British Documentary About Sex.com Scandal

7/24/04

I've just watched a one-hour documentary about the Gary Kremen - Stephen Michael Cohen struggle over the domain name sex.com made by the British television production company called Making Time for UK's Channel 5 network.

A young Gary Kremen (rightful owner of sex.com) with his parents Gary Kremen Luke Gary Jones, Orange County Sheriff's Department Sharon Boydston, an ex-wife of Cohen Kevin Blatt, Jonathan Silverstein Tom Hymes of AVN Online Luke Kremen Lawyer Jim Wagstaffe Ron Levi

There's enough Jews in the special to make a minyan: Stephen Michael Cohen, Gary Kremen, Luke, Kevin Blatt, Jonathan Silverstein, Ron Levi, Seth Warshavsky.

I remember producer Toby Dye and his cameraman stopping by my hovel December 10. I find Brits particularly charming and funny.

This tabloid is particularly tabloid and British in tone. Those wild and crazy Americans. About a third of the screen time is taken up by softcore footage of beautiful naked young women.

There's not much new ground that's broken here and there's one segment devoted to a reconstruction of a shoot-out in Mexico that probably never happened.

"I had the most valuable domain name on the Internet," says Gary at the beginning, sitting on the bed of a pickup truck next to a shack. "I should've made hundreds of millions of dollars. And this is what I ended up with."

He spreads his arms wide.

"It was impossible not to make money," says Tom Hymes about the early days of the porn Web (1996-97), "no matter how stupid and inept you were."

"It was a battle for a multi-million dollar business," intones the narrator, "that would end with a high-noon shootout in Mexico."

Baloney. This shootout never happened. It just makes for a dramatic climax.

Gary Kremen was born in 1960s Chicago to respectable middle-class Jewish parents. "His love was for the hard-drive, not the hardcore. In May 1994, he acquired sex.com (along with jobs.com, date.com, autos.com, housing.com, property.com), the most valuable domain name on the Web."

"Cohen is a criminal genius," says Gary.

"Cohen's a con man, a crook," says Luke. "He's always been a crook. He'll probably always be a crook. It's breathtaking when you encounter someone who can lie with such audacity."

"He has the lying skills unique to conmen," says Gary Kremen's lawyer Jim Wagstaffe.

"He's a megalomaniac and a sociopath," says Kremen's PI.

"Never any guilt," says Sharon Boydston, one of Cohen's five ex-wives. They married in 1987.

In 1987, Cohen started up a swing club in north Orange County (called The Club) and a BBS (Bulletin Board Service, a precursor to the WWW) The French Connection.

"He started it in my daughter's bedroom," says Sharon. "He would sit there and type in different names and be different people. Always women. He was trying to attract men customers.

"When I was married to him, I asked him, why does everything you do have to do with sex? He said, because sex sells.

"I'm sitting at home wondering what could be taking this man's time so much. Finally I find out he's been swinging.

"He wanted to be Hugh Hefner. When the guys arrested him at his swing club, they had to laugh because he came out in his robe and his pipe and he was trying to be the Hugh Hefner of swinging. He just made them roar with laughter."

Cohen then moved on to new scams. He impersonated a lawyer in an elaborate loan fraud. He got four years in federal prison.

"While he was in prison," says Luke, "he thought, I'm going to figure out how I can avoid coming back here and how I can make a lot of money and be a big success and sleep with a lot of beautiful women. This is a guy who's devoted himself to banging babes."

"In the old days," says Kevin Blatt, "you had to go to jack shacks, where truck drivers and the guys with no teeth would pay five dollars for five minutes to whack off in a booth. Sometimes they would share a movie with some derelict. Now, with the advent of the Internet, you're sitting in the privacy of your own home with your pants around your ankles and there's nobody to say, hey, what are you doing? This is what's brilliant about the Internet. You turn off the lights. You turn on your computer. You pull your pants down. It's a great formula."

"It took three years in federal prison," says the narrator, "for Stephen Michael Cohen to hatch the greatest Internet scam of all time."

"I knew that when he when he went into federal prison," says Sharon, "God help us, because he was going to pick the minds of everybody there. If there was anybody he could learn something from, he would learn it."

Kieren McCarthy, journalist: "Just months after getting out of prison, Cohen managed to get his hands on the world's most valuable domain name. He was turning that into a multi-million pound business right under the nose of Gary Kremen, who did not even know it had been stolen."

Kremen lawyer Charles Carreon: "A friend called him up and said, I thought you owned sex.com. You ought to check the Whois registration record, because it is registered to Sporting Houses."

Gary: "I'd never dealt with any criminals or confidence men. I didn't expect any bad play. I expected the company made a mistake."

To get sex.com, Stephen Michael Cohen wrote a letter from a third party to another third party, giving Networld Solutions permission to transfer the domain name to Cohen. There were over 20 typos in the letters. The word "Ads" was misspelled in the letterhead as "Ad's."

The letter says the reason Cohen is entitled to this name is that he has been using "sex.com" on his BBS since 1979. Cohen told me this several times. Problem -- the dot com nomenclature did not begin until 1984. Network Solutions should have known that.

A simple phone call to Gary Kremen would've revealed that letter as a phony.

"He [Cohen] was an IQ of a genius," says Sharon, "yet the insecurities of not being able to spell were profound for him."

But Cohen was a genius on the telephone, and that's how he persuaded Network Solutions to give him the domain name.

"Stephen Michael Cohen used sex.com as a banner farm," says Luke. "He just plastered it with banner ads for other hardcore porn paysites. He didn't have any pretense to doing anything but slutty dirty lowdown site that made tens of millions of dollars."

The documentary claims that Cohen had become one of the top three Internet porn kings along with Seth Warshavsky of Clublove.com and Ron Levi.

That is nonsense. Neither Cohen nor Warshavsky were ever in the top ten of the industry. Yishai Habari, Serge Birbrair, the folks running Crescent, John Bennett, Joseph Elkind, Richard and Robert Botto were all bigger players than Cohen or Warshavsky would ever be.

"Seth Warshavsky had so many scams," says Luke, "it was hard to keep track of them. Once he would get people's credit card numbers, good night. He'd charge those things up the yazoo. He'd claim to have live cam girl feeds when he was just looping old feeds."

It's funny to see Jonathan Silverstein and Kevin Blatt sitting together on a railing and Kevin looking around and scratching himself while Jonathan is talking. KB wears a white sweat suit and sunglasses and a fu manchu style beard and moustache. JStyles has a piercing in his eyebrow and an earring.

There's a bottle of Jack Daniels off camera. KB and JStyle started drinking halfway through the interview.

Cohen was charging $50,000 a month for each tiny banner ad. Cohen used his money to keep Kremen's lawyers at bay.

Gary: "Stephen Michael Cohen did not have many friends in the industry. You could count them on one hand. You could count his enemies on 50 hands."

Jonathan: "Cohen was a litigious prick. He was suing everybody who had 'sex' in their domain."

Kieren McCarthy, journalist: "In 1998, Seth Warshavsky and Ron Levi gave Gary $150,000 for his legal fight against Cohen."

I believe this number is wildly exaggereated. Warshavsky didn't give Gary anything. Ron gave him somewhere between $10,000 to $50,000 (according to various reports).

Jim Wagstaffe: "Stephen Cohen was beating Gary in the litigation game by using the very money he stole from Gary."

In July 2000, Cohen was forced to do a deposition.

"We had to cross a gulf in the law," says lawyer Charles Carreon. "At that time, there was no law about domain names."

"We had to convince the judge," says Wagstaffe, "that this was more than two guys fighting over an adult domain name."

Kieren: "To most people in the courtroom, it was just a sleazy affair between two sex-obsessed pornographers."

Cohen was forced to produce his bank records. He had his bank fax them to a kinkos where Kremen's lawyer were supposed to pick them up. But Gary impersonated one of Kremen's lawyers and took out the stuff he didn't want revealed. Unfortunately for Cohen, a Kinkos security camera captured him in the act.

"When we caught him on tape stealing evidence," says Gary, "the judge became livid."

In March 2001, Gary returned to San Francisco to launch his version of the Web site.

"Kim Wilde is our resident porn star," says Gary. "Every company in the industry should have a resident porn star."

Does that mean everyone in the company gets to f--- her?

"Gary's girlfriends and the women around him," says a Kremen employee, "he needs intellectuals around him."

Cut to pictures of Wilde getting nasty to Gary's approval. He spanks her.

"Gary views Stephen Cohen as a criminal mastermind. He respects Mr. Cohen, which I don't understand."

"I'm not into pornography," says Gary. "All I do is have a dictionary up there.

"When Cohen had sex.com, it was much more valuable than when I got it."

At Kremen's party, a guy puts his arm around Gary and says to the camera, "It's all about rock n' roll, call girls, and having a good time."

"I wouldn't go that far," says Gary, slipping out of his grasp and away from the camera.

"He's not in the adult online industry," says Silverstein, "in his mind. He believes he's in the search engine business."

Gary's PI: "Cohen has a narcissistic personality. He's a megalomaniac and a sociopath. He only cares about himself. He has a superiority complex. He thinks he's smarter than everyone else. I think he thinks he's untouchable and that will be his fatal flaw."

Gary: "He's defeated such people as five ex-wives, many gambling casinos, fraud, child support..."