He told AVNOnline.com when it was over that he knew, even before his arrest, that he was innocent. His models were subpoenaed by the prosecution but testified that he had never done anything inappropriate with or to them. His attorney argued the photos were taken for no one's sexual arousal - including his clients'. And, finally, a jury agreed.
It took only two and a half hours of deliberation before 42-year-old Sheridan, Colo., photographer James Steven Grady was acquitted March 13 of child porn and sexual exploitation. He was arrested in April 2002 over a Website featuring bikini- and short-short-clad teenagers who some thought looked too arousing for comfort. At one time, Grady faced as many as 866 felony charges, but he was tried on only 39 and acquitted on every one of them.
Grady said the first thing he wants to do, after the media crush over his acquittal finished, is to visit his mother. "My mom turns 84 next week," Grady said by telephone from the office of his attorney, Andy Contigulia, "and I haven't seen her because she can't walk up the steps to the court or to the jail visiting area. But I'm anxious to see her. She makes the best lasagna in town. Otherwise, I've made no business decisions."
That's because his entire business and assets have been under government seizure. Grady said he expects Arapaho County to try a civil suit against him, now that he's been acquitted of the criminal charges.
"The prosecution still has all my equipment," said Grady, who had a 4,000-square-foot studio and a 2,000-square-foot photo lab with high-quality photo processors, high-tech scanners, and other equipment. "We don't know what they're going to do. They told us months ago they'd file a civil action and try to declare me and my business a public nuisance and seize all that equipment and sell it; split the proceeds between the sheriff's department and the DA."
Until or unless such a civil suit is filed, Grady's acquittal ends a run that began April 5, 2002, and saw him spend almost a year behind bars, unable to raise the bond for his freedom or to defend himself as he watched the case go from 720 charges to 866 charges. The odyssey started when a 17-year-old girl accused him of touching her inappropriately. The accusation was dumped almost as quickly as it arose when her story proved untenable to investigators, and the charges were cut back to 39 just before the trial began.
The case bumped around Colorado's courts over the question of whether the state's aggressive sexual-exploitation-of-minors laws actually applied to Grady's work. In fact, Grady's photo sessions with the 13 models in question, he and his attorney noted, all were accomplished with the models' consent - and, customarily, with a parent present for the photo shoots.
The prosecution and jury were instructed that the state had to prove that the pictures on the site, TrueTeenBabes.com, were taken deliberately for sexual arousal, said Chicago attorney J.D. Obenberger, who served as a constitutional consultant to the defense for this case. Contigulia said the pictures were taken for anything but. "We put on quite a bit of evidence to show this is the way it's done in the industry," he said, "and the jury agreed with us."
If the pictures in question were merely revealing - as is often the case when young models are displayed in mainstream fashion advertising - what provoked the Grady case in the first place? "People jumping to conclusions without all the facts," Contigulia said, "and without understanding what the law means."
What the furor meant to Contigulia and his client, in essence, was prosecuting Grady for a thought crime… for what someone else thought of his images. "We filed motions declaring the statute unconstitutional at the trial court level," he said. "We said what [they're] trying to do is punish a thought crime, but we said you can't consider what other people are thinking of this material in our analysis of whether Jim Grady broke the law. You can't punish what other people think about this stuff. Once you start to punish [that], you chip away at the cornerstone of our Constitution. We argued that to the judge. And the judge said, 'You're right.'"
It might be simple to picture Grady languishing in jail for almost a year, unable to post a bond that began at $1 million, was hiked to $1.5 million, but lowered again to $500,000 in the end. Languish was about the last thing he did, though, either in jail or during his trial. In fact, he was the kind of defendant Contigulia said many attorneys wish they represented: one completely engaged in and doing his own work on his own defense. "He was unbelievable during the trial and in all the preparations during the trial," Contigulia said. "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."
Grady said he was absolutely confident - even before his arrest - that he'd prevail in the criminal trial. "I was confident in my innocence from the day we knew an investigation was going, which was 33 days before the arrest," he said. "And we never removed anything [from the business]. Not a CD. Not a tape. Not a server. We never removed a thing from the studio, because we knew we were innocent. I told all the employees that if anyone needs to come by, let them in. We were confident."
Unfortunately, he added, doing the research he did to help his defense was anything but simple, once the county seized his business and assets. "They took everything," he said. "They even took the potted plants and the bicycle with the flat tire. And we believe, to this day, that the reason for that was so that there were no assets to be liquidated for us to put up a proper defense."
In an apparent case of bloodied but unbowed, Grady went to work regardless from jail. Through a number of legal contacts he had had for several years and other research he could do from jail, Grady made sure he was almost as prepared as his legal team was.
"I knew a law firm going back a lot of years, Miller and Steinert," he said. "I knew a partner, Mike Miller, for a number of years. And if he could help present the case, we'd be in pretty good shape. If the truth was a solid metal bar that could be laid across the table between us and law enforcement and not be bent, then I'd be walking out of jail. But if the prosecution could mold it into what it wasn't, I might be in trouble. We managed to keep the truth as a solid metal bar."
One positive turning point for the case was the unreliability of the 17-year-old complainant's testimony before trial.
"She claimed before her 18th birthday that I took naked pictures and touched her inappropriately and gave her alcohol," Grady said. "Unfortunately, the story that she gave was physically impossible. The location where she said it happened, the construction wasn't even finished until 23 days after her 18th birthday. And we also happened to pull out her 2257 documents, and included in those was her application for the modeling position, still dated two months later than her 18th birthday."
Grady said the girl isn't likely to face any kind of criminal charge for false accusation. In fact, he said, she was the only one of his models ever to speak against him. Twelve models answered prosecution subpoenas to testify at the trial, but none of them had anything ill to say at all, Grady said. A thirteenth refused the subpoena, he said, but even as she refused she said he did nothing wrong.
"The 12 on the stand all verified, all were asked the same question, 'Did he ever try to touch you, try to force you to wear anything? Was he totally professional?'" Grady said. "And they all told the truth. And the truth means I didn't break the law."
Still, he's waiting for a civil suit to fall into his lap.
"After seeing the lies and the way they tried to manipulate witnesses and the closing arguments," he said, "we think, as poor sports, that the Arapaho County District Attorney's office will try to do just that."
