Mike Jones is an adult industry photographer and former owner of CDBabes.com. More than three years ago, Mike's home and business were raided by law enforcement; he was subsequently charged with distributing obscenity and possession of child pornography. It was the latter accusation that would destroy Mike's business and reputation. Yet Jones wasn't a child pornographer, and after years of court proceedings, he proved it. This is his story.
Adult industry photographer and content provider Mike Jones was attending a regional adult industry conference in Chicago back in 2000 when his life and business were suddenly thrown into disarray. Mike was at the conference to promote his adult content site, CDBabes.com, in the hope of making a few more sales for his up-and-coming online business. His attorney,
J.D. Obenberger of XXXLaw.net, was also attending the gathering. The event started off well enough, but Mike's day was about to take a serious turn for the worse.
Mike was at the buffet table at the hotel when his cell phone started ringing. "It was this big, yellow, clunky cell phone. I still remember it," says Obenberger, who was next to Mike when the call came in. "He picks it up and he's talking to a member of his family and he goes ashen and then his eyes just go completely catatonic. It was somebody back at his house telling him that the police were all over his house and they were breaking the door in at his studios."
Trouble Brewing
Mike Jones got started in the adult photography business in the 1990s after years working at various jobs, including his own computer retail store. He moved his wife and three children to a home just outside the village of Greenwood, Ill., sometime around the year 1995; he opened a photography studio at a separate location about a quarter-mile from his home. Photography had been Mike's hobby for years, but the opportunities created by the mainstream's arrival to the Internet suddenly provided Mike with a chance to take his hobby to a more professional level. His wife was not only aware of Mike's business and supportive of his work, but she also was an active part of his operations. Mike was well-liked by those in the adult industry who knew him, and it seemed his venture was off to a great start.
The village of Greenwood was small, however, and some people who lived there had small-town values. When a local woman with a history of initiating legal disputes against the village learned that Mike was operating an adult business, she quickly decided that she wanted Mike to leave the area; she took her objections about Mike's presence to an acquaintance, who, according to police reports that would later come out in court, began making calls to law enforcement to complain about Mike's business and to urge the local sheriff's office to act.
Some time before the police raided Mike's home and studio, they paid him a visit to inquire about allegations they had received from parties, then undisclosed, that Mike might be taking nude pictures of underage girls. "When the police first came, they told me that it was an anonymous report that came in through Crime Stoppers, and they were investigating it," explains Jones. "[The police said] that an anonymous report had come in that I had done a video with two 13-year-old girls."
Having nothing to hide, Mike invited the officers in to his home, sat them down, and explained to them candidly what he did for a living. The officers seemed to be unaware of the record-keeping requirements set forth by 18 U.S.C. � 2257, so Mike explained that he kept age verification documents for all models that he shot, along with a signed model release. "I told them that if they ever had a question about any of the performers, on any of our Websites or on CD Babes, that they could feel free to come back to my house at any time and I would provide them with the information on the performer, copies of her ID, etc.," says Jones.
Mike's explanation seemed to satisfy the officers, and when they left his home that day it appeared to all that the misunderstanding had been settled. In fact, the investigating officer closed the case in June of that year, concluding that the accusations of child pornography were unfounded. Yet the locals who were intent on seeing Mike's business shut down would call the sheriff's office again, and even go so far as to convince the village attorney to call and suggest Mike be considered for charges of obscenity for some BDSM images that he sold through his adult content business.
When the police returned to Mike's home a few months after their initial visit, this time with a search warrant, it quickly became apparent that all hadn't been settled, and that Jones was in for a legal fight, not only for his business, but for his very freedom.
Search and Seizure
The raid on Mike's home occurred at a time when no adult was present. Mike was at the convention in Chicago, and his 18-year-old daughter had just cut her hand making a Halloween costume and was at the hospital emergency room with her mother, leaving Mike's 14-year-old daughter, her boyfriend, and Mike's 11-year-old son alone at the house when the police arrived. With no adults to object, the officers took Mike's daughter and son aside and asked them explicit questions, many of which would make most adults blush.
"They were asking [my children] questions like, 'Do you do nudie pictures for your daddy? Have you ever posed naked for your daddy? Have you ever had sex for your daddy? Have you ever been pregnant? Have you ever had an abortion? Have you ever been married? Have you ever been divorced?' That's what they asked a 14-year-old girl," says Jones.
Obenberger says that the police were absolutely invasive in their tactics while executing their search warrant at Mike's home. "This little girl didn't even know that there was such a thing as child porn," says Obenberger. "The whole thing was just a gross and disgusting experience."
By the time Mike arrived back at his home, the police had left the house but were still going through his studio. The police took everything that might store information about Mike's business, even sifting through his daughter's bedroom and taking her personal computer. They took financial records, and adult videotapes that were for personal use.
Stunned by the events of the evening, Mike ordered out for pizza and sat down with his attorney to plan out the defense. Obenberger says he remembers the evening vividly; the mood was one of complete hollowness and dread. Mike's kids were anxious and uneasy, and found it difficult to look their father in the eye. One of his daughters left the table to be alone.
Just down the road at Mike's photography studio, another group of officers kicked in the door and seized business records, photographs, floppy discs, computer equipment, CDs, and other items. "We went through the studio and it was pathetic," says Obenberger, describing the scene. "They left a camera, they left a tripod, they left his backdrops, and they left about a thousand 3x5 color prints. They took a huge number of color prints, and they took everything else electronic. They took two computers from there, four or five computers from his house; they took over a thousand videotapes, they took hundreds and hundreds if not thousands and thousands of CD-ROMs. They completely shut him down; he had no way to do e-mail except the laptop that he had taken with him to the show." After about 10 days, a portion of the materials were returned, though much of Mike's equipment was not; his primary business computer remains in police custody to this day.
The "Evidence"
Jones was eventually arrested and charged with two crimes: distribution of obscene materials, and possession of child pornography. It was the second charge that would mean hard times for Mike's business, CD Babes.
"YNOT jumped on the bandwagon right away with the defense fund," says Jones, referring to an effort made by the YNOT Network LP to raise money for Mike's defense. Other than that, support was hard to find. "Basically for the first 30 to 60 days our business went dead," says Jones. "People were in a panic; they thought my records had been seized and that people were going to come knocking on their doors because they had names and addresses of other Webmasters. They were afraid to buy from me because their information would be on file in my shop." Mike's business was cut in half in the first year alone. "The major players wouldn't play with me because of what was going on."
The charge of child porn actually was not related to Mike's business. After seizing Mike's work computer, investigators scoured its hard drive with forensics software designed to recover deleted files. Investigators found several images that they believed could be child pornography. The images were small thumbnail images found in an Internet browser's cache folder; all of the images had filenames that started with "TN," and all were downloaded in less than one minute at about 4:57 on Aug. 5, 2000. The images had already been deleted. There was no evidence that Mike had ever sought out child porn, or intentionally stored it on his computer, or was ever aware that the small thumbnail files had existed at all. No larger counterparts to these thumbnail images were ever recovered.
"It's apparent to me that some TGP page was accessed by someone using his office computer," explains Obenberger. "On the basis of those [thumbnail images], he was indicted on several counts of child pornography. We believe the state had zero chance of ever prevailing on child porn."
As for the charges of obscenity, that was an idea passed on to the sheriff's department from the local village attorney, Anthony Nettis. Once it became clear that Mike wasn't guilty of photographing underage girls, the issue of obscenity was indeed considered. An Illinois grand jury would eventually be asked to decide if Mike should be tried on charges of obscenity based on several explicit BDSM images that were pulled from his Website; while the facts that were presented to the grand jury are confidential, and its understanding of obscenity law unknown, it was the grand jury's ultimate decision that the state should proceed with charges of obscenity against Mike, as well as charges of possessing child pornography.
"We started negotiating immediately with the state's attorney Dan Regna," says Obenberger. "Dan Regna is actually a decent guy. I like him on a personal level... so we always had a good relationship through the whole course of the thing."
It would turn out that law enforcement had made a number of mistakes in their investigation of Mike and his business. In what would prove to be a pivotal issue in Mike's subsequent court hearings, law enforcement officers used questionable and overly broad methods in obtaining and carrying out the search warrant.
In order to obtain the warrant, an investigator took several pictures of legal-age nude models off of Mike's Website (not to be confused with the thumbnail images that would later be found), took them to a local emergency room doctor and asked for a professional opinion as to the age of the girls in the pictures. Though the physician would later admit that he recommended the investigator should simply go to Jones and ask him about the age of the girls in question, when the investigator insisted the doctor be the judge, the physician made a guess based on the size of the models' breasts and their lack of pubic hair (the girls had shaved). His verdict was that one model was between the ages of 14 and 17, and the other was between the ages of 15 and 18.
The doctor's flawed age estimate proved to be enough for investigators to get a search warrant. "They got a very broad warrant authorizing them to take everything," says Obenberger. "There's nothing identified particularly, not even these two pictures."
According to Regna, the investigation was never about politics, but was always about taking accusations of child porn seriously. Regna says that the grand jury could have decided that cause did not exist to pursue Mike for any charges, and he added that law enforcement never charged him up front with a crime before presenting the matter to the grand jury for its consideration. Regna claims that law enforcement was never interested in shutting Mike down, per se, but rather they were interested in being certain that a crime was not taking place.
To Jones, the motives of the law enforcement investigators were clearly political in nature. "The prosecution is trying to make this look like it was a standard investigation and that there was no politics involved, which is a pile of horse shit," says Jones. "They came out in March on a call from [the local village resident], they found nothing. They weren't doing anything until [the individual] and the village called again and started putting pressure on, and it was an election year. This thing was political as all hell."
Asked why law enforcement didn't just ask Mike for proof that the disputed models were of legal age when the pictures were shot, Regna claims that law enforcement had to be wary of the possibility that any existing evidence potentially stored at Mike's home or business could have been destroyed were Mike alerted to the investigation.
The End in Sight
As of this writing, Mike's court battle had lasted for three-and-a-half years. Fortunately for Jones, the judge assigned to his case was willing to listen to the facts of the case and abide strictly by the letter of the law. "The judge was very fair," says Jones. "She did her job. She upheld the law... she was always very straight and very fair."
After several procedural hurdles, Mike's attorneys filed a motion with the court to suppress the evidence obtained as a result of the broad search warrant. "[Obenberger associate] Reed Lee and I collaborated on the motion to suppress, itself; and the hearing - I did most of it; [Lee] cross-examined the forensic computer analyst; and then Reed substantially wrote the brief after the hearing," explains Obenberger.
In January, the motion to suppress was granted in court, leaving the prosecution without any of the evidence it had obtained through the search of Mike's home and studio. That, of course, included the recovered thumbnail images that were the basis of the child pornography charges. Obenberger is optimistic that this latest development will result in the prosecution dropping its case against Mike. "I think they see what kind of case this is," says Obenberger. "I expect this will probably be the end of the case, but we'll know in 30 days."
Jones is hopeful that his ordeal is finally coming to an end. "I am optimistic that it's over," says Jones. "I don't know what the state has to gain. The state has already acknowledged that they know that I never produced any of these images."
Regna was asked directly if the court's decision would mean an end to Mike's case, but he was not yet prepared to answer that definitively. Regna said only that the prosecution was still consider-ing all of the possibilities, and that a decision would be made soon as to the fate of the case. Lessons Learned
Having sold CDBabes.com in December of last year, Mike now finds himself trying to pick up the pieces and start over. He and his family moved out of Greenwood, the damage having already been done, but Mike hasn't shied away from the adult industry. Mike now finds himself shooting custom exclusive content for his clients, doing magazine layouts, and promoting his new Web site, PhotoStudio18.com.
Will the adult industry move on and support Mike and his content? Some already have.
"It's a matter of what the other people in the industry really believe," says Jones. "From day one when we started on the Internet, we always reported child pornography. In the days prior to the ASACP, we used to call the ISPs directly, we used to trace and find out where the site was being hosted from and immediately notify the ISP that they had child pornography on their system. As the ASACP evolved and we became involved with them we made all of our reports through the ASACP."
"He's not a child pornographer, and anyone who knew him knew he wasn't," says Obenberger. "He was devastated and destroyed by [the charges]."
According to Obenberger, Jones's case provides a number of lessons for other industry professionals to remember.
"We don't leave it to the unconstrained judgment of police officers to determine what is obscene, and by seizing something, close down its expression," says Obenberger. Pointing out that an officer does have the right to seize contraband when he sees it, such as illegal drugs, Obenberger stressed that officers don't have that same power when dealing with expressive materials like photographs that the officer feels might be obscene. "Because we value freedom of expression and society's right to receive the message as much as we do, [a police officer] has to go in front of a judge and tell the judge what he saw."
Obenberger said the search warrant that law enforcement executed was so broad that it amounted to nothing more than a fishing expedition - a fact that was directly responsible for the suppression of all evidence obtained through the illegal raid. "[The judge] held that Mike's business was an active, expressive enterprise publishing images, video, and Websites to the Internet, and so the scope and scale of the seizure impeded ongoing, presumptively protected expression in a manner that did violence to the Constitution."
UPDATE: Here We Go Again
At a mid-February status hearing, the state of Illinois filed a new motion to reconsider Jones' case. That motion was scheduled for a hearing March 19.
"The matter came for status Feb. 13, at which time we expected the state to dismiss the prosecution," said Obenberger. "Instead, the state was granted leave to file a motion for reconsideration, keeping the issue of suppression alive legally. And that motion was set for a hearing on March 19, three days after a primary election in a... contest between a candidate backed by the incumbent state's attorney and a candidate backed by the incumbent McHenry County Sheriff."
Further developments in this case will be reported on AVNOnline.com. o
Connor Young is Editor-in-Chief of The ADULTWEBMASTER MAGAZINE and YNOT News. Charles Farrar contributed to this article.
