DEKALB COUNTY, Georgia—The Brookhaven city fathers must have thought it would be a walk in the park when they decided to set aside a longstanding agreement DeKalb County had with the Pink Pony Strip Club and enact new laws to keep adult businesses out of the municipality that also swept up the Pink Pony along with everyone else. They thought wrong.
Anti-porner lawyer Scott Bergthold has been advising the city, which means the laws they’ve been considering will look a lot like hundreds, if not thousands, of other local ordinances Bergthold has helped towns throughout the country enact in a zealous bid to drive adult-oriented businesses out of business.
Luckily for the adult clubs, smoke shops and book stores, there are attorneys throughout the nation who have their back, and one of the most respected in these sorts of cases is Georgia-based Alan Begner, who knows Bergthold well.
According to WSBTV.com, the Pink Pony and a place next door to it called the Stardust Smoke Shop have been targeted by Brookhaven for closure. “The Pink Pony strip club stands to lose its liquor license Jan. 1,” reported the station. “Its lawyers said they will file a lawsuit this week to force Brookhaven to honor a longstanding agreement the club had with DeKalb County that allows it to continue to serve alcohol even though its entertainers dance nude.”
The case against the smoke shop is less transparent, according to owner Michael Morrison, who said he has been told that city leaders have “already met behind closed doors to consider ways to shut him down."
“Morrison said his business sells general merchandise and smoke-related items along with some adult sex items,” reported WSBTV.com. “He insists the store's products meet the ratio set by city code to not be considered an adult entertainment store.”
He also promised to fight to keep his 2-year-old business open, even if it means taking it to the Supreme Court.
It’s not like the city has not been warned that if it tries to undo previous agreements there will be litigious hell to pay. In December of last year, as the city was still mulling its options, another Pink Pony lawyer, Aubrey Villines, suggested that the city “does not need to craft legislation that will lead to a war.”
Back then, Bergthold, as he has done countless times before, tried to get the city “to tackle so-called ‘secondary effects’ like prostitution, drug trafficking and crime.”
Villines reacted viscerally. "Balderdash,” he told the local TV news station. “I think it's difficult to prove, and I don't think we have a negative secondary impact on DeKalb County. I think we have a positive.
"There's no reason why they can't look at DeKalb, basically adopt what DeKalb has done, and we continue in business without anyone else coming in," he added.
April 23, Begner took it one step further and effectively informed the Brookhaven city council that if they decide to continue down the path of forced closure, they will only have themselves to blame when the legal bills start piling up.
Arguing once again that the city’s new ordinance banning nude dancing and the sale of alcohol can only apply to new businessess, Begner told the council, “You don’t have any citizens that I can see that really care about whether the Pink Pony is put out of business. It’s in extreme south Brookhaven. It’s off a main street. It’s not near any sensitive uses.
“I urge you as a city council to grandfather us in,” he said, adding almost as an afterthought, “The citizens will appreciate that you don’t spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to defend a lawsuit that is almost ready to file and the possibility of millions of dollars of damages that would occur if you move to destroy our business and fail.”
Sounds like good advice if anyone is able to hear it.
