The owners of the adult retail store The Bad Kitty have been charged with breaking local obscenity laws, one year after police officers seized 233 DVDs from the store.
The only DVDs known to be involved in the charges are Snoop Dogg’s Hustlaz: Diary of a Pimp, the winner of the AVN Award for 2004’s Top Selling Tape of the Year and Barely Legal 30, both Hustler Video titles.
City Prosecutor Gary Haynes told the Lafayette Daily Advertiser that the charges against Ryan and Erika Hargroder were filed after police investigators determined that the videos were obscene.
“Police have reviewed the videos and found they meet the criteria,” Haynes told the Advertiser. “... The material, according to police, shows explicit, hard-core sexual acts.”
Obscenity carries up $2,500 in fines and/or up to three years in jail.
Calls to the Hargroders by AVN.com were not returned.
Louisiana ACLU Director Joe Cook, while not taking the Hargroders’ defense, did decry the charges against them. “The Supreme Court did a great disservice by carving out an obscenity exception to the First Amendment. ... Censoring pornography can’t eliminate evil. It can only kill freedom,” he said.
Haynes said that one of the things he asked officers to look for was which body parts were exposed while sex acts were performed on the videos. Haynes wouldn’t give more information about what officers were asked to watch for, but added that it wasn’t a “checklist.”
Hustler Video titles, considered well within the norms of the adult industry, were also cited in the obscenity conviction of Sasha Birmin in Ruston, Louisiana.
Larry Flynt has previously stated that Louisiana was one of twelve states that Hustler would not ship too. In Birmin’s case, he had bought Hustler titles from a distributor in another state.
