Couple Pleads Innocent In Online Scat Video Case

The couple whose scat Website and videos got them arrested when postal inspectors were tipped off to their content earlier this year have pleaded innocent to five federal charges.

Michael and Sharon Corbett pleaded not guilty at their April 22 arraignment. Though Mrs. Corbett's attorney said she believed the Websites and videos were not obscene or illegal at the time postal investigators became aware of them, prosecutors think the DVDs and videotapes the couple sold - showing nude and semi-nude women using the bathroom as a sexual fetish - "were so worthless and deviant that they would be considered obscene by any American anywhere," as the Charleston Daily Mail put it.

In addition, the two men who actually operated the Website, Joseph Tanner and Randall Rogers, were arraigned April 24, the paper reported.

"In this particular case it's going to be very obvious that what was being sold on girlspooping.com does not match up with community standards anywhere in this country," U.S. Attorney Kasey Warner told the Daily Mail. "If anything in this world is obscene and therefore illegal, we are going to argue that this is.

"This is a cancer on our society, kind of like the embezzlement and corporate fraud," Warner told the paper. "It is a problem in our society and we're putting our attention on it."

But a successful prosecution may turn on what West Virginians deem acceptable or obscene, since locales under federal standards are allowed to determine those borders on their own, the Daily Mail observed. Or, as Mrs. Corbett's attorney, S. Mason Preston told the paper, earlier legal precedents can suggest that something is disgusting or revolting but not obscene.

And that problem is compounded by the fact that the Corbett case represents one of West Virginia's first obscenity cases in over a decade. West Virginia's Supreme Court last took on the issue in 1991, the Daily Mail said, when it upheld a state law letting counties bar stores from selling or displaying obscene materials.