Child porn is a cut-and-dry legal situation, but rare cases where an underage performer deceives otherwise legitimate producers of adult pornography by producing forged legal documents has a much more murky legal history.
RK Netmedia, producers of the popular Reality Kings network of sites, finds themselves in hot legal water for producing and shortly posting a movie called Cum Fiesta allegedly featuring a 15-year-old runaway billed as "Bieyanka Moore". While this case so far has only attracted civil lawsuits and no previous similar high-profile cases have occurred in Florida or featured a girl quite so young, the history of prosecution of porn companies who found themselves in similar situations has mixed results.
Here's a short and horrible history of underage porn scandals.
Porn legend Sharon Mitchell has claimed that she made her first adult movie six months before her 18th birthday back in the '70s, though some doubt her claim and the film was never pulled. Nor were there any legal actions. Today Mitchell is the director of the Adult Industry Medical Healthcare Foundation, the main organization charged with STD testing of adult models in California. AIM has come under fire for defending the practice of not using condoms in straight videos and for possibly being the source of a recently leaked list of porn performers' real names. The clinic is currently "closed for renovations" with some wondering whether it will ever reopen.
The Traci Lords scandal is perhaps the most well-known such scandal in history. At 15, Lords began posing for adult magazines, and quickly ventured into porn. She appeared in more than 100 movies before she turned 18, and was one of the most popular models in the industry. In 1986, federal authorities found out that Lords was underage during the filming of all but one of her films. No one, including Lords or her scene partners, ever went to jail over the scandal, but it led to several court cases and tougher laws regulating the adult industry. Today Lords still supports herself as an actress, usually in B-Movies and TV guest spots.
Following the Lords scandal, authorities began investigating the possibility that other porn actresses under the age of 18 were working in the industry. Films starring Kristara Barrington, Ali Moore and Nikki Charm were ultimately pulled as a precautionary measure. All three of the actresses dispute that they were ever underage during their scenes and continued to work in the industry. No charges were ever filed in the investigations.
It isn't always straight porn that causes underage scandals. The Brent Corrigan scandal is the most recent high-profile, and perhaps most twisted underage porn scandal. The Zak Efron-doppelganger. Corrigan starred in several bareback (without condom) films for shady "twink" studio Cobra Films while only 17 years old using forged documents. He also began sleeping with Cobra Video owner Bryan Kocis, who was in his 40s. Corrigan came public with his age in 2005, and the videos were pulled. Kocis was never charged with anything, but was murdered by two male escorts two years latter, and Corrigan continues to perform in adult movies with condoms.
In 2008 Rufus Ffoulkes of England, a producer and performer of condomless gay porn featuring "twinks," was sentenced to nearly three-years in prison after his film, "Royal Raw Auditions 1" was found to have included a 16-year-old actor known a "Harry." Ffoulkes was apparently ratted out by another legal model after checks had bounced, but Ffoulkes claimed he did not know that boy was underaged. The film was pulled from circulation.
In the most recent, and only other similar high profile case in Florida, Girls Gone Wild was sued for filming a topless girl who claimed they were underage at the time. GGW honcho Joe Francis appeared in a Panama City court on March 28th, and just last week the jury decided that GGW would not have to pay any damages. Though, they found Francis's behavior "beyond all possible bounds of decency and is regarded as shocking, atrocious and utterly intolerable in a civilized community." Francis has found himself in similar situations concerning underaged girls before, and has been fined millions of dollars for failing to keep records of their models' ages.
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