HEY MR.SOUTHPOLE,
A few of us traveled about 2 hrs to go see Felicia Fox dance at a club in Columbus ,OH.Let me tell you we weren’t disappointed at all by her performance.There was about 12-15 of us Caravan from Hustler Ohio to go see her.I have seen her dance many times and never seen such energy put in a performance as I seen hers.The main reason i’m writing about this that i’m not a 100% sure of what category’s are nominated at AVN awards in Jan,but I would like to Nominate Felicia Fox for Feature performer of the year.I know I don’t have a say so as to what is nominated but as an employee of industry for a few years now and a consumer as well ,I would like to some how start a petition to get her nominated if there is such a category.Well I waisted enough of Mr.Flynts time{I’m on salary I dont care} keep up the good work and just to let you know I have gotten alot of people to read your website and get the latest in the JIZ BIZ gossip from you.
Jaime Romero
Hustler-Ohio
I would second that nomination but there is no such category. AVN doesn’t much cover the feature dancing things.
Exotic Dancer Magazine DOES however.
Mark Kernes responds to Cookie Man:
Cookie Guy wrote:
<< As I plainly state in the email, I think that Acacia probably obtained names and addresses from InterNext registrations, but doubt (like you do)
that AVN would cooperate with Acacia. What is suspicious is AVN’s heavy-handed response to the dissemination of this news.>>
What’s fascinating to me is how many “lawyer” correspondents apparently exist in the porn fan letter-writing base who’ve never been to law school but who nonetheless have that peculiar brand of paranoia that allows actual lawyers to create lawsuits out of ephemera and to enter heaven by squeezing camels through the eye of a needle.
(Of particular recent interest to me was Rodger Jacobs’ attempt to “correct” my use of the word “slander” in connection with Luke Ford’s near-defamation of Eddie Wedelstedt’s Eddie’s Kids program and his comparison of the situation to Jerry Falwell’s defamation suit against Hustler back in the ’80s, when anyone who had any legal training and who’s familiar with that case would know that the primary differences between the two are that
Falwell is/was a public figure and Wedelstedt is not, and that Ford implied that Wedelstedt was using donated funds to buy cocaine for some claimed
addiction — a fiduciary fraud — while Falwell was “accused” of fucking his own mother; not even a crime in many states.)
But be that as it may, the reason lawyers like Cambria write letters like the one reprinted in your column is because Internet porn gossip, as exemplified by Ford (setgo), GFY and some others, is in roughly the same state as was Hollywood gossip in the ’50s: Full of innuendo and personal
grudge airings, both of which are bandied about and expounded upon, using the above-mentioned “lawyerly” paranoia, until they are blown wildly out of proportion — and, of course, very short on facts.
The point is, a letter like Cambria’s is necessary to put these paranoia mavens on notice that people whose reputations are at stake (like AVN) take
such allegations pretty seriously.
Now, many people consider the Internet to be the modern-day equivalent of the wild and wooly Old West, where anything goes, especially in the area of defamation and character assassination, because “Hey, just try and find me — and if you do, try and find my assets, because they’re either well hidden or (and this is the more common problem) I HAVEN’T GOT ANY!”
And yet, reputation still counts for something in modern society — and believe me, you wouldn’t want to live in a society where it didn’t, though the way things in America are going, you may get your chance — and hence, people (like AVN) who’ve spent a few years delivering on what they say they’re going to deliver on and not fucking people over unnecessarily and generally being honest in their business dealings, have to protect said reputation when outright lies are told about it.
The fact is, AVN doesn’t sell or rent its mailing lists or lists of attendees at conventions, period. So when somebody says, “Well, they MUST have gotten my name from AVN,” that has to be a lie. Now, the person saying it may well believe that what he says is true… but that doesn’t make it any less of a lie. And after having been informed that it IS a lie, to keep saying it is defamatory in the common use of the term, though whether it meets the legal standard of “defamation” would be a matter for the court.
What I find fascinating is the mindset of people who apparently DON’T take reputations seriously — though one has to wonder if their attitude depends on whose ox is being gored. As I suspect you already know, you DON’T want to be around people who have no respect for your reputation, because that means they have no respect for you as a person. And my experience with people like that is that they have no respect for ANYONE’s reputation, often not even their own. To them, reputations are just another mental construct to bandy about while they play out their own power trips, apparently unconscious of the harm they’re causing, and certainly in complete disregard of it. And whether “unconscious” or “in complete disregard” is the stuff of which defamation trials are made — and a certain amount of that determination is based on the history — the “reputation,” if you will — of the person who continues to tell lies about the plaintiff.
For instance, Cookie Guy writes:
<< I received a letter from Acacia this past Wednesday. One of the first things I considered was where they could have acquired the name and address where the letter was sent. After some thought, the way the letter was addressed, the person it was addressed to (not me, but someone no longer with my company), and the address it was sent to, led me to the conclusion that the only correspondence received that fit the above criteria was the InterNext registration materials sent by AVN. I am not one hundred percent sure about this, as we’ve used this address for a few years and had dealings with a few correspondents using it. I would, however, describe myself as being greater than ninety-five percent sure.>>
Now, on what POSSIBLE basis does this guy, who admits that he’s given out his contact info to “a few correspondents,” get to be “ninety-five percent sure” that Acacia got it from AVN? I mean, can you IMAGINE a basis for him saying that? All it takes is one of his correspondents even inadvertently passing his address on to some other party — if in fact the correspondent didn’t itself give the address to Acacia! But no, he’s “ninety-five percent sure” it was AVN.
Well, guess what, buddy: You may get your chance to expound on the reasoning behind that “ninety-five percent sure” in court, so I hope you’re prepared to do it — but Cambria’s letter is giving you the opportunity to avoid spending all that time and money by encouraging you to re-examine your position. Because your claim that you’re “ninety-five percent sure” that AVN/InterneXt is the source is 95 percent *damaging* to AVN’s reputation. And damage means bucks, and AVN is going to be looking for somebody to pay those bucks.
I mean, I could take Cookie Guy’s letter apart sentence by sentence and show you how it adds up to defamation — the sentence “But we came to our
conclusion not out of malice, but because of the facts as we saw them.” is particularly revealing — and I’ve never been to law school either; just been hanging around lawyers for 35 years in one profession or another, and paying attention to what I heard. But let me just deal with this:
<< For AVN to take this post so seriously as to set legal heavyweight Paul Cambria into action poses more questions than it answers. The world class spin doctoring makes it obvious that AVN is very concerned, perhaps embarrassed, perhaps frightened, about these allegations. Why is that?>>
“Why” is because AVN has a reputation to protect in the business community for fair dealing and for keeping its word. And only someone who DIDN’T have respect for that reputation (even though he claims he does) would think that Cambria’s letter “poses more questions than it answers.” AVN intends to protect its reputation not only from people who deliberately lie about it, but also from those add 2+2 and manage to get 5. Try to think of Cambria’s letter as “Remedial Math 101.”
Kernes
Because it’s a slow day in porn news, at least untill someones office ignites into a blazing inferno I am going to pose some thoughts on this.
First I find it highly unlikely that AVN would choose to sue anyone over all of this. The fact is Cookie Man and others came to the same conclusion independently, to say the information came from AVN is not any more a lie than it is to say it didn’t come from AVN. I am sure that AVN protects this list but the possiblity that it leaked out covertly is certainly within the realm of believability.
I choose the example I did because “Dallas” CODES his registrations so that he knows exactly where the address originated, he never uses the same one twice and it is clearly coded as to its origination. This one clearly implicated last years Internext Show.
Kernes is correct in that AVNs reputation is of the utmost importance, he is wrong in any speculation that legal action against those pointing a finger at AVN would do anything other than to damage that reputation. I don’t believe for a second that AVN sold or gave away this info. I KNOW for fact that AVN has some degree of damage control to do here because it is widely percieved that AVN was the source, and the people that hold that perception factor into AVN’s medium and long term plans.
I suspect AVN will come out of this just fine, if AVN is upset they might want to start asking questions of Acacia, lets face it Acacia has shown no compunction about using subversive methods in the past, it could be that AVN is, in fact, a victim of Acacia way moreso than gofuckyourself.com.
It’s Getting Hot in Porn Valley: Time for a Little Insensitivity:
Y’all know all those fires ripping through California….Apparently now sections of Porn Valley are being threatened. There is an upside to this though. Whether it sinks into the ocean, burns to the ground (That would give the Right Wing Conservatives an analogy wouldnt it?). Anyhow however it goes, when it goes…..I am in the catbirds seat, as we say down here in the south (where we don’t have a worry of sinking into the ocean, or rampaging brush fires….hell its raining here.)
