Sex Writer On "Obscene" Website Sentenced To Home Detention

Brian Fairbanks — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 16:38:00 GMT

A woman whose website, Red Rose Stories, was shuttered three years ago by the Feds, pleaded guilty yesterday to obscenity charges and received a long term of probation plus six months of home confinement.

Wait, fiftysomething years after Howl and Naked Lunch, they're still busting people for "obscenity," particularly on the internet? We had to find out just what the site could have presented that could get its owner in so much trouble...

Karen Fletcher is the owner of Red Rose Stories. She's a 56-year-old Pennsylvania woman who happens to live in the district covered by crusading US attorney Mary Beth Buchanan, a staple of the Alberto Gonzales/George W. Bush Justice Department and her website contained

stories that allegedly involved bestiality, water sports, scat, bondage and domination, S&M, slavery, threesomes, orgies and sex with children.

Note that not one of Fletcher's pages featured photos of any kind, nor did the site explicitly encourage real-life encounters with children. After her arrest, Fletcher quipped that, to her, it seemed "the only legal sex stories are those that involve a man and a woman consenting to missionary position sex in a dark room.”

Buchanan "has gone on a rampage trying to stamp out expression that doesn't meet her standards of morality," Marc John Randazza, a law professor at the Barry University School of Law in Orlando, wrote on his blog.
Randazza, who teaches about free speech rights and other legal issues, acknowledges that the content of Red Rose Stories was shocking, but he suggested the U.S. Constitution protects fictional stories. "If you believe in the Constitution, and you believe in what this country means, you can NOT believe that any American should ever face prison for writing fiction -- no matter what the subject matter of that fiction might be," he wrote in a blog post.

What do you think? Was Fletcher a fool for writing about child sex and enjoying it?

Via Anarchist Librarians and PC World.

Judge In Trouble For Bestiality Photos, Lingerie Parties

Brian Fairbanks — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 14:01:00 GMT

A judge in Los Angeles, due to hear a major obscenity trial, is in hot water after the contents of his website became public... although no one yet knows how they did...

1) Alex Kozinski is the chief Judge of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. In 1996, he had a diary that was recently published, in the wake of the current scandal, on Slate. There isn't much here that he would have to recuse himself over-- unless you consider a lingerie (and pajama) party "obscenity." Looking at the above picture, we're not sure how we feel, mainly because of said party's obvious IQ average.

2) He was about to preside over what will surely become a landmark free speech case.

For jurors to determine whether [Ira] Isaacs' work is obscene, they will view hours of hard-core pornography so degrading that in one film, an actress cries throughout, prosecutors said in court papers.

But if jurors find that any of the four videos at issue in the case have any "literary, scientific or artistic value," the work is not legally obscene, according to a 1973 Supreme Court ruling.

"All they're going to do is turn on a DVD machine and hope the jury is going to be so shocked and disgusted and offended that they're going to throw me in prison," said Isaacs, 57, a native of the Bronx. He said he hopes that jurors will be shocked -- he's a self-described "shock artist" -- but also that they will see artistic value in the work. [LA Times]

3) Kozinski's site, which is now down for good, "included a photo of naked women on all fours painted to look like cows and a video of a half-dressed man cavorting with a sexually aroused farm animal. Some of the material was inappropriate, he conceded, although he defended other sexually explicit content as 'funny.'"

4) The trial was suspended today following the public outcry. He may be removed from the case, although hopefully not.

5) He would've seen this case for what it was-- a disgrace to the Bill of Rights/First Amendment. Lenny Bruce will have died in vain. Henry Miller would have written all those books for nothing. And Bill Burroughs would return from the dead and shoot everyone in a William Tell Trick gone wrong.

To be continued...

Via the LA Times.

Scanner : obscene

Sex Writer On "Obscene" Website Sentenced To Home Detention

Judge In Trouble For Bestiality Photos, Lingerie Parties