Joe (a journalist, not law enforcement) says that kink.com is under investigation. "The two most controversial issues are child pornography and bondage. The Justice Department has made it their agenda to go after those kinds of smut peddlers."
I also expect the extreme gonzo companies such as Anabolic/Diabolic to get popped on federal obscenity charges within the next 18 months.
I expect a steady stream of obscenity indictments (one every few months) for the remainder of the Bush presidency.
Someguy posts on XPT:
It isn’t even about getting a conviction that the government cares about. The point is to either scare companies away for fear of prosecution because legal bills can be a lot or to try and bleed these companies dry through tons of litigation. I don’t know if anyone followed it at the time(or even knew about it) but insex.com used to be this very hard bondage site run out of New York. They had to shut down cause of the heat they were getting from the government. They knew a lawsuit would bankrupt them through legal fees so they had to close their doors and just come back as a much softer bdsm site.
I don’t know the exact in and outs of it but apparently the government is also pretty good at scaring credit card processors away from certain areas of business as well. That’s another problem insex had.
I hope that kink.com is as well off financially as I think they might be and has the resources to fight this. They better not have spent all that cash on buying that building in San Fran.
I’ve wondered about this but haven’t gotten any real answers. It seems to me that in the last two years there has been a proliferation of fairly high profile sites with simultaneous bondage and sex. Kink’s own sexandsubmission.com being one of them.
My limited understanding has been that the No Sex with your Bondage Rule was implicit in various rulings and regulations, but not explicitly ruled out. (Of course that can change, although I would hope congress could find better things to do like, oh, health care or that pesky business in the Middle East.)
My guess has been that the downward trend in the overall adult industry has put pressure on fetish/bondage providers to expand into more areas. If this is true — and what do I know, not only am I not a lawyer, I have never played one on TV — then a federal lawsuit would at least end up clarifying matters one way or another.
This is a strange article. The headline says “Kink.com Is Under Federal Investigation For Obscenity”, but the text doesn’t really say anything about Kink.com. Is Kink.com under investigation, or is “Joe” just speculating that the Justice Dept wants to investigate bondage sites? Is there a link I am missing to another article that talks about Kink being investigated?
This is a ridiculous article with no substantiation. Anyone can say anything. It doesn’t make it true.
This anonymous Internet source cites no authority other than some ‘journalist’ named Joe. Not the most credible statement, to be sure.
The DOJ does not publicize their investigations to targets or journalists before formal action occurs. They don’t want their targets to start destroying evidence or stashing money for their defense. The first thing that usually happens is the execution of a search warrant.
I know people over there and I know the first they heard of this, was this gossip column. It is nice to know you can make up any shit you want and post it as “news”