you with today?"
Me: "OK, let me get this straight. I've just asked you a technical question regarding you're own system, which you're unable to answer. Now, you want me to hang up this phone, email you the same question and wait for your response. Also, you're telling me that not 1 of the thousand+ members of staff can answer this question at this point in time.";

This query has now be given to the escalations department, whrere the majority of staff are trainees who find english difficult, let alone direct technical questions in english.

Don't get me wrong, the iBill platform is fantasic. But, the online documentation doesn't help webmasters in the slightest.

Doe's anyone know a free PHP script resource for iBill membership integration. I just need to know what variable and options they provide.

Fetch me a jug of water, my blood is boiling.

Hannah Harper Leaves LA Direct Models

Gene Ross writes on Adultfyi.com: "Hannah Harper is now out of the day-to-day running of L.A. Direct Models. Mike Sullivan and Ben English are handling the whole show with Harper focusing on her Sin City career. And, yes, Harper and English have split. At least that's the impression she gave in Tampa."

Gene Ross Weighs In On Rosenblatt Suit Against AVN

Gene Ross writes on Adultfyi.com:

I told some of the AVN story when I left it to go to Extreme Associates but half the adult industry didn't believe what I had to say and the other half silently nodded and winked but never had the guts to lend any vocal or moral support. I know- I saw it all - the first trade show I attended in Vegas in an Extreme Associates capacity, I got the thumbs up, the handshakes, the we know what you're talking about telling nods. But I didn't see any courage, and, frankly, I wasn't asking for it from anyone but myself.

It takes a little bit of guts, you know, to walk away from a good paying job. A great paying job, but what good is it when you spend your days with your twisted stomach making balloon dolls.

I read Rosenblatt's suit and can tell you I've witnessed a lot of what she has to say first hand. Remember, I was there almost from the very beginning, long before Jennifer Rosenblatt came aboard, in the days when another Rosenblatt- Barry- was the first business partner then got greased conveniently out of the equation so that the publisher could cut his printer in to keep AVN afloat.

Reaction To Rosenblatt's Suit Against AVN

A Porn Observer writes:

Reading Jennifer's suit was the nicest thing I've come across in a long time; I kind of wish it wasn't so many pages as I was going to print it out, frame it and hang it over the fireplace.

She missed a bet though...I think she could have made it a class action suit.

Paul Fishbein is an impotent businessman who allowed a misogynistic pig to dictate AVN policies for years and I hope Jennifer destroys the whole damn lot of them. They're getting no less than they deserve.

Here's a copy of Jennifer Rosenblatt's lawsuit against Paul Fishbein and Darren Roberts personally and AVN the corporation

According to a report I got from an industry player, Fishbein has been on a rampage to take away the clients of Jennifer Rosenblatt's husband Darren Blatt, the promoter of the Players Ball. Darren does not have anything to do with Jennifer's lawsuit.

According to my information, Fishbein does not even know what Darren does for a living, let alone has tried to hurt his business.

This could get ugly.

According to what I know, In 22 years of business, AVN has not been sued before (aside from a small thing ten years ago by somebody who was receiving the magazine and didn't want it).

Several females who've worked at AVN in the past five years have considered the managing editors - first Bryn Pryor and later Mike Ramone (both deeply steeped in the bondage underworld) - to be misogynistic. Bryn had a hot temper. (He is now in a relationship with Kylie Ireland.)

Renee Johnson considered a harassment suit against the former AVN managing editor Bryn Pryor but the matter was handled in house. Bryn had to attend anger management classes. Renee received a company car and a cushy job running the trade shows.

Juliet Lowry was the head of the AVN internet division. She's been heard making similar complaints to Jenn's about AVN, but that is weird because she remains friends with Paul Fishbein.

There are a lot of ex-AVN employees who are rooting for Jennifer.

I expect AVN will have to make a statement about Jennifer's lawsuit. Jenn and AVN publisher Paul Fishbein were platonic friends for years.

I expect that AVN will defend itself from Jenn's lawsuit by arguing that she was fired for just cause. That she wasn't doing a good job. That people were complaining. That employees were threatening to quit. AVN will have to name names and provide specificity to these allegations to be persuasive. Who complained? Who threatened to quit? How was Jenn's work incompetent?