ATLANTA, Ga.—Pretty much everyone who's followed the travails of adult businesses in Georgia knows the name Scott Bergthold. He's the Chattanooga, Tenn.-based religio-conservative attorney who's previously been hired by Sandy Springs and other local communities to get rid of adult businesses—stores, nightclubs, whatever—by writing anti-adult ordinances for the cities and then getting hired to enforce them through legal actions. (AVN readers will also remember that it was Bergthold that helped get the eXXXotica Expo kicked out of Dallas.)
But it seems that Bergthold's latest target is Tokyo Valentino, formerly known as Inserection, an adult "superstore" on Cheshire Bridge Road reputed to be friendly and open to the city's LGBTQ community—and even though the city of Atlanta has a pretty good record regarding its protections and treatment of LGBTQ residents, employees and even visitors, for some reason it saw fit to hire Bergthold to continue its so-far-unsuccessful attempts to shut the store down.
In fact, Atlanta has been trying to get rid of Tokyo Valentino/Inserection for more than 20 years—ever since Inserection first opened in 1998, and that very day, the city changed its zoning ordinance to require that adult businesses be 500 feet from residences and other "sensitive uses"—and it was one year later that a Fulton County Superior Court judge ruled that the city must nevertheless give the store an operating permit, since it opened before the revised ordinance went into effect.
But in 2014, Inserection expanded its floor space and changed its name to Tokyo Valentino—and in seeking a new operating permit for the new name and space, the city decided that the store's arcade booths and private "play rooms" in the basement were in violation of the city's building code and had to be removed. That started another round of litigation that's continued for nearly five years and has gone all the way to the Eleventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, where Bergthold appeared today to press the city's attempt to shutter the business.
The store was defended by attorney Daniel Aaronson, who, according to an article on the Courthouse News website, told the three-judge panel that the arcades and play rooms "constitute a legal nonconforming use of the property."
Senior U.S. Circuit Judge Richard Tallman, who usually sits on the Ninth Circuit bench, asked "whether the ability to show explicit videos inside the basement video booths was granted by the business license under the old version of the ordinance."
"Yes and no," Aaronson replied, explaining that while the store should have been ordered to close the mini theater after the 1998 district court ruling, it was "still a legal nonconforming use to sell adult novelties and videos."
Bergthold, of course, disputed that claim, saying, "They operated an illegal business from the beginning; therefore they can’t argue lawful nonconforming use. They opened in February 1998 and always did illegal things. ... They did not commence lawfully—it was unlawful from the beginning. [They] never established a lawful nonconforming use from the day they commenced using the property."
It is not known when the Eleventh Circuit panel will deliver its decision in the case.
And this isn't the first time Tokyo Valentino's owner, Michael Morrison, has clashed with Bergthold. Shortly after Morrison opened a Tokyo Valentino location on Pleasant Hill Road in Gwinnett County, Ga., in June 2015, the county accused the store of violating its anti-adult ordinance—and sure enough, Bergthold was one of the attorneys representing the county in that fight as well.
One organization that's been following the Atlanta case for several years is Project Q, an Atlanta-based website and magazine that covers the city's LGBTQ scene—and earlier this week, it published an "exposé" of Bergthold, noting that "Bergthold has been affiliated with anti-LGBTQ forces his entire career," adding that he graduated from Pat Robertson's Regent University School of Law, became president of the Community Defense Council, which published a book of boilerplate anti-adult ordinances, and is allied with the Alliance Defending Freedom, the conservative Christian law group, which "gave over $213,000 in grants to Bergthold’s law office between 2010 and 2016."
Bergthold is the author of several anti-adult ordinances for cities surrounding the Atlanta area, including Brookhaven, Doraville and Sandy Springs, and those cities have paid him hundreds of thousands of dollars to defend those ordinances. And that's on top of the more than $750,000 he got from Dallas defending its anti-eXXXotica ordinance.
Just how far Bergthold and the city will get in trying to close down Atlanta's Tokyo Valentino location remains to be seen, but sadly, Bergthold has a pretty good track record in these types of cases—and he's got the bank account to prove it.
