Adult Site Broker Talk Episode 223 with Attorney Jeffrey Douglas

This is Bruce Friedman of Adult Site Broker and welcome to Adult Site Broker Talk where each week we interview one of the movers and shakers of the adult industry and we give you a tip on buying and selling websites. This week we’ll be speaking with free speech attorney Jeffrey Douglas in part one of a two-part series. We’ve doubled our affiliate payouts at ASB Cash. Now when you refer sellers or buyers to us, you’ll receive 20% of our broker commission on any and all sales that result from that referral for life. Check out ASB Cash dot com for more details and to sign up. And we’re proud to announce our latest project, thewaronporn.com. You’ll find articles from industry websites as well as mainstream publications. It’s designed to raise awareness of our industry’s plight in the war on porn and the numerous attacks on our industry. You’ll find all that and more at thewaronporn.com. Now time for our property of the week that’s for sale at Adult Site Broker. We’re proud to offer a premier female-led only fans agency. Although they primarily manage creators from the U.S., their reach is truly global. 579 models are under contract, 22 of which generate significant revenue. The rest participate in qualification programs and online training, which ensures future growth. Their service includes 24/7 chat support. They also offer a range of templates, video courses, and other resources designed to streamline and enhance the content creation process. And they’ve started an only fans community. This pioneering platform enables creators to connect, collaborate, and seek peer support. This agency represents a unique investment opportunity in the thriving only fans market. Only 252,000 euros. Now time for this week’s interview. My guest today on Adult Site Broker Talk is free speech attorney Jeffrey Douglas. Jeffrey, thanks for being with us on Adult Site Broker Talk. It’s a great pleasure and honor in fact, thank you. Well the honor is all mine sir. Jeffrey J. Douglas is a leading adult industry attorney who focuses on criminal defense in state and federal courts. Since 1982, he’s advised all segments of the adult industry from creators, manufacturers, and distributors to direct consumer sales. His clients include many of the prominent manufacturers, distributors, and resellers of sexually explicit products and services, as well as hundreds of internet companies. He’s chair of the Free Speech Coalition’s Board of Directors, the Adult Industries Trade Association. Jeffrey is chairman emeritus, I got through that, of the First Amendment Lawyers Association, and a former director of the ACLU Foundation of Southern California. A nationally recognized spokesperson for the adult industry and an expert witness, he appears regularly in the media, has testified before Congress, and is the author of numerous articles. He successfully defended clients and state and federal obscenity cases and is regarded as one of the leading authorities on 18 USC 2257. Jeffrey, let’s start with age verification since it’s the hot button issue right now. States are passing these laws across the US. What’s the latest on these laws? About just over 20 states have passed some version of adult verification. Some of those states have rules that require things they haven’t created yet, like a digital ID, but they haven’t written the regulations to create a digital ID. So those states haven’t yet, although the bill has passed and is in effect technically, since they haven’t taken that next step, there’s not a lot that can be done. But we have successfully beaten back attempts to pass in several states. Most recently in California, we got a Republican author to amend the law so that it included device level filtering. So a website would be immune from any civil liability in California as long as it had the equivalent of an RTA label on the site, so that a filter would find that out and then the minor or someone else who didn’t want to go to an adult site couldn’t go to an adult site. And in Arizona, we persuaded the governor to veto the bill, and the veto message contained substantial portions of the language that we proposed. So that was successful, and we’re still working legislatures for being to slow down the train. The hallmark of every one of these legislative efforts except California, like adult regulation has been, you know, as long as I’ve been watching it, it occurs with absolutely no dialogue with the industry. And if there is a true truism, it’s that you can’t effectively regulate an industry that you’re not talking to. You can pass all the regulations you want, but if you don’t understand the industry, you don’t understand what the impact is, it’s not going to work. It may not work in how you expect it to not work, but it’s going to be ineffective. And since the people who are motivated to regulate the adult industry are typically groups or legislators who are hostile to the industry, they don’t see any reason to talk to us. In fact, they avoid talking to us. As a result, they pass things that are stupid, ineffective, and often unconstitutional. And that’s where we’re at right now. So we’re battling this on a number of levels, at the lobbying level, at the legislative level. And then as a last resort, we were forced to litigate. So we filed lawsuits in five states so far, and we won most recently in Indiana a terrific district court opinion. We got a terrific district court opinion in Texas, which was reversed by the crazy fifth circuit, which we’ll get to in a few minutes. And then we have a decision pending in the 10th and in Montana, which is in the ninth circuit, we’ve just basically finished the first round of pleadings. So we’re fighting on every level that you can fight on. Ultimately, of course, if there is to be regulation, it really needs to come from the feds. Congress has to do something because otherwise you have 50 rules in 50 states. And that’s insane. Are you suggesting that Congress agree on something? That is so far beyond the realm of possibility. And it’s probably just as well in because if they were to try to regulate the industry historically, again, they have refused to speak to us, hence 20 to 50 sevens or foster sesto or anything like that. Right. Yeah, exactly. So because our lobbying is now at a much more sophisticated level than we’ve ever had, there is a realistic possibility that if the courts strike down the state regulations in laws in a certain way, that we might be able to get a bill passed that is device based filtering in which case it would not disrupt the existing economic model. And in fact, we make life better because I don’t know what has any idea, you know, whether there are 10 minors they’re accessing on a daily basis or 10,000, but the more that there are, they’re just wasted space. They aren’t going to buy and we don’t want them. So if we can get device based filtering, that would be a win for everyone. And there are a handful of members of Congress who are talking to us and listening to us and agree with us. In fact, there was a bill that was introduced without discussion of us to us. Well, there should be some introduced. There is a bill that’s being potentially being circulated and in its initial form, they haven’t spoken to us yet. And it was debate device based filtering. They’re now in dialogue with us. So you know, can they progress? It is. It really is. Yeah. Nice to know somebody listens. And I should give the disclaimer we’re talking in July and this will run sometime in September. So let’s face it, age verification laws are being devised to try to kill our industry when you talk about the statewide ones. Some industry opponents have as much as admitted it. How does the industry survive in this environment? Well, one of the benefits of having so many stars from having fought in so many wars over the decades is that there’s a certain familiarity to this. It is the exact same people in the for profit censorship business, right? These organizations, Nicosi, American Family Association in the past, Reality Media, all of these deeply Christian, I want to keep Protestant organizations that they keep trying out different ways of getting around the First Amendment. And almost always it’s to protect the children. They automatically shift definitions. So they start out by talking about material that pretty much there’s a consensus. We do not want circulated. That is non-consensual material, a recording of an actual non-consensual rate. Nobody wants that. Nobody wants to distribute it. And then they shift immediately to a much broader so then they start talking about violent pornography, which is almost an undefined concept. So they go from child pornography or now, child sexual abuse material, CSAM, to violent pornography. They just are always shifting terms because when you try to nail them, if you force them to nail themselves down, they don’t really have an argument. So this is just the same song only at the moment. It’s much more effective than it has previously been because we have a much more polarized country. And so there are many most legislators are making decisions strictly on the basis of how do I avoid a primary challenge? So this voting against the adult industry, if you’re a Republican or you’re in a swing district, seems like the simplest, safest thing in the world to do. There’s no downside because adult consumers don’t band together and vote to protect their right to masturbate. So it’s a relatively safe vote. And with the polarization, it sort of is rushing through. But fundamentally, what has kept our industry functioning are two things, the Constitution and demand. So no matter what regulators try to do, they can’t change the demand. They always go to the supply side. And it doesn’t work because even to the extent that they are successful, there are clever people out there who will create a new business model that will provide consumers what they want. And in the course of the technological developments over the last whatever, 40 years, 50 years, the audience just keeps growing. The more easily you make the material available, the bigger the audience. So when it was only available in adult bookstores or adult theaters, that’s going to limit your audience. Once you get home video through VHS, then the audience explodes because they can get it easily and anonymously. Then you go to the direct delivery with a birth with only a virtual middleman, which is the internet. So if they, although I don’t believe it’ll happen, is at least partially this the ABS model succeeds. The first thing that’s going to happen is that commerce will simply move over seats because the US government or the state of Louisiana or Texas can’t reach a website that is in the Czech Republic or in Ukraine. So that will be highly disruptive to most people who work in this industry. And again, because demand is not just fixed, but it’s growing, they’re going to find a way. But we want to minimize the amount of harm that it does to the people who work in our domestic adult industry. And this is a battle that we have to fight in. It’s a battle that I expect we’ll win. That’s very encouraging. Jeffrey, you were involved in getting the US Supreme Court to temporarily block the Texas law in free speech coalition versus Paxton with the US Supreme Court. Where do you see that going? I didn’t even make a correction, at least as far as I know, they have not yet enjoyed it. They have granted a hearing, but the status quo is that Texas can enforce the law. So, you know, websites are still endangered there. But so in a nutshell, what the fifth circuit opinion that I described earlier is being outlandish. What they said was the standard of review that the Supreme Court required in an earlier version of adult verification, one that Congress passed in 1998 or something. In 2004, the court declared that unconstitutional. It was much better than the current versions because all it required was a credit card. But the Supreme Court said, "You can’t do it. I’ll get into why in a minute." But they said the proper standard is strict scrutiny. There are three standards for reviewing law regulation that impinges on the First Amendment. There’s the rational relationship test. And if you are suing, you have to prove that the legislature was irrational. And that means you lose. There’s interneed scrutiny, which is tricky and I won’t get into. And then there’s strict scrutiny. And if it’s strict scrutiny, the government loses. So the Supreme Court in 2004, in a case called Ashrop versus ACLU 2, because there was an earlier case on the same issue, said you have to use strict scrutiny. And when you use strict scrutiny, it means that the state has to have a compelling reason. And they got that year protecting minors from seeing coroners and telling them, "Okay, give up on that. No problem." It has to be, under strict scrutiny, the least restrictive alternative of speech. And it has to be narrowly tailored. And what narrowly tailored means is you can’t encompass speech that’s not the problem, nor and you have to pretty much cover all the speech that’s the problem. Because if it’s either under inclusive or over inclusive, it fails the least restrictive alternative test. Not the least restrictive alternative, but that it’s narrowly drafted to cover only what it’s supposed to cover. And then the least restrictive alternative, in our case, the law fails because device filtering is a less restrictive alternative than saying to adults, "You have to prove that you’re an adult." So they went through everything 2004 and they said, "You lose." So the way that Texas, the Fifth Circuit ruled was, well, the Supreme Court was just obviously stupid and wrong. And they picked strict scrutiny, they did that arbitrarily. They didn’t think about it. They didn’t consider alternatives. Well, I mean, I’m a layman. If the Supreme Court said something, isn’t that considered legal precedent? It absolutely is. And courts all over the country think that the Supreme Court has made a mistake. And what they do under those circumstances is they say, "We have to follow the court. We think the court needs to reconsider this part or they need to reconsider that and we hope they do." And Circuit Court’s appeal and the feds do that all the time. We disagree, but and we urge the court to think about this again, but we have to follow it. The Fifth Circuit took the more dramatic approach of essentially flipping off the Supreme Court. Which many of us would like to do right now, especially women everywhere, but I’d gruss. Go ahead. Yeah, but you and I are there to do that one. So the Fifth Circuit has been an outlier in a very dramatic fashion for many, many years. And they are now being reversed at a rate that no circuit has ever been reversed before. They were reversed three times, I believe this chairman might have been four. And justices have gone out of their way in sometimes a concurring opinion, which is politically where you tend to find those kinds of comments. Slacked the Fifth Circuit for their misbehavior. And then the grant of the hearing, the grant of search, as we say in the trade, that happened very, very early. That the grand cert in our case was about as early as you can have one. So there’s ground for optimism there. They are, you know, annoyed. The Fifth Circuit did something that is likely to offend many justices. So we’re going to have a hearing date given to us. It could be in October or November. I wouldn’t expect it to be much later because of how early they granted it. But you know, that’s totally looking into a magic ball. There’s no way of knowing. And then we’ll have oral argument again before the Supreme Court as we did 23 years ago. Jeffrey, what kind of challenges is the industry facing with such a conservative Supreme Court? It’s terrifying because of the truly radical nature of this court. You know, obviously conservative simply is a term that doesn’t mean anything like what it meant for several hundred years, which is, you know, a desire to sort of maintain the status quo and with, you know, certain economic ideological consensus. But this court is anything but conservative. Maybe the word is just insane. Yes, but they clearly have a very, very strong partisan, not just political, but a partisan agenda and the several justices, certainly the three Trump appointees have come to the court with an agenda to reverse previous holdings. And we’ve never faced that before, right? But it was supposedly the most radical court, the Warren court. They just they pale in comparison to what’s been going on now for more than a decade. And then the last few years, well, fair to say we’ve never seen anything like it before in American history. But anyway, so we have sound reason to fear what this court might do since there’s not bound by precedent that leaves you open to, well, what do they do today? The flip side of that is first amendment issues tend to be less predictive, have less predictable partisan outcomes than other issues because the first amendment is partisan neutral. The same law that impairs the ability of a Black Lives Matter parade also applies to a white supremacy protest. And so some of the better first amendment opinions that conservative courts have come out with with conservatives joining liberals or at least moderates. I don’t know that there are any real liberals left, but have been on abortion clinics and abortion protests. And so in order to be able to maintain the ability of people to protest against abortion clinics willy nilly, that means that groups that the partisanship on the court doesn’t necessarily favor also need protection. So it’s much less predictable than you might think. But I don’t want to minimize the terror as well as the excitement that occurs. So the court is not going to say the Fifth Circuit was right. We fucked up. We used strict scrutiny. That they’re not going to do. There is however a possibility that they will change the level of scrutiny, but they’ll find a way to represent the Fifth Circuit for doing it the way they did. And that’s the biggest fear that they would do something to say sex is different than every other form of speech. And therefore, while any other form of speech would be entitled to strict scrutiny, this form of sexual communication is not. And it’s happened in the past. Approval to zone adult businesses out of the way so that no one can go to them. Only making only available zoning spot is at the bottom of a rock quarry and things like that. When the court said that that was okay, one of the more thoughtless comments written by justice was we can’t imagine parents sending their sons to do battle to go to war over specified sexual activity or specified anatomical areas. Well, parents are not going to send their children to go to war over most person for some of the issues. They wouldn’t go to war to allow Jehovah’s Witnesses to cover live, free or die on their New Hampshire license plate. And they wouldn’t go to war in order to protect the Supreme Court from publishing what they want. That can’t be the standard, but that kind of intellectual blindness has appeared in the past and it could happen again. The fact that they did such an offensive, they did such a bad job kind of helps us. Absolutely. Jeffrey, there’s a general war on porn. We all know that. So how do we win it? In a way, like I said, because you can’t alter the demand for people to see sexually solicited material, we can’t lose. The only way we can lose is if the minority, the small minority, persuade people that they shouldn’t look at porn and that will never happen. So the victims of the previous wars have been people who were prosecuted under these crazy laws that exist, that there’s such a thing as criminal art, that you can make art so bad that you can go to prison for it. I’ve seen some paintings. And I’ve watched some movies, although those movies never have sex in them, that I would just as soon have a person go to prison for. It doesn’t make any sense in spite. But despite the victims along the way that have done prison time, that have lost virtually everything, their fortune, their homes, their businesses and all of that, the marketplace never changes. It just keeps growing. Our native business, the people employed in this industry, whether they’re behind the camera on the camera, whether they’ve never seen a camera and they’re working in a warehouse, distributing online, all those people deserve to have a voice of advocacy that protects them from this irrational, unenforceable legislation. And so that’s where the battle is. But in terms of the product and the audience for it, that cannot be touched by a relatively small group of fanatics. Absolutely. Jeffrey, you’ve been very much involved in defending against obscenity prosecutions. Talk about obscenity in the past and in the future as it relates to adult. The past versus the future, that’s a really important distinction. Obscenity is unique, as I indicated. There’s no other crime with the exception of the basic speed law where you can’t drive too quickly, right? So if it’s very foggy and the speed limit is 65, if it’s foggy enough, you can get a ticket for doing 60 because it’s unsafe. But the worst thing that’ll happen to you for getting a ticket is that you go to traffic school or you pay a fine. But nobody is going to go to prison for violating the basic speed law. Obscenity is worse. Obscenity says there is an undefined subset of pornography that is too much. We don’t know what too much means, but it’s too much. And if it’s too much, you go to prison. That’s crazy. Like I said, there’s nothing like that in any form of American jurisprudence. So fortunately, it’s a difficult case to prosecute because my theory and over the many years that I’ve been observing this, this appears to be a truth that you don’t have an obscenity prosecution unless you have both a political payoff or a perceived political payoff for the agency or the prosecutor themselves and an ideological, you know, a real deep religious commitment. If you only have one or the other, it just doesn’t happen. One example of that is in the second Bush administration. There was so much pressure on them for the entire eight years to prosecute obscenity aggressively on the internet. And in the eight years, I think they did five cases and they badly screwed up three of them. Which were the ones they screwed up? The most dramatic was in a prosecution of evil angel where the special FBI agent in charge testified that the prosecutor had told him how he should tailor his testimony at the direction of the judge. And everyone was kind of gasped. So all of a sudden the prosecutor becomes a witness and says, I never told him that. So we have a situation where the prosecutor is saying that her chief investigating officer is perjuring himself. But the choice is the judge of partisan who’s advising the prosecutor how to coach a witness. Anyway, after that the judge said, you know, the case is over. There were a lot of mistakes that led up to that, but they pretty much screwed everything up every step of the way. Another one was in Arizona of a likely forgotten company called JM Productions. They primarily did spook hockey and that’s, you know, very attractive target. Yeah, one of my personal favorite dishes, by the way. And they couldn’t find, so let’s see how we get through this. The Congress said you have to pursue online obscenity. The administration, which really didn’t want to do it, said, okay, we’ll set up a new division. Instead of the existing anti-obscenity group, we’ll set up a new one just for online, which is a way of buying themselves two or three years. They couldn’t find lawyers to work for them. So they had the administrative level of lawyer, but they couldn’t find trial attorneys who were willing to taint their career by doing obscenity prosecutions. So they dug deep and in the Arizona case, they got a very religious US attorney, assistant US attorney, whose experience was basically just drug cases. And they didn’t communicate with the local US attorney’s office. The head of this new unit had demanded that the US attorney, the Republican US attorney in Arizona be fired because he hadn’t given them enough support. So Bush fired him. That made the local office very unhappy. And the Washington DC people were just incredibly angry. They didn’t show up at certain hearings because anything was important. They didn’t tell anybody. I mean, they just... Anyway, when we finally get to trial, there was a local retail outlet in Arizona that was being prosecuted. That was my client. And then there was the distributor, JM. And in order to get JM, they had to prove that JM sent the material to my client. And an assistant US attorney did not know how to lay a foundation to introduce a UPS document. That’s a level of incompetency that is simply beyond belief. My client, who did graduate from college, could sure as shit never went to law school. But just from what he’d seen on television, whispered to me, "Can’t he just say this?" And I kicked him under the table. That’s awesome. And at one point, the judge said outside the... excuse me, the prosecutor said outside the presence of the jury because things were getting hot and the judge directed the jury out. He said, "If you don’t... If I can’t introduce this document, I have to dismiss." And she said, "Then you’d better find a way to introduce it." He tried again. She said, "That’s not the way." And so, JM was dismissed. And then my client, they lost on another element of it. And so, the only thing that happened was they got the corporate conviction, which cost a bankrupt corporation and a $1,000 fine. It’s just amazing this kind of inaptitude goes on in federal prosecutions. It really only does when you’re talking about something that no one’s interested in doing. They all regarded as this massive waste of time. FBI agents don’t like doing it. Postal inspectors, they like it because they don’t have anything important to do anyway. But FBI agents have real sense of their own importance. And what they... They don’t want to chase bank robbers anymore. That was the 1930s. They wanted to do terrorism. They wanted to do computer crime. And getting the sign to watch 200 hours of pornography week after week after week when there’s real crime going on, that pisses them off. And they’re hoping about it. Back in the ’90s, in second big attack on the adult industry of the modern era, I was present when the FBI was exhuming a search warrant and vented. While that was going on, and there were a million FBI agents. I mean, it was amazing how many there were, certainly more than 20. We’re certainly dangerous people. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. There was a major drug battle going on. And there was a, you know, a crack house that was armed to the teeth. And, you know, there’s everything short of the Zookas flying. And the FBI agents are hearing about this while they’re going through Winswere House. And they were openly furious. They explicitly said this was just a waste of our time. You know, we’re just much more important than this. And similarly for lawyers, because the lawyers that were involved in the two major attacks on the industry in ’87 and ’91, it was the end of their career. Because, you know, when you go into the private sector after working in the U.S. Attorney’s Office, if what you say you spent the last three years of your life doing was prosecuting one obscenity case. And let me give a sort of bigger context for this. Between the peak of federal attack on the adult industry was from 1986 to, say, 1994. And most of it was in a narrow period of that. There is a special unit, the Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section of the Justice Department. In that period, the feds did less than 50 cases, substantially less than 50. So in a seven-year period, say, they do less than 50 cases and they had 11 lawyers. So the lawyers are averaging essentially maybe a case a year. But let’s quintuple that and say they were doing five cases a year. The super, the other super specialized U.S. attorneys average 20 cases a year. And most U.S. attorneys are going to be handling 120 cases a year. The job was an embarrassment to themselves and it became harder and harder to find lawyers to do it. And eventually they just ran out. Wow. So, I mean, are there any obscenity concerns right now? No. Not as a practical level. There are several reasons that are worth discussing. One, the most important is that the jury pool, virtually all of them have themselves watched porn intentionally. It’s much, much harder to get a jury conviction when they’ve seen the cross-section of material that’s available. If they go onto a tube site, say, and they’re only interested in missionary position with white people who are all blonde and blue eyes, and that’s what they’re going to focus on. It’s not like they don’t see all of the rest of the stuff in all of the categories. So they know that it’s out there. It’s available and it’s being consumed. So it’s extremely difficult to find, no matter what corner of the country you go to, a jury that a generation ago would have been absolutely shocked at the site of an erect penis. That’s good. So, the community is speaking. That is, they’re voting unintentionally. They’re voting with their dollars. They’re voting with their eyeballs. So it’s hard to find a jury. The other thing is that unlike a mail or sale or an over-the-counter sale, when the material is on the internet, there are elements of the obscenity definition that are inconsistent with the internet. For instance, when an item is being prosecuted, the rule is the material has to be taken as a whole. As you have to look at the whole book, the whole movie, you can’t just take out a scene or a few paragraphs and say, "This is really dirty." And that’s, for instance, how Ulysses, Joie Schroes’ Ulysses, was declared obscene. And characterizes the grace novel of the 20th century. It was found obscene because a prosecutor was allowed to read the sex paragraphs, which are delightfully crude, sort of lyrically crude, if that makes any sense, about, you know, masturbation or alcohol, all this kind of stuff. And in 1910, the jury hadn’t heard any of those words before. And the courts said, "Higher courts, if you can’t do that, you have to look at the book as a whole. You have to look at the magazine as a whole. You can’t just take one photo set out of a Playboy or Penthouse magazine and say, "Well, that’s too much. You have to read the articles. You have to do the whole thing." Okay, now let’s deal with the website. You can’t view Pornhub as a whole because you will be long dead before you’ve covered a tenth of it. Exactly. So, they have to find a way to find exceptions or narrowings to take it as a whole. And it’s very, very difficult. So in all of the federal obscenity cases against websites, they help all relied on mail order. All of the websites that were prosecuted had a mail order component to it. And that was they relied on so that the jury didn’t have to look at the website. They could just look at these six films that were mail ordered to the COPS PO locks. The other thing is that obscenity, as defined in the ’70s, used this truly bizarre and irrational concept of local contemporary community standards. And a jury is supposed to decide when the materials have seen, not based on their own personal opinion, but based on their understanding of what the community standard for sexuality is. Now, the one thing that you can be certain about is that you don’t know what your community is. As soon as there is such a thing as a community standard, you don’t know what it is because nobody’s surrounded. Sure, because people aren’t talking about it. Well, what did you masturbate to last night? It doesn’t have to be. People don’t read a playboy on a bus. It’s private. I was watching a Seinfeld episode yesterday where they had Penthouse in the lobby of the dentist’s office. So that kind of reminded me of that. Exactly. So the late great Reed Lee used to say, "What’s a community standard for ice cream?" If you can’t define what the community standard is for ice cream, which you can’t, how in the world are you going to determine what the community standard is from depictions of sexuality? Bizarre as it is, the courts have stuck with that. So what is the community standard when you’re talking about a website? It’s not a mail order to one particular location. It’s certainly not a retail outlet where you can say, "Well, the community is Phoenix or Arizona." So the ninth circuit ruled and no other circuit has differed from it, and the Supreme Court denied, served on that case, said the community when you’re talking about a website is the world. It’s the community of the internet. So once the content of the entire internet comes in, the government can’t win because whatever they pick, there’s something more extreme out there. There’s a lot more extreme out there. So the obstacles for obscenity prosecution is there’s little or no political payoff because the people who get excited and donate money, if there’s a local obscenity prosecution, are the same people who are going to donate money anyway. There’s no new audience that’s going to say, "Wow, I’m going to support deputy attorney general such and such when they run for attorney general because they handled an obscenity case." It’s just there’s not sufficient political payoff, except in very small communities, in Cincinnati for 50 years, if you were anti-coronial and get elected. First of all, it’s not the reality now, but it’s certainly not on the bigger stage. Reminds me of a WKRP episode, by the way. What a wonderful show that was. Oh, my God. Jeffrey, this is obviously an election year. We all know that. Now, while neither party is an advocate for the adult industry, I think most of us prefer the Democrats. Please talk about the upcoming presidential election and how it will shape the future of the adult entertainment industry. So the best possible answer is, "I don’t know." So although I don’t know, that doesn’t stop me from having opinions. But I do want to make sure that I’m not coming off like a prophet. But there is a negative incentive for Democrats to come after the adult industry because there is no Democratic audience and support for allocating those resources. And in fact, they’re going to lose some of the people that they want money and votes for, even the non-consumers, all the ACLU types, right? That will be offensive to them. So on the Democratic side, there’s no strong motivation to regulate, let alone prosecute the adult industry. And if you look at the course of the last 40 years, the pattern is unmistakable. It doesn’t matter what they say on the campaign trail because many Democrats have said, "I’m pro-family, a good Christian, I don’t believe in pornography, and we have to make sure that they do nothing." Because again, they don’t have the combination of a political payoff and a true ideological commitment. On the other hand, for the adult industry is to Christian conservatives what seal hunters were for Greenpeace. We are this perfect pretend evil. They can distort us into whatever they want, and they can always send out a fundraiser saying, the porn industry is trying to seduce your children, they’re destroying them, they’re turning them gay, they’re turning them trans, they’re wearing beards, and they’re not voting down a crowd. So that force, that group has merged with the Republican Party, right? Most of your audience doesn’t remember pre-Nixon days, but they’re certainly pre-rating. But sortly, even the most conservative and characteristic of conservative Christian groups was they stay away from politics. But a number of factors came, and a number of very, very smart political operatives recognized that it would serve their purposes to essentially merge the Christian right with the Republican Party. And we’ve seen that, a member of Congress, a senator, just recently said, I’m a Christian nationalist. That’s what the Republican Party represents, that’s what America is. So even if they’re ineffective as added, like the Bush administration was, when I say they blew three cases and we won, you can’t win a criminal case. Certainly not a federal criminal one. You just don’t lose. But the punishment starts when the FBI knocks on your door. The emotional cost, the financial cost, the anxiety over the next few years, and it’s not like your lawyer can say, well, you can’t lose. No one in their right mind would say that. They’re going to say, you know, it’s a crap shoot. We don’t know who our jury is going to be, and you know, who knows what may happen. So the uncertainty, the fear and the cost. So you go through trial, the cases dismissed, like I described in those two, and they won nothing. It’s just the only place you get is the same place you get when somebody stops hitting you over the head. But it’s hard to call that a victory. So the Republican Party represents a threat, even if the, for instance, the use of the obscenity laws is token so that, you know, in eight years they prosecute five cases. Those five cases represent incredible damage to, you know, 20 to 40 people and sometimes more. So it’s not even a close call. If I disagreed with the Democratic Party on virtually every plank that they had, I was a civil Democrat because to a Republican administration means both risk and actual damage to the people in the industry. And there’s just no way to get around it. That’s very true. My broker tip today is part seven of what to do to make your site more valuable for when you decide to sell it later. Last week we talked about trademarking your site and ways to make it unique. Next, when you decide to sell your website, make sure you have the following information available for potential buyers. Detailed information about your company, your website, and any other aspect of your operation the potential buyers may want to find out about. This should include for a pay site, a detailed inventory of your content, number of images and number of videos, how much of those are exclusive and how much are non-exclusive. Detailed information for at least the last three years if your company is that old. This should include sales reports, profit and loss statements, and billing reports. Get all the information organized in a legible format that a good broker can use to sell your property. If you decide to sell it yourself, organize a list of potential buyers and start the process of contacting them. Be realistic about what your company is worth. In today’s market, the kiss of death is overpricing your property. Is there anything that a potential buyer needs to know, such as "are you being sued?" "Do you have any substantial debts?" Don’t let these things be a surprise to the potential buyer. They’ll either find out before the sale and not by, or they’re going to find out after the sale and you’ll have another lawsuit on your hands. Disclose everything. We’ll talk about this subject more next week. And next week we’ll be speaking with free speech attorney Jeffrey Douglas in part two of our conversation. And that’s it for this week’s Adult Site Broker Talk. I’d once again like to thank my guest, Jeffrey Douglas. Talk to you again next week on Adult Site Broker Talk. I’m Bruce Friedman. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) [BLANK_AUDIO]