@ivy

LOL That critical thinking thing is a bitch! Still nice he raised so many things as topics for consideration. It would be nice if agents decided who their client is (i.e. buyer/seller real estate agents) and/or made an effort to separate and define charges for the various services they offer.

The (model house) rent, transportation, cash advances (personal use/testing) stuff isn’t limited to porn. Same shit happens in hospitality, agriculture, miners, construction and more.

Unions are geared towards protecting ‘regular’ dues paying jobs …aka protecting their revenue source…which means they aren’t the best stewards or advocates for temporary or intermittent workers.

Stakeholders are damned if they do & damned if they don’t. If they do they’re still assumed to be a don’t while the don’ts are claiming they do. 🙂 Stakeholders who have been transitioning into compliance with the US employer role are going to be the force that brings those ducking & dodging into the grey area or out in the cold.

It’s not an overnight process. Andrew in 1992 changed construction in Florida where every effort to enforce standards was like spitting in the ocean. Pre storm price gouging and post storm scammer policies got written pretty quick some of it even helped when Katrina happened over ten years later and finally had a noticeable effect when Sandy hit 20 years after Andrew.

@laura great suggestion, I enjoyed watching the interview. Personally I like voodoo, although I had never heard about him before a few weeks ago. I did admire seeing him defend various people, and he seemed like an overall good dude.

That being said. I did not like how he phrased Stoya’s decision to sell her footage with Deen. It came off a little victim blamey – and it’s my understanding that Stoya ruffled a few people’s feathers. So, my gut instinct was that Voodoo is not a loyal friend of Stoya’s. Don’t know if I can really read further into that without more evidence, but it seemed odd to me that he picked Stoya apart, when he didn’t do that to any others.

But it was good to see that his opinions meshed with what we’ve all been on Mike’s blog. Ok so on Voodoo’s 3 fixes:
1. Get rid of tube sites
2. Get rid of agencies
3. 3rd party advocates

So before I start with this takedown, not sure how many saw in the news that an anonymous rich person bought the Las Vegas review. Makes ya wonder with the avn xbiz buyout. Happenin so close together, ya think?

1. free sites aint go away and the quicker people in the industry realize that, the more useful and quick their fixes will be. people have to stop suggestions that, its just moronic and proves that you haven’t thought critically about your ideas.

2. Ok this is another dumb idea too. Fashion models have agencies. If your gonna keep calling porners models, well …. I dunno what to tell ya aint trying to tell nobobody how to run their business….but you know what some people ought to sit down and the connect the dots here.

3. sounds good in theory but just another useless pair of hands siphoning money. and what if the 3rd party advocate joins in on that kind of bohemian lifestyle and in cahoots well then another parasitic person yet again, gets paid for nothing.

I think a porn union is a great idea. I don’t think that’s gonna happen. I think the industry will do as little as possible, in making fixes for itself, because it likes the status quo. they will find people to spot light and everything will look brand new and shiny, because there will be a ton of people coming out saying what a great industry it is.

Ok, so really if you want to boil down to it. Illegal shit is happening. How do you fix that? I haven’t thought to hard about it yet, but i’m thinkin. Like I said before, porns a grey industry. All fixes would have to…grey.

It was interesting. TY for mentioning it.

I’m not sure this is a hiatus for Deen with fixed location stakeholders. He is known for pushing the limits and it would be risky even if he adhered to some kind of retraining protocol which doesn’t exist.

His idea of an outside (third party) on-set monitoring isn’t feasible. It’s possible performers will start seeing set advocates on sets run by stakeholders with something to lose if a director they’re paying goes rogue. Set advocates will help performers as a go between but they’re loyalty is to the stakeholder not performers.

Some fixed location stakeholders are no doubt already looking into how to rent space and equipment to directors to transfer the production stakeholder liabilities.

The game is changing but the tube site piracy part isn’t cuz the biggest pirates are at the table making the rules up ditching copyright protections to keep money flowing into their pockets off your work…of course they’ll claim your work couldn’t be marketed without their tubes.

He packed a lot into the time he had, his take on agents was interesting.

For kinks OSHA appeal Final (post hearing) briefs were due 3/13/15
The findings were published in April
Two lawsuits filed in late April.

If you search ‘Cybernet’ on cal/OSHA they are still working with OSHA.

This glassdoor comment Ivy shared. “Mar 4, 2015-Poor leadership and decisions are made out of self preservation and fear.”

Anyone else wonder if the writer of that comment would try to ride out a cat 4/5 hurricane on a hotel balcony? Or shelter in place thru a wildfire? Lol

For the most part we are pretty civil. Other than the infamous one that started fights on here (I won’t mention his name because last time I did he posted a rant here and I don’t wish to encourage him to start posting again) the award for most caustic poster here would go to either Hop Sing or myself. I think I may have only been edited on here once or twice (I don’t recall any but I will allow for me missing one or two) in almost ten years and probably 800-1000 posts. I think Hop has a similar moderator edit ratio although he has far fewer posts and started out posting solely to needle me. There was a guy (I forgot his name but his English was poor) that was posting Rob Black blog posts verbatim (with his permission) and was moderator edited a couple of times due to the heinous content of Rob’s articles.

Funny thing, I clicked my old Rob Black bookmark tonight for the first time in at least a year, he is still making daily podcast videos and posting blog posts under the name Rob Zicari (his legal name) and working with a Katie Howard. A quick perusal did not bring up any porn-related material. I wonder if he even gets ten viewers a day, I think most of his viewership before was porn people tuning in to see who he would slander in the industry today.

My understanding is their contracts expired Dec. 31, 2014 or thereabouts. They were gone by the start of work in January 2015. Donna still hasn’t found a job to my knowledge (maybe she had a one-year non-compete clause in her contract — although NCCs longer than 90 days are difficult for a company to actually enforce, maybe there is more to her canning than even we know about, maybe she took her (estimated) $5 million plus salary over her tenure and retired — I don’t know but I do know she bought a motorhome and traveled the country for part of 2015). One of Princess Donna’s friends (I don’t recall which one off-hand) claimed she left because Peter wanted the BDSM tamed down and she could not compromise her integrity by doing so (I have a hard time believing that, though considering the Cameron Bay debacle likely went down on her watch, my understanding was she was at least on set that day even though Cameron/Weinstein claim Lorelei Lee was directing).

My understanding is Marty also had an incident with Cameron Bay on his set although it was not nearly as severe as the one on Donna’s He was Peter’s first employee in 2000-2001, he started as a PA but within two years he was directing, he only directed two sites at most and many times only one so he may not have made the money Princess Donna or Tomcat made — my estimate is he may have made $5 million or so over 13 years of directing at Kink.

I am at a loss as to why Tomcat left other than maybe he took the (estimated) $5 million plus he made over the past ten years and retired with it. I would be very interested to know what his reason for leaving actually was.

I don’t know if it matters but Lorelei started her six month vacation in February 2015 and Van Darkholme in March.

Lurk, you can also note that Peter may have decided to not renew their contracts in 2013 when this all went down but could not fire them until their then-current contracts ran out. A copy of Princess Donna’s employment contract would probably be very interesting to read IMO. A million dollar plus buyout (my $500K per annum salary/commission estimate could end up being extremely conservative as Kink directors are paid partially on commission based on their sites revenues, the staff meeting on a documentary I watched on Kink showed that $130K per week gross revenue for a site was considered on the lower end in about 2012) plus hiring and possibly training new directors to replace someone like her could get costly quick! With commission-based salary Kink could also have ended up paying double commissions on their (former) sites (one to them and one to their replacements) if they had been canned before their contracts were up. $130K per week comes to $6.76 million per year, even if Kink only pays 5% of that commissions on that would be $338K per year, I doubt Kink was getting off that light, with salary (Peter said he paid both a set salary and commissions) $500K per annum is probably a very conservative estimate especially for Donna who had quite a following, I would not be surprised if Public Disgrace and Wired Pussy grossed twice the $130K cited as a bad week for a site (Tomcat’s Fucking Machines was the site cited that week as grossing $130K) or more.

@Mharris TY if you know the week or even which month it would be helpful to compare against OSHA event dates.

@Ivy I think the APAC press release was at least in part motivated as white-knight support. First glance reaction to Kink was they were throwing him under the bus, second glance was like whoa this has nothing absofuckinglutely nothing to do with tweets unless seeing them encouraged others to speak up.

bbl got to rescue gravy from hungry folks threatening to crank it up…evil looks aren’t cutting it 🙂

@Ivy

Given the reaction this got her today I conclude Victim blaming/shaming, rape culture etc is a hot topic that becomes contentious even in like minded circles. No way to keep up with the between plays topic of convo but this is the gist of it once the die hard game watchers booted us to the kitchen.

His rebuttal to your reply crossed the line.
He didn’t recognize your disclosures were prompted by the very same current events he says prompted him to cherry pick vague broad statements to support his prediction.

“Predictably, there has been quite an outcry about the need to believe women who claim rape and why does it take numerous women coming forward for them to be believed, etc”

His rebuttal begins with an ambiguous statement that people can’t explain themselves on open comment forums…..is he suggesting
A. we don’t know how to say what’s on our minds?
B. He didn’t intend to jab his red hot poker thoughts about his remote idea into your very real up close personal experiences?
C. Some subtle point we missed cuz we didn’t jump through the Internet for a f2f so he could his listeners body language to hone his message?
D. WTF!

An attorney? There goes option B cuz this forum is an attorney dream welcoming unsolicited written submissions in their entirety unedited, uninterrupted, unformatted too.

Was the attorney claim supposed to validate his initial opinion…still not persuaded. Asserting authority to intimidate? micro/macro deflection attempt.

Back to WTF with “Plus, the whole discussion was on Deen specifically, not rape in general.” He’s got friends here if he defends rapists gifting bubba with bitches using these unpersuasive arguments.

Skipping past silly willy nilly wishy washy we get to but….ordinarily this means the rest is bullshit….in this situation it is the heart of the matter.

“but I think the accuser’s decision not to press charges or say something at the time goes to her/their credibility. ”

For someone claiming to be an attorney advocating reputation preservation this is seriously fucked up.

Has the statue of limitations run out? Is the accusers credibility restored with a police report? Is this limited to Deen/Stoya? All his accusers or rape in general?

“Why isn’t fair to question (not accuse or attack, but just question) why they didn’t say anything at the time? ”

Fair? Her credibility aka reputation is damaged if she didn’t call the cops and if she does she’s the Duke Lacrosse false accuser? He doesn’t even pretend he asking out of curiosity to get a picture of the events timeline. Fair? Where are the questions to the accused?

“How can anyone defend himself so long after the fact?”
Indeed! Or immediately when their credibility rests on arbitrary benchmarks.

“It also worries me to see someone tried in the “court of public opinion” vs a “court of law.” A person’s reputation is priceless. It’s so hard to build and so easy to destroy.”

Then why destroy the accusers reputation in the court of public opinion where they aren’t afforded the protections in a court of law?

By his standards Deen isn’t credible because he hasn’t filed a police report for harrasment nor filed a civil suit for defamation. Why didn’t he do so immediately? Too traumatized? Doing the best he could through the emotional and physical trauma? Coping with an extreme betrayal of trust?

“Here a person will forever be remembered as a rapist, essentially based on a few tweets and interviews. That’s pretty rough.”

Why are his tweets and interviews any more credible than hers? Seems harsh to brand accusers LIAR because you don’t want what they said to be true. Innocent until proven guilty in a court of law is a myth. SMH spewing ‘why isn’t it fair’ while tipping the scales with arbitrary benchmarks added to one side.

“I don’t know, hopefully that sort of clears up my thoughts….maybe not…it’s been a long week.”

If he’s really an attorney his week just got longer. He comes across as a CrazyAssTrollingRapeApologist claiming to be a NormalAndSaneAttorney.

A survivor told me to add, this won’t restore you but he hopes sharing it with you lets you know you aren’t alone. Through this I learned and revisited a lot especially the ways …why didn’t you…magnifies trauma. We were all surprised to see how many ways we play into the culture without even knowing it.

@normalandsane I agree with you on this point:
“Yeah, but Deen just admitted that he’d only worked for them once in the last year, so it’s not like they were really doing anything of substance there. That’s another red flag to me. Total PR move of getting out in front of a story to hide the real story.”

@lurkingreader You even mentioned something along these lines, that when Kink dropped Deen it wasn’t to be “a whiteknight” but to save their own asses because of the multiple lawsuits, and correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe that you were the first on Mike’s blog to say that.

Aurora Snow writing for the daily beast last year, “Despite signing paperwork and a checklist of dos and don’ts, I was in way over my head. What I thought I was agreeing to felt a lot different in reality. I was groped by hands I didn’t know…It felt more like a party for the extras than a professional scene.” and “After the scene, I did a brief on camera interview about my experience—a standard company procedure. I nodded my head, smiled, and said all the right things. To me, that interview was also part of the job. It’s also filmed before performers are paid, or at least that’s been my experience.”
So when I think about this, in the big picture I look at it this way. Ok so there were some problems with kink in the last few years, which are easily google-able. And then there was the issue of the California condom law, it would make sense to me that a bunch of directors would leave Kink so they could focus more on their own content or their own company. But, 11 at the same time? @lurkingreader I think the cleaning house idea, and getting all the ducks in a row seems like a reasonable explanation, but then I also wonder who came in after. Did they just downsize? Looking at past articles for kink in a google search, I get the impression that “rebranding” was important to Kink, after the public disgrace and cameron bay stuff.
And playing devil’s advocate, I think I would quite frankly, be MORE shocked if Kink hadn’t had any problems at all with lawsuits and models, due to the nature of the work environment.
So, if Kink is ahead of the curve, and the best business model for the industry, as far as safety, profitability, and the amount of work available, why would Kink not work with Deen much for about a year? Clearly they had to have known, even back then what a black sheep he was. Of course he has his own site, his own content, but if Deen is just sooooooo into hardcore sex, well I would think he would be living there every day and just living the best life that Kink has to offer him.
I think for me, what I have trouble believing is how can you make a big company like Kink truly safe? No company is ever going to have 100% happy employees where nothing goes wrong ever, but what is the acceptable threshold for safety violations? And really, whats an appropriate solution? Sex police with rape whistles? Thats a joke of course. To me, it seems like Kink is still trying to figure that out, figure out that balance.
And to wrap it up, here are some interesting reviews about Kink from Glassdoor.com. I gotta say, great if Kink’s cleaning house and making it all shiny, but some of these glassdoor reviews make it seem like something was brewing in Kink, before they dropped Deen.

Apr 14, 2015-Very poor project management. All of the classic problems associated with an seriously unsupervised development culture. Stop burning out or alienating your operations staff, and continue to vigorously and visibly stand by your ethical principles.”

May 4, 2015-“HR is 100% against you. If you have the nerve to go to HR to talk about the way you were being treated you’re almost guaranteed to be fired. I watch over half the staff get fired for absolutely nothing. If you work hard to do your job it means nothing if your complete slacker that never does your job, push all your work on other employees and shows up late you get a pat on the back. The drug usage by staff and models… ”

Mar 16, 2015- Advice to Management The COO is a sycophant.

Feb 23, 2015- They fire and lay off people almost every week. Sometimes for reason, but most of the time it does not seem to make any sense. Moral is low overall because no one knows when the hammer is going to fall on them. In the last 3 months they have laid off or fired a couple of dozen people and had several others leave of their own accord, including the head of HR and a couple of prominent directors.

Mar 4, 2015-Poor leadership and decisions are made out of self preservation and fear. Advice to Management Stop pretending you care about employees and telling them their jobs are “safe” after each layoff. Just own up and tell employees that they are not your priority. If the goal is to make money at any cost, just be honest.