SAN FRANCISCO—Kink.com owner Peter Acworth has issued a statement via his blog responding to some of the allegations made against Kink by AIDS Healthcare Foundation president Michael Weinstein during the press conference AHF held Wednesday concerning adult performer testing protocols.
At the conference, performers Cameron Bay, Rod Daily and Patrick Stone—the first two of whom recently tested positive for HIV, while the third claims to have possibly received a false positive test result for the virus earlier this month—all spoke about their concerns pertaining to current performer safety norms. All three shot for Kink this summer, and both Bay and Stone touched on their experiences doing so.
Of particular cause for alarm was Bay's contention that during her July 31 shoot for Kink's Public Disgrace sub-site—her last scene before being diagnosed as HIV-positive—"there was an incident with a performer I was working with, and he ended up with a cut on the tip of his penis, and he was bleeding." Noting that production stopped at that point and Daily, who was standing by on set, prepared to step in for the injured performer, she added, "the performer said, no, he could continue to work, and we continued to work even though he was bleeding from the cut, and we did not use condoms."
In his response, Acworth addressed this assertion, albeit obliquely, by stating, "Ms. Bay's shoot caused us concern long before the subject of HIV came up. While HIV was not transmitted on set, there were incidents on that shoot, including some of the same ones that Ms. Bay identified, that have caused us to reevaluate what we permit on shoots involving members of the public, even when it's consensual."
AVN confirmed with Xander Corvus, the sole male performer in Bay's Public Disgrace scene to penetrate her vaginally and/or anally (she did performer oral sex on another, unidentified male during the scene), that he was the performer Bay was referring to at the press conference. Corvus verified that he did sustain a cut on his penis from Bay's teeth during the shoot, and that he bled "a little bit" from the wound. He also maintained that the decision to continue with the scene was a group one by all participants while shooting was stopped, as much of Bay's volition as his own.
"I asked her if she wanted to keep shooting, and she said, 'As long as you're OK, you're not hurt,'" Corvus told AVN.
Corvus has tested negative for HIV repeatedly since the Public Disgrace shoot with Bay, including on August 31, a full month afterward.
Peter Acworth's response to the AHF press conference can be read here.
