The so-called Million Dollar Madam has a novel defense in the case of her December bust for sending call girls to high-price dens in Manhattan high rises: porn makers are prostitutes, too. Jenny Paulino's attorneys filed papers March 11 suggesting the prosecutors try going after the porn industry instead of unfairly targeting a madam. "Promoting prostitution," argued the attorneys in the filing, "is paying someone to have sex. Time Warner and the others who have adult channels pay people to have sex so they can film it and show it, but they're not being prosecuted." Prosecutors have "several weeks to respond in writing" to the Paulino argument, according to reports from New York.
Writing is what got a deputy prosecutor in Marion County, Indiana canned. That's because Jay Meisenhelder—the county's sex crimes prosecutor, as it happened—wrote a rather amorous e-mail to a 16-year-old girl. He insisted he did nothing more than act in friendship. But his bosses thought the e-mail suggested otherwise: "I love you as I have loved only two other women in my life," wrote the 53-year-old Meisenhelder in the fateful e-mail. "I also know that my feelings are not going to change anytime soon." His job status, however, changed only too soon for his trouble. Meisenhelder's attorney and longtime friend, Roberta Ross, defended him, saying he was only expressing a fantasy with the teenager—with whom he co-starred in a local production of Annie—and that his firing was an overraction.
You could say that, if she's guilty, Shannon Marie Lorenzo had a particularly obscene overreaction to a custody battle with her former husband: She's accused of conspiring to kill him and then of breaking into his house to plant child porn pictures of their two-year-old child—the pictures featured the child with a sex toy and suggesting that the child might have been sodomized. Authorities in Prattville, Alabama say the images were probably fakes intended to imply Lorenzo's ex, Chad Baker, had abused the child. At this writing, she's in the Autauga Metro clink under constant watch and separated from the general inmate population since her March 13 arrest. She faces state charges of conspiracy to commit murder (she's accused of trying to find someone to kill Baker) and permitting a child to engage in production of obscene material—good for a pair of life sentences if found guilty.
We can only imagine the reaction (over or otherwise) Dutch police had, when what began as a bid to stop a kidnapping ended up with their tripping over an elaborate and slightly kinky sex game. They saw a blonde woman being manhandled and put in the back of a van, in Brunssum, scrambled helicopter, bikes, and squad cars, trailed the van to Heerlen…and got ripped the proverbial new one when they unbound and ungagged the blonde: "You stupid bastards! I've been trying to set this up for months! And now you've ruined it, just when it was getting interesting!" They let the three men go and suggested the blonde think of arranging her next kinky kidnapping in her own home.
On the other hand, some Dutch police officers have a discomfiting twist on mixing business with pleasure: prostitues in Groningen complaining to the city's mayor that a few too many politieagenten have been turning up—not to arrest them but to watch them practice their profession. "Instead of focused inspections," complained De Straatmadelief, a prostitutes' foundation, "they are coming and watching like monkeys. If it is quiet in the city centre, dozens of cars come to the street sex zone to watch. But if the police are really needed when there is trouble, you don't see anyone."
And now, we go from insane to mere bedlam and back…
>>Bombshell A package awaiting delivery at a German post office panicked workers when its vibrating and strange noises suggested a bomb about to blow up. Did they learn the hard way about this bombshell…
>> Up and Down Staircase Ohio lost the head of the interstate support division in its Office of Child Support, Marcus Lee, and state business analyst Teresa Householder, in the stairwell. That's because the state canned them over what they had in the stairwell: sex.
>>Sex and the Campus Newspapers Cutoff One too many sex surveys, columns on sexual technique tips, and sexually explicit photographs in the Arizona State University student newspaper may equal no more state funding for any university student papers in the state, if a few outraged state lawmakers have their way.
>>Stealing Fatherhood Just because his former lover stole his sperm after oral sex to inseminate herself secretly doesn't mean a Chicago doctor gets out of parenthood's legal obligations, according to the Cook County family court judge who also doubled the doctor's child support payments—for a five year old daughter he has never even met.
>>Breaking, Entering, and Porn Watching Yes, it sounds like the plotline for a particularly tasteless adult film, but here goes: Seattle police want to nail the man who broke into a Capitol Hill area apartment March 1, tied up the two residents therein, and watched porn on their television set.
