The year 2019 was not an altogether encouraging one for the future of online freedom—especially the freedom to create and post adult content. A worldwide movement to ban or restrict online porn gained momentum, while efforts to revive net neutrality rules in the United States sputtered.
At the same time, there were signs of hope. The rights of sex workers, for the first time, became a legitimate topic of discussion in a presidential campaign, a long-running attempt to block porn sites in the United Kingdom fell flat, and a notorious “porn troll” was sent to prison.
THE WORLD DECLARES WAR — ON PORN
Countries around the world this year stepped up their efforts to ban, or place severe restrictions on, pornography online, making 2019 an ominous year in the growing global backlash against the adult industry. But in a perhaps hopeful development for the business, the international war on porn met with varying degrees of success.
In the United Kingdom (see below), a two-year push to implement a nationwide “age verification” system for porn sites was finally scrapped, while in India, a government mandate last year for ISPs to block more than 800 sites was quickly circumvented by porn fans using Virtual Private Networks and other relatively simple techniques.
Other South Asian countries attempted to follow India’s lead. Bangladesh moved to block 20,000 sites, while Nepal attempted to slap bans on 25,000. But research by a Nepalese news site found that users in the country were accessing porn at higher rates than before the ban went into effect.
Australia, New Zealand, and Ireland are also now considering legislation to restrict online access to porn, while in the USA, three states—New York, Kansas, and Hawaii—have seen legislation proffered that would automatically block porn sites but attach surcharges for users who want them unblocked, in effect creating a porn tax.
The Hawaiian legislation was introduced by state senator Mike Gabbard, father of current Democratic Presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard. And while the younger Gabbard has not stated her own position on banning on restricting porn, fellow Democratic candidate Andrew Yang has.
In a tweet, Yang declared “rampant access” to porn to be “a real problem.” He advocated some sort of measure to “empower families to be able to moderate what our kids see and when.” But Yang did not specify what measures he would favor.
No other United States presidential candidate has taken a public position on restricting online access to porn. On the other hand, in 2016 Donald Trump became the first Republican candidate to run on a platform that included a specific anti-porn plank.
As 2019 comes to a close, NBC News reported, many of Trump’s right-wing supporters are pushing him to lead a new “war on porn,” a crackdown that they believe could help bring him a reelection victory in the 2020 election.
U.K. PORN ‘AGE VERIFICATION’ FAILS
In 2017, the United Kingdom passed a law requiring that all adult sites put technology in place to block access for any user who could not prove that he or she was at least 18 years old. Two years later, after repeated deadlines for the requirement to take effect had passed, the “age verification” law was scrapped not with a bang but with a whimper.
A study showed that the British government blew the equivalent of almost $3 million on researching and promoting the “age verification” system, but in reality, no such system ever existed. The attempt to create a nationwide method for verifying the ages of all porn site visitors ran into both technological problems, and significant privacy concerns.
In the end, however, the British government claimed that neither the technical nor civil liberties issues sank the age-verification system, blaming the failure instead on an unexplained “administrative error.” The government said that it had simply neglected to submit the law to the European Union for approval.
But Britain’s failure has left other countries undeterred. Australia, Ireland, and New Zealand all said this year that they would develop similar systems. Officials in Australia have even made the Orwellian proposal to use the country’s facial recognition database to ferret out underage porn site viewers.
SEX WORKER RIGHTS BECOME A CAMPAIGN ISSUE
While it may not receive the same attention as health care or gun violence, the decriminalization of sex work has become an issue in the 2020 presidential campaign. At one point, four of the Democratic candidates for president declared their support for decriminalization.
The most prominent of those candidates, California Senator Kamala Harris, has since dropped out of the race for financial reasons (though her prominence in California politics may help spur the state toward decriminalization). Another, former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel, has also dropped out and was arguably never a serious candidate in the first place.
That leaves New Jersey Senator Corey Booker and Hawaii congressional rep Tulsi Gabbard as the two remaining candidates to state their unequivocal support for sex work decriminalization.
But last week, businessman Andrew Yang stated his support for a controversial version of decriminalization that would free sex workers from the threat of criminal penalties, but prosecute their paying customers instead. It's known as the "Nordic model," and is opposed by sex work decrim groups.
Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren has said that she would be “open” to sex work decriminalization, while Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders says he still needs more time to “discuss” it.
Only Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar has stated that she is flatly opposed to sex work decriminalization.
STORMY DANIELS LAWSUIT AGAINST TRUMP ENDS
Last year, AVN Hall of Famer Stormy Daniels found herself in the national headlines on a near-daily basis, after she sued Donald Trump in March to get out of a “hush money” deal to silence her from disclosing details of a 2006 sexual encounter between the two at a celebrity golf tournament.
Almost exactly one year later, in March of 2019, a federal judge quietly dismissed the case, saying that Daniels’ claim was no longer relevant after a solid year of Daniels and, to much greater extent her media-magnet lawyer Michael Avenatti talking about the case—and the 2006 sexual encounter—in hundreds of media appearances.
In part due to the media blitz, Trump and his now-former lawyer Michael Cohen, who was also targeted by Daniels in the lawsuit, agreed not to enforce the non-disclosure agreement Daniels signed, or demand that she pay any penalties. As a result, the judge found the suit pointless.
But the dismissal was not the end for Daniels and Trump in 2019. His lawyers still claim that Daniels owes him $293,000 in legal fees for a defamation lawsuit that was dismissed late last year.
In September of 2019, Daniels settled another lawsuit, this one against the Columbus, Ohio, Police Department over her arrest at a strip club there in July of 2018. The city agreed to pay Daniels $450,000 for the wrongful arrest, reportedly the result of Trump-supporting vice squad officers—and shortly after the settlement, the Trump lawyers swooped in, demanding that they get their money out of the Columbus cash.
As for the high-flying Avenatti, he came crashing to Earth in 2019 after Daniels broke with him, and he was hit with a series of criminal charges alleging that he bilked clients out of hundreds of thousands of dollars. One of those clients, allegedly, was Daniels. Avenatti is charged with embezzling almost $300,000 from the publisher’s advance she earned for her memoir, Full Disclosure.
MERCEDES CARRERA FACES SEXUAL ABUSE CHARGES
In February, adult star Mercedes Carrera and her husband, Daemon Cins, were arrested at their home in Rancho Cucamonga, California, and charged with multiple counts of sexually abusing a child under age 10. They were initially held without bail, but in June, a magistrate granted their request for bail—but set the amount at $2 million each.
As a result, Carrera and Cins remain behind bars awaiting a trial that may not occur until April of 2020, after multiple delays and postponed hearings in San Bernardino County Superior Court.
Both Carrera and Cins have entered not guilty pleas. Shortly after her arrest, Carrera issued a statement in which she professed her innocence, and acknowledged that the child in the case, identified publicly only as Jane Doe, was her own “beloved daughter.”
At an evidentiary hearing on August 8, the child’s voice was heard in the courtroom, via a 75-minute audio recording of her interview with a San Bernardino sheriff’s deputy.
In the graphic recording, the nine-year-old described what she called “cuddle sessions” with Carrera and Cins, in which Carrera used a Hitachi vibrator on herself, and on occasion would “suck on my clit,” the girl said in the audio recording.
She also described one instance in which Cins touched her clitoris with his penis.
Carrera and Cins have denied that any of those actions took place, charging that the child has been influenced to tell such stories by Carrera's ex-husband.
BLACK TRANS PERFORMERS MURDERED
In one of 2019’s grimmest and most alarming trends, the year was a deadly one to be a trans person in the United States, particularly a black transgender woman. As of November, 20 trans or gender-nonconforming women of color had become victims of homicide. Three of the victims were performers in trans porn videos.
In May, Michele “Tamika” Washington, who performed as Nyobi Khan from about 2001 to 2009, was shot and killed in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, her hometown. Washington was known as mentor and activist in the city’s LGBTQ community.
A 28-year-old man, Troy Bailey, was arrested and is awaiting trial on charges of killing Washington. Police did not investigating the slaying as a hate crime, but said that the the true motive for Washington’s murder, "may never be fully known."
Her death came the same weekend as the shooting death in Dallas, Texas, of 23-year-old Muhlaysia Booker, who modeled for the trans porn site Grooby under the name Cashmere. Just a month before her slaying, Booker was the victim of a brutal assault in a Dallas parking lot—an assault captured on cell phone video which then went viral online.
But police arrested 34-year-old Kendrell Lavar Lyles on suspicion of killing Booker, and say that Lyles is a serial killer who has also slain two other victims. They say that Booker’s death is unrelated to the earlier, horrifying assault.
In October, another Grooby performer, Brianna “BB” Hill, was shot dead in Kansas City, Missouri. Hill, who used the performing name Aries, was not only the third black trans porn performer to meet death by violence in 2019, but the fourth trans person killed in Kansas City alone. She was also the 20th trans homicide victim of the year in the United States.
The killing of transgender people has become an “epidemic,” according to the Human Rights Commission, which has recorded the murders of 150 trans people in the U.S. since 2013.
Even the American Medical Association has made note of the horrific trend, saying that “ fatal anti-transgender violence in the U.S. is on the rise, and most victims were black transgender women.”
STATES GET COURT OK FOR NET NEUTRALITY
Net neutrality, the set of regulations that guarantee fair and equal treatment for all online data traffic—a principle with clear importance for the online porn industry, did not have a good year in 2019. The Republican led Federal Communications Commission repealed the 2015 federal net neutrality regs last year. This year, efforts in both Congress and the courts to overturn the repeal came up short.
But there was at least a ray of hope for saving the open internet, but it will come down not to the federal government but to individual states to take up the cause.
In an October 1 decision, the District of Columbia Federal Court of Appeals—considered the last stop before the Supreme Court—issued a decision in a lawsuit brought by the Mozilla Foundation and a coalition of other tech forms and activist groups who asked the court to overturn the FCC repeal.
In that decision, a three-judge panel ruled that the FCC had the right to ditch the Obama-era net neutrality regulations. But while the ruling was a disappointing setback, the court also held that the FCC was wrong to “preempt” individual states from imposing their own net neutrality rules—a legal conundrum since the internet, by its very nature, is a service that happens in an interstate setting.
The ruling appears to give a green light to states to formulate their own open internet rules. New York was the first to respond, as Governor Andrew Cuomo announced in December that what he said would be the strongest net neutrality law in the country would take a high priority on his 2020 legislative agenda.
EPIC ‘PORN TROLL’ CASE ENDS WITH STIFF SENTENCES
Paul Hansmeier and John Steele each received prison sentences in 2019, after their guilty pleas in a six-year case charging the two Minnesota lawyers with preying on porn fans who downloaded adult clips from torrent sites with what prosecutors called “sham copyright lawsuits.”
The two lawyers, principals in the Prenda Law Group, were charged in a scheme in which, at first, they would acquire the copyrights to porn clips, then upload the videos to torrent sites. They would then track the IP addresses of internet users who downloaded the clips and hit those users with copyright suits.
They counted on the victims’ reluctance to be “outed” as porn fans, ultimately extracting a total of $6 million in bogus “settlements.”
Eventually, the pair realized that it would be easier to simply produce their own porn, and upload their original clips, rather than go through the extra step of acquiring copyrights to existing porn content.
In June, Hansmeier, who fought the charges until last year, was hit with a 14-year sentence, which was two years more than prosecutors sought.
A month later, Steele was handed a five-year sentence. He received more lenient treatment largely because he “flipped” and aided prosecutors in their pursuit of his law partner, Hansmeier.
FOSTA/SESTA FACES BACKLASH IN COURT, CONGRESS
Last year, both houses of Congress overwhelmingly passed the “Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act,” known as FOSTA—or in the Senate version, SESTA—which blew a hole in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. That’s the law that makes free online communications possible, because it protects internet platforms and providers from being held responsible for every crazy or dangerous post made by a user on their services.
In June of 2019, a federal district court in Washington D.C. threw out a major lawsuit challenging FOSTA/SESTA, brought by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Woodhull Sexual Freedom Alliance, Human Rights Watch and other civil liberties groups. But the court tossed the lawsuit largely on a technicality, making no ruling on whether the law is constitutional or valid.
Meanwhile, one of the first lawsuits filed under the FOSTA/SESTA law brought an encouraging sign for opponents of the law. In a suit brought by 50 women against the business software giant Salesforce, a federal court ruled that the company was, in fact, protected by Section 230.
Salesforce provided software to Backpage, the online advertising site that was shuttered by the FBI early in 2018. The 50 women claimed that they were victims of sex trafficking via Backpage ads, and that Salesforce should be held liable under the provisions of FOSTA/SESTA.
The court disagreed, saying that FOSTA applied narrowly only to circumstances specified in the law. Plaintiffs cannot simply invoke FOSTA in any online sex trafficking lawsuit, the ruling said.
Even though the vote in both the House and Senate was massively in favor of the law, California congressional rep Ro Khanna—one of only 25 who voted against FOSTA—has now introduced a bill to study the law’s effects. He says that the law “criminalized online sex work,” and has made sex workers’ lives more dangerous, while doing little or nothing to curb sex trafficking.
Khanna said he expects that the federal study will show the harms inflicted by FOSTA/SESTA, and serve as a first step toward repealing the law.
GIRLSDOPORN.COM ON TRIAL
The “amateur” porn site was nothing but a sex trafficking scheme that deceived, exploited and ultimately ruined the lives of young women who needed cash, and answered online ads to become “models.” Those charges are at the center of an epic, three-month lawsuit against the company.
The suit was brought by 22 women identified in court only as “Jane Does,” who named site owner Michael Pratt, videographer Matthew Wolfe, performer Reuben "Andre" Garcia and office assistant Valorie Moser as defendants.
The suit charges that the women were originally solicited to come to San Diego at the company's expense to film auditions for modeling work. But when they got there, they were asked to have sex on camera with Garcia, the suit alleges, having been promised that the videos were for private use, would only be seen outside the U.S. and would never be posted online—but those promises were all lies.
The defendants raked in $17 million by exploiting the young women, according to the allegations.
Pratt fled to his native New Zealand before the civil trial commenced. But in October, federal prosecutors charged him, as well as Wolfe, Garcia and other site employees with production of child porn and sex trafficking of a minor. The prosecutors say that one of the women recorded performing a hardcore sex scene that was uploaded to the site was just 16 years old at the time she was filmed.
The 22 women have yet to receive a verdict in their lawsuit, which wrapped up in November, from San Diego Superior Court Judge Kevin Enright, who heard the case in a non-jury trial.
The defendants in the criminal case are expected to go on trial sometime next year, though whether the U.S. will be able to extradite Pratt remains uncertain.
Photos by Attorney General of California /WCMH TV YouTube /Baldwin Saintilus/KMSP TV Vimeo
