Most parents would tell you their worst nightmare is having their children taken from them.
There are, nonetheless, those who will try to make that nightmare a reality—particularly in the adult industry.
Your loving parents
Chris and Brandi Potoski, who own Xclusive Cash (www.xclusivecash.com) and parent company Naked Rhino learned that lesson hard and fast this past February after
Brandi, star of www.brandilove.com, made a string of TV and radio appearances for the eponymous site. Unbeknownst to the couple at the time, the promotional exposure enabled Brandi’s parents, a deeply religious pair, to discovered exactly what their daughter did for a living.
Chris and Brandi were in New York meeting with a mainstream film producer when they received a frantic call from their nanny, who informed them the Department of Social Services was at their door threatening to remove their 4-year-old daughter from the house.
"[Her parents] stated that because they knew some of the photographs on our website were taken at our home that we were exposing our daughter to adult content. They also contended that my wife was approached at a local Starbucks and offered sex for money with our 4-year-old daughter in the car. How they [could have been] in the Starbucks parking lot is very interesting," Chris says.
The sense of betrayal pained Chris and Brandi beyond description. They may work in adult, but they’re also typical parents.
"We love our daughter with all our heart and soul. She is our air," Chris says.
And so when they couldn’t get a flight home fast enough, Chris and Brandi jumped in their car and drove home from New York.
"I was obviously upset, but my wife was beyond upset. I thought I was going to have to take her to the hospital," Chris says."She was literally throwing up on herself because she was crying so hard. I could not have driven fast enough to get home."
When they arrived, they found that DSS had interviewed both their nanny and their young daughter separately, along with some of their neighbors. When Chris and Brandi called DSS, they were asked to come in for a series of interviews, which ultimately found no wrongdoing whatsoever. The case has since been closed, at least as far as DSS is concerned.
Strife within the family was just beginning, however.
Not yet knowing how or why they were reported to DSS, Chris started to do some searching and found that all of the couple’s personal information – Brandi’s real name, their address, phone number – and their daughter’s full name was posted in a commenton Brandi’s blog. The poster’s IP was traced back to her brother.
Seems a coordinated effort had been instrumented that included not only Brandi’s family, but Chris’s father, and several members of their church. The group submitted 14 complaints to DSS.
"The amazing thing to me is that the very belief system they propose to follow, they violate by spreading downright lies. It’s no different than Right to Life people going out and bombing abortion clinics," Chris says.
"On the flip side of things, Brandi and I have always contended the same things. We are good parents. We have a strong marriage and always have," Chris says.
The couple even went to church, until family members made some calls and got them banned from attending.
"We have no problem balancing what we believe in, our lifestyle, and our business. We don’t see any hypocrisy in that at all, and they really have a hard time with that," he continues.
Unfortunately, Brandi’s mother and father would not be deterred and continued the attack through criminal complaints, claiming their daughter and her husband were dealing in child porn.
"They took pictures that we, and every parent in this country has, of their child in the bathtub playing with bubbles and sent them to the Raleigh Police Department. They filed a complaint with the police department. They sent photos we had taken and sent to them two years ago, before they knew we were involved in the swinging lifestyle and the adult industry," Chris says with a laugh.
He’s able to laugh because he soon thereafter hired veteran First Amendment attorney Joe Cheshire and found out from the Wake County prosecuting attorney, that Brandi’s parents’ claims were indeed laughable. Cheshire sent what was in effect a cease-and-desist letter to all of the Potoskis’ family members.
"They are adults who made the decision to go into a business that’s legal, and as a result, their child was put through something she should never have been put through, and [the Pototskis] were too. It was shown by the DSS investigation, which is not the most liberal organization in the world, [that] they were wonderful parents. That’s the kind of thing that shouldn’t happen," Cheshire says.
So that’s that, right?
Wrong.
Spreading the "Good" word
Why would someone’s parents simply let him or her raise their own children, especially if that person is a dirty, filthy pornographer? Why not try to ruin their lives? After all, that’s the Christian thing to do.
In addition to being a dirty, filthy pornographer, Chris is also the vice president of development for a large bio-tech company, or at least he was.
"They contacted my corporate office and human resources to let them know what type of employee they had working for them," Chris says.
Chris and the company mutually agreed that Chris would resign his position at the end of 2005.
Chris reports that their persecutors are now contemplating filing a custody suit, in which they will claim that Chris and Brandi are unfit parents.
What has become a completely absurd situation is not lost on Chris. Somewhere along the way, he starts to laugh as he recounts his story.
"With the DSS investigation behind us I feel much more secure. Now anything they do is going to have to be played out in the courts, unless they start picketing our company. I feel much more secure fighting that type of legal battle with the type of representation we have and the fact that this is a legal business," he says.
Your cherished ex-partners
Few divorces are pretty, but when a former spouse takes the kids and marries into the adult family, it can get downright nasty. So learned Tom Leach, one-third owner in RavenRiley.com and a long-time employee of PicHunter (www.pichunter.com).
His life played out much like that of the Potoskis’ some three years ago. Three weeks after his new wife, a divorcee with three children, moved into his house (also his office), her ex-husband decided he didn’t like that and needed to do something about it.
"He found out [about] what I do and reported to the police that I was involved in a child pornography ring, [saying] I had his kids in my house, was taking pictures of them and posting them on the Internet," Leach says.
One afternoon, Leach says, the police and child services showed up at his door. They searched the house and interviewed the children. When they left, they did so with nothing more than the smiles on their faces.
"They more or less were laughing when they left because they knew it was all just a bunch of crap," Leach says.
Each step of the way, Leach was truthful with them. As it turns out, the police did their homework and checked out his sites before they arrived.
"They asked me, ‘Are you involved in porn?’ and I said, ‘yeah, I am.’ They asked me if I owned a certain website and I said ‘yeah, I do,’" Leach says.
"I told them I didn’t have anything to hide. [I said] ‘You guys are more than welcome to come into my house anytime day or night. You can hang out and drink coffee with me in the morning. I don’t care—I’m not hiding anything.’"
Once the children, who Leach has supported for the past three years, moved in he took precautions. His office stays locked and his computers cannot be turned on without fingerprint recognition.
"This is what I do for a living and it’s under lock and key," he says.
"I’ve always been very protective. Even today, the kids don’t really know what I do. They just know I work on the Internet."
Still, that didn’t stop the ex from trying the same tactics again three months after his first attempt.
"He reported to the police that we nailed the windows shut, wouldn’t let his kids out of the house and that we would lock them in their rooms as soon as they got home from school—just retarded stuff," Leach says.
"It was kind of crazy there for a while. He’s always holding it over our heads and saying he’s got something on us."
Of course, he doesn’t. And oddly enough, he once tried to get into the industry himself, Leach claims."We were friends when [he and my wife] were dating. He wanted to get into this business and was even pimping out his wife. That’s how I met her. He was trying to get her into porn sites and he came to me."
While the major attacks have subsided, similar problems for the Leaches still rear their heads from time to time because they – like a lot of parents in the industry – find themselves a lonely minority.
"I’m not doing anything illegal, so I’m not really afraid of that aspect, but my wife gets scared at times. She needs someone she can talk to about things like this. Both of our families are extremely religious so we can’t go that route," Leach says.
"My wife thinks we’re all alone in this and that’s not the case. There are people who don’t want to talk about it or who are afraid to talk about it and it’s something that needs to be talked about to let people know where they stand."
Your friends and neighbors
One day your kids are running around with the other neighborhood kids doing what they do. The next day, no one wants to play with them.
No, this tale doesn’t involve the authorities, like those that preceded it, but it does involve an 8-year-old boy and a 6-year-old girl who couldn’t play with their friends anymore after neighbors found out the children’s parents run a large affiliate program.
(The family wishes to remain anonymous.)
"I know that there are a lot of nice people just making a living doing a very different type of job, but it is a job," the children’s mother says. "Many of us have kids and have to deal with that every day. Some of us have chosen to hide what we do, and some of us have chosen to be very open. I have to say I am almost afraid of what being open might mean to us and our kids and therefore, we choose to stay in the closet."
Their story, however, is much like the others.
Piece by piece, the neighborhood parents started putting things together— models stopping over to pick up checks, a well-styled marketing effort, an overheard conversation. These people peddle porn, oh my God!
"After they figured it out, my kids were not allowed to play with their kids. When my son would go see if they could play, as he always had, it was always ‘no’ from that day on," she continues. "My son thought that since his friends were a little older they didn’t want to play with him anymore. I spent a couple days with a sad and crying little boy."
Suddenly, the once-friendly neighborhood was a different place. No one’s kids came over and no one said hello to their pornographer neighbors, even though they had no problem with them just weeks before.
"I felt a lot of different emotions. Mad that they would do that to my children, sad they would do that to my children, and really angry that they didn’t even come and talk to us about it. I certainly wasn’t going to go and explain. We had lived there long enough to be known as good people." The family has since moved to a more private residence and no longer has any contact with their former neighbors, but their concerns still remain.
"We always worry about when our neighbors and our kids will find out," she says. We don’t really feel what we do is wrong, but people in general seem to be hypocritical and thus we hide what we do for our children’s sake. If it started to hurt them too much in any way we would probably quit the industry."
The test of time
Quitting the industry is not an option right now for Cathy McDonald, who runs AmateurThumbPost.com, Pixerotic.com, and KinkShock.com. She’s a single mother who takes care of her 4-year-old anaphylactic son, who is hypersensitive to peanut dust and could go into shock anytime he’s exposed to it.
Being in the industry means caring for her son full time and working from home while he sleeps or visits his grandparents.
Still, she worries about what could happen.
"I fear that someone will think that this puts my son in a dangerous environment and will try and have him taken away from me, which is absolutely ridiculous. I don’t think that any parent working in the adult industry is unethical, unless they expose their child to it and my son is not exposed to anything negative. All he knows is that I work on the computer and that I’m always there for him when he needs me," McDonald says.
But what happens when parents need someone?
Right now, parents in the industry don’t seem to have any easy answers available when they’re confronted with these attacks.
Parents In Adult
If anything good can come out of the Potoskis’ battle for their children, it will be the formation of Parents In Adult, a highly secure organization for parents in the industry. When Chris found out that other people had gone through situations similar to his, he started to envision a place where parents could go for resources, legal counsel, and to talk to others who understand the situation.
"The biggest thing is, when we were in the middle of having these problems, no one is ever around to help you or support you. It’s not something you can go to your mom and dad or a relative with. My wife had some questions and we called several of the top attorneys in this business and tried to ask a few questions and they were like, ‘Screw you, you’re not my client.’ It really bothered me that we couldn’t get any help or counseling from anybody," Leach recalls.
While Chris has a lot of work to do to bring his idea to fruition, he has garnered a lot of support in the industry and hopes to have a site live by early January 2006.
"If we in the adult industry hide under a rock, they’re just going to keep coming. I truly believe the battle regarding the perception of the adult industry can be won, but not if everyone continues to run and hide," he says. "We certainly won’t. Brandi and I feel very strongly about our right to run a legal business."
