Dr. Laura Schlessinger won't let anything like the dumping of her libel suit suit against an Orange County (CA) beach shop owner stop her from keeping up the heat on "stealth porn". She's charging in her syndicated column that the editor of the magazine which started the flap in the first place admitted, at least two months before the flap began, that its aim was to dupe young readers into picking up a piece of the real stuff.
Schlessinger accuses the Larry Flynt publication Big Brother Skateboarder of deliberately aiming to give younger readers a taste for more advanced hardcore. "Big Brother Skateboarder is filled with the sort of rampant obscenity, casual misogyny, and deviant sexuality one might expect to find in…Hustler magazine," she writes. "But it's…in a magazine aimed at children as young as 8 years old."
Schlessinger had seen the magazine in Beach Access surf shop in Orange County last summer, while shopping with her young son, and accused the shop's management of deliberately displaying porn for younger viewers to see freely. The shop's owner, Tom Moore, denied he was showing kids porn; Schlessinger zapped him on her radio show over the matter. When Moore responded to that by saying she was lying, she hit him with a libel suit.
That suit was thrown out of court last week. But Schlessinger still faces a countersuit from Moore for defamation. And now she says Big Brother Skateboarder editor Dave Carnie "boasted openly that his magazine…(was) marketed so that parents won't know what's inside" to National Public Radio talk host Guy Kemp, at least two months before she and her son spotted the magazine in Beach Access.
"When Kemp asked Carnie point blank…the editor did not flinch," Schlessinger writes, adding that she took it up on her own radio show the same month.
Schlessinger also says Flynt himself - with whom she's been at loggerheads since losing a case involving Flynt's publication of nude photos taken of her by a former boyfriend years before she became famous - "seems to agree" with her take on the magazine. She says Flynt was asked about her charge about the magazine and answered, in a television interview, that the magazine's appeal was precisely its inclusion of sexuality.
To Schlessinger, though, that's what makes the magazine so nefarious. "A parent who idly flips through it probably won't notice anything but photos of skateboarders and articles about skateboarding," she writes. "It's only when you sit down and actually read it cover to cover -- which is what kids do -- that you realize its true nature. To complicate matters, not every issue is loaded with filth; a particularly egregious one will be followed by a relatively tame one. This duplicity, of course, is the nature of stealth pornography."
Schlessinger's radio barbs at Beach Access resulted in protests, angry calls, and a slump in business at the shop, according to Moore's countersuit. The court ultimately ruled, in dismissing Schlessinger's suit, that Moore was only exercising his First Amendment right to free speech when he said Schlessinger had lied on the air about his deliberately showing a porn magazine.
