Not only does Robert Zicari (Rob Black) believe too many in the business have not stood up and fought against vice hunters in and out of government, but a cover story in the forthcoming May issue of Reason says Zicari has "reached out to some of his better funded peers" in adult entertainment – including Hustler founder-publisher Larry Flynt – to little if any response.
"He's correct," Flynt told AVN.com in a telephone interview. "I had a request from them for money for their defense fund. I spoke with (other producers) who just echoed my feelings, we've got a guy who's bringing a lot of heat on the adult industry.
"I've been involved in more obscenity cases than probably anybody who's been around now," the Hustler publisher continued. "Sure, I push the envelope. But when I started out in 1974, much of the stuff I'm publishing you can see on cable and satellite TV now. I wasn't going into court and having to say, 'you know, this is garbage, but it's protected under the First Amendment.'"
"The feds are kicking themselves in the balls right now because they hit me first," Zicari chief told freelance journalist G. Beato, who wrote "X-Treme Measures,", based on interviews he did of Zicari and other adult entertainment figures during January's Adult Entertainment Expo, for Reason, a libertarian opinion and investigative reporting magazine.
"Anybody else in this industry would have already copped a plea, and that's just what the government wants," Zicari told Beato. "They don't want millions of people debating this issue. They don't want a big firestorm of publicity. They want to do this quietly."
Flynt said Zicari deserves First Amendment protection because "all forms of expression are legally protected by the First Amendment," but he questioned whether Zicari has matched responsibility to his First Amendment protection.
"What we're talking about here is an industry that everybody is doing very well in," Flynt said. "Everyone is following certain guidelines. Not just what they produce but where they ship them to, where they're being sold from. And as a result, this industry has grown from a $600 million industry in the early 1970s to an $11 billion industry today. But it's because, you know, we have businessmen running it, not people that wanted to see how kinky or weird they could get."
"There's a lot of people in this industry who think it's not them, it's me," Zicari told Beato. "But honestly, if those motherfuckers think that (Attorney General John) Ashcroft has hired 25 prosecutors to get me and that's it, then they are unbelievably delusional."
Flynt said he doesn't think the government is so much singling Zicari out as doing "the logical thing to go after the worst first. That's why he was selected for prosecution."
But Flynt did agree with Zicari that, if he and Extreme go down, "they'll be coming after the entire industry." On the other hand, Flynt continued, Zicari brought it about himself. "Not us," Flynt said. "He's trying to say that the reason why we should help with his defense fund is, because if he gets convicted we're next. And he's right. We are next. But it's something that he created."
Beato in Reason observed that questions abound as to why porn is held to a higher standard than other pop culture genres. "Are the two amateurishly simulated murders in Forced Entry somehow more offensive than the dozens of expertly simulated murders in Jason vs. Freddy> or Gangs of New York?" he wrote. "Is the difference between eating semen-spattered dog food in a porn movie and eating raw pig rectums on Fear Factor really so pronounced that the former deserves a jail sentence while the latter becomes a prime-time major network staple?"
Flynt said you can count on one hand the adult directors "bent on doing, you know, things that are real demeaning toward women…You don't want a jury of at least half women sitting there seeing this. It's cutting your own throat. This has nothing to do with the First Amendment, it takes an idiot to create a product that he knows he can't defend in court that's going to send him to prison."
Zicari and his wife, Janet Romano (a.k.a. Lizzy Borden) were indicted last August on ten counts of violating federal obscenity laws, each facing maximum 50-year sentences and $2.5 million in fines. "By comparison," Beato wrote, "the maximum sentence for actual rape in Pennsylvania is 20 years."
Federal prosecutor Mary Beth Buchanan, who is handling the Extreme Associates prosecution, told Beato the government lacks the resources to prosecute every "instance of the illegal distribution of obscenity. But if the law isn't enforced, the material is going to proliferate and become more violent, more degrading, and more disgusting. So there have to be limits."
Zicari's attorney, Louis Sirkin, told Beato he considers censorship a cancer. "Once it starts," he said, "it spreads pretty rapidly."
