PITTSBURGH – A U.S. District Judge has denied motions to dismiss the federal obscenity charges against author and webmistress, Karen Fletcher. Fletcher was indicted last year on six counts of transmission of obscene matter, based on short stories she posted online.
Fletcher's ‘Red Rose’ website, which had 29 subscribers, charged $10 per month for customers to read fantasies consisting of “explicit stories about adults having sex with children,” according to the FBI's search warrant which was executed in August of 2005. At that time, the government seized Fletcher's computer containing the online stories, to which 40 writers allegedly contributed.
Jerome Mooney, one of Fletcher's attorneys, told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette his client is a "poor, damaged woman" who writes to excise her torment. Mooney set out a number of arguments for dismissing the case, all of which were denied by U.S. District Judge Joy Flowers Conti.
Fletcher's is the first federal obscenity case in decades involving only writings. Mooney’s key argument was that mere words alone cannot be obscene. “Textual material is different than other kinds of visual depictions,” he said. “Text is as close to the process of thought as we can get. The First Amendment doesn't mean much if one is only allowed to write down their own thoughts for their own perusal.”
First Amendment attorney Jeffrey Douglas agrees. He told AVN that the federal government has been scared of prosecuting obscenity cases involving only text for decades, and for good reason. “Going all the way back to thirties,” said Douglas, “when they decided to try and prosecute and ban James Joyce’s Ulysses. They weren’t really sure what the hell they were reading with the book, but they were pretty sure that he was talking about sex. This turned into an international humiliation [for the U.S.]. It’s a novel that won Joyce the Nobel Prize, and it’s one of the greatest and most influential books of the century…and to think that this great work was indicative of the kind of material the federal government wanted banned.”
Mooney added that Fletcher protected children from unknowingly viewing her stories by requiring the minimal charge, paid by credit card.
Judge Conti tried to draw a distinction between writing privately for ones self, and selling ones literature online.
“The courts have been incredibly consistent with saying that the commercial component or free speech is irrelevant,” explained Douglas. “So to tell people that they can say anything they want, but they just can’t sell it, is basically as good as banning free speech.”
Mooney also took issue with the six separate counts against Fletcher — one for each of the individual stories she posted online. According to the Post-Gazette, Mooney submitted that under the 1973 standard set by the U.S. Supreme Court in Miller v. California, the material in question must be taken as a whole. And if it is, he said, it would not be considered obscene under contemporary community standards.
Fletcher has been prohibited from posting any more stories online, even though there has been no verdict in the case.
“It has a chilling effect,” Mooney told the Post-Gazette. “We try very hard to keep speech free.”
“To prosecute a pure idea, which is what is basically happening in the Red Rose case, shows a basic inconsistency with the nature of ordered liberty and the nature of limited government,” explained Douglas. “In the marketplace of ideas, the public should be able to decide what is worthy and what is not. If an idea is stupid and makes no sense…people should be able to throw it out. The notion of liberty implies that people should be able to do, say and think whatever they want, without doing physical harm to other people.”
