The latest shots fired between Sex.com owner Gary Kremen and the man convicted of stealing the domain from him, Stephen Michael Cohen, wasn’t of the legal variety, it came in the form a press release calling Kremen a child molester and drug addict.
Kremen believes the release was the work of Cohen, a claim that the international fugitive denied entirely.
The release was published on the PRWEB on June 4 and removed Monday morning after a PRWEB representative became aware of it. It came with a contact name – Nancy Howard of Pacific Media – and a phone number, at which no one had ever heard of Nancy Howard.
Kremen, however, wasn’t surprised. In fact, he said Cohen sent him a copy of the release several days beforehand.
“I knew he was going to do it, but what can you do. You’re dealing with a kook,” he tells AVNOnline.com.
“That’s bullshit. I never sent him a copy of it. I don’t know if [the release] is true or not. I tend to believe it’s not, but I absolutely knew nothing about it,” Cohen says. “The man is sick. Anything that happens to him, he automatically blames on me.”
Cohen and Kremen have been exchanging similar jabs for years, including Cohen’s filing of lis pendens, pending suits against Kremen’s physical properties, and Kremen’s attempt to acquire some of Cohen’s personal details by sending him a check in hopes that he would cash it. In response to the check, Cohen returned it with an inflatable doll and a note saying, “Nice try.”
The PRWEB service allows anyone with an account to post press releases, as long as they supply an email address, name, and company. An editor checks every release for newsworthiness and grammar, but not necessarily validity.
“We have a number of editors who have their own idea about what should get posted, but when I read something like this, I have to wonder if it’s even something we want on our site,” Alex Linde, a PRWEB business development associate tells AVNOnline.com.
The headline of the release read, “Sex.com Owner Arrested for Child Molestation and Possession of Heroin in San Francisco, California,” and the opening sentence read, “A police source familiar with the incident stated that Kremen is a well known user of drugs such as speed and heroin and has admitted to being bisexual during a police interview.”
Kremen said his lawyers would be asking PRWEB for a retraction.
The company has few measures in place to stop such abuses of their system.
“The only action we could take is to say you can never use our site again. Whether or not they register under a different name or something, people, I’m sure, can get by that. But we really are trying to facilitate the distribution of news. If someone has a problem with the information put out, we really hope the two parties can resolve it themselves. We’re very amiable to taking the press release down immediately if there are problems, but we get so many press releases a day and aren’t charging for accounts, therefore it’s almost impossible for us to vet all the information correctly,” Linde says.
In late March, a federal appeals court rejected Cohen’s 2001 appeal that he pay Kremen $65 million for stealing Sex.com in 1995 and making millions of dollars with it.
Cohen, who is now in the casino industry in Europe, said he planned to file an appeal with the U.S. Supreme Court within the next few weeks.
“This will be the last shot. If I lose on this, that will be it,” he says.
