Fashion photographer/director Ron Harris lured millions to a Web site Monday offering auctions of donated egg cells from striking-looking models - but the Washington Post says the whole thing might be a hoax from the man whose credits include some television directing for Playboy.
"(T)he enterprise may be nothing more than a scam, designed by an experienced Internet pornographer," write Post reporters Ann Gerhart and John Schwartz. They say Network Solutions reveals to them that the domain names for www.ronsangels.com (the models' egg auction site) and fourteen erotic sites are all registered to Harris.
And the two Post writers also say that others who know Harris from erotic photography say he's scamming this one. "My immediate reaction was that it was a very clever scam designed to draw traffic to the site," Humphry Knipe, a Webmaster for erotic photographer Suze Randall, tells the Post.
Harris apparently refused an interview request by the paper.
But Gerhart and Schwartz say that, considering the "other real currency of the World Wide Web is eyeballs," over 5.5 million hits to ronsangels.com - which they say Harris told the Associated Press - could mean untold advertising dollars for his site(s).
Photographer J. Stephen Hicks tells the Post that "crass marketers" drive out the "true artists" such as himself in the competitive, tight online porn market. "The only way to get traffic on an adult site is with a big media splash," he says. "It's exponentially more valuable than any other marketing tool right now to get mainstream media attention."
Harris got precisely that - major stories in the New York Times, USA Today and elsewhere touted his online beautiful models' egg auction, despite increasing expressions of outrage from reproductive ethics spokespeople and other medical professionals. Yet the Post says there is "no evidence" on the Web site that the models pictured have any intention of selling their eggs.
"Instead," the paper says, "the site employs classic Internet come-ons: the sultry pose for free, with a promise of racier fare available only to 'members only'." And the bid for something so serious as an ova extraction and its result(s) is nothing more complex than a simple blank e-mail form - with bidders unable to know what other bidding the model egg is receiving, the paper continues.
And, perhaps most troubling, is this disclaimer on the site: "Our site acts as the venue for sellers to list items (or, as appropriate, solicit offers to buy) and buyers to bid on items. We are not involved in the actual transaction between buyers and sellers. As a result, we have no control over the quality, safety or legality of the items advertised, the truth or accuracy of the listings, the ability of sellers to sell items or the ability of buyers to buy items. We cannot ensure that a buyer or seller will actually complete a transaction."
Harris may not even be doing as much of his own work as in the past. A Fort Lauderdale Internet maven, Steve Easton, who surfs the Net for copyright holders looking for intellectual and content pirates, tells the Post he's pursured Harris numerous times in the past over complaints from other photographers that his sites used their imagery without their consent. He tells the paper at least one of the models pictured on Harris's auction site looked very, very familiar to him.
A Playboy spokesman, Bill Farley, tells the Post Harris - whom he calls the granddaddy of softcore - was once on the sexy cutting edge but "I ran into him a few years ago and his career was in need of a transfusion."
