Five months after he was acquitted of child porn charges stemming from his operation of a “teen modeling” Website, Colorado photographer James Grady has filed notice with the state attorney general's office to preserve his right to sue the law enforcement agencies that arrested and prosecuted him.
Grady filed what Colorado law mandates as a "Notice of Intent to File Suit" Aug. 12. The notice preserves his right to sue Arapahoe County District Attorney James Peters, prosecutors William Hood and Karen Pearson, the Arapahoe County Sheriff's Office, the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, and the police and fire departments in Sheridan.
Grady was acquitted at trial March 13, in a criminal case that began with felony charges ballooning from 720 to 866 counts but reduced to 39 felony counts by court time. The case began in April 2002 when a 17-year-old model accused Grady of touching her inappropriately. It ended after a rocky ride around Colorado's courts on the question of whether Grady's work – in which he had the teenagers' consent and a parent present at all his photo shoots – was covered by the state's aggressive sexual exploitation of minors laws.
Grady told AVN.com on Aug. 13 that it isn't a question of if but when he will sue, and for at least $15.2 million in damages.
"If you're going to sue, which I intend to do, you have to, by Colorado statute, give the state a chance to investigate the matter first," he said. "You have to give the times and dates in your claim, and a concise statement of what they did and, you know, it's pretty short, it's just a couple of pages, and name the particular people as best as you can."
The notice filing said that if Grady does sue in due course, the bases would be wrongful arrest, unreasonable use of force, false imprisonment, and intentional infliction of emotional distress resulting pain and suffering, according to a published report and Grady's attorney, Andy Contiguglia.
"He hasn't filed a suit yet," Contiguglia told AVN.com , "but he has given the statutory notice required to preserve his rights to file. Under the government immunity statute in Colorado, you have to give notice to the government entity that you're planning on suing some time. You have to give the basis of your claim, you have to give your version of the facts that support the claim."
Grady said the respondents in question have at least three months or more to answer the intent filing. "If they ignore it, that's considered an automatic denial," he said, "so we can wait the length of time, which I think is 90 days or more. Or, if they deny in writing before that, we'll file within a day or two afterward."
On the day he was acquitted, Grady told AVN.com he expected a civil action to follow, declaring him and his business a public nuisance, seizing his equipment, and splitting the proceeds from their sale between the sheriff’s and the district attorney's offices. His equipment and studio – including several high-tech pieces of scanning and processing equipment – had been seized already.
Contiguglia confirmed no such civil action against his client has come. "He thought they were going to try a civil action to keep his stuff," Contiguglia said, "but the sheriff's staff contacted us and said he could come and get his things."
The problem with that, Contiguglia added, was that a great deal of Grady's seized equipment and assets had been damaged or destroyed or lost, including "rolls and rolls and rolls of film" which may be worth thousands of dollars, based on how a court assesses the negatives' value to a photographer's actual and prospective business.
"I had a separate photo lab and did tons and tons of processing for the adult industry and for (places like) colleges or universities, on a wholesale basis with no retail, and I had a couple of hundred thousand dollars of high-end [equipment]," said Grady, whose estimate on the dollar damage to the equipment is in the $500,000 range. "It appears from looking at them that they tossed them around like they were beanbags."
He said the missing film's value could run as high as $5 million. "There are lots of federal cases that have set up what they call an ‘intrinsic value’ on damage," Grady said. "In my case, we're talking over 80 rolls of 36 exposures apiece. And using the numbers the federal courts have used [since] the late 1980s, using a figure of about $1,500 a frame, you're looking at over $48,000 a roll."
Grady said he and his legal team looked "through every single box, we looked all over for those rolls of film, we have tried our best and spent hundreds of hours mitigating our damages. We wouldn't just sue because we felt like suing."
He said it was also possible that the damage to his equipment might have been done by a moving company hired to move the sheriff's department’s offices during his case, but could not yet confirm the company in question or the extent, if any, to which it might be responsible.
Grady spent almost a year behind bars before his trial because he couldn't raise $500,000 bond. But he didn't exactly languish there, as AVN Online reported upon his acquittal. Grady became "completely engaged" in his own defense, making himself almost more knowledgeable about the law than his legal team and prosecutors.
"He was unbelievable during the trial and in all the preparations during the trial," Contigulia said after Grady's acquittal. "He was very knowledgeable on the law. He did a lot of technical research while he was in custody. He was absolutely invaluable. He really made the best of a pretty bad situation."
The criminal case turned especially on the original 17-year-old complainant's testimony proving unreliable, when it was determined the location in which she claimed the touching incident took place was undergoing construction until after her 18th birthday. She was also the only one of Grady's youthful models to testify against him. The others were subpoenaed, but all but one denied he had ever behaved inappropriately with them. The holdout refused the subpoena but told authorities Grady had done nothing wrong.
