Adult Industry Leaders to File Suit Against LA County Over Measure B
Los Angeles, CA – A group of adult industry leaders announced today their intent to file a law suit soon against Los Angeles County over Measure B.
On November 6th voters of Los Angeles passed Measure B, an ill-conceived law that makes it mandatory for adult actors to wear lab coats, goggles and gloves as well as condoms while shooting adult films in the County. The law was funded solely by AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF).
"The industry has organized a team of highly respected attorneys to protect our First Amendment rights. I am confident that we will prevail and ultimately save LA County millions of dollars as well as save thousands of jobs. As an industry we are united in this effort and look forward to our day in court," said Steven Hirsch, founder/co-Chairman of Vivid Entertainment.
Industry attorneys Paul Cambria of Lipsitz Green Scime Cambria, Louis Sirkin of Santen Hughes, and Bob Corn-Revere of Davis Wright Tremaine will represent the industry in the US District Court for the Central District of California.
The attorneys plan to challenge the law on the question of whether the County has jurisdiction to regulate adult production on performer health and safety, as these issues would typically fall under CalOSHA and thus State regulation. Additionally, attorneys plan to challenge the law on Constitutional grounds.
"This law will waste taxpayer dollars and compromise the effective performer health protocols already in place," said Diane Duke CEO for the Free Speech Coalition who is helping coordinate the litigation. "We are making a broad appeal for donations to consumers to protect the content they enjoy; to performers, to protect their right to perform without the absurd regulation that will require them to wear a virtual hazmat suit; to producers and directors who face jail time for any noncompliance of this ill-conceived law; and finally to anyone who opposes government overreach and government waste. AHF has threatened to replicate this effort nationwide—we have to stop them in their tracks."
Donations can be sent to FSC-Measure B Litigation (100% of the donation will go to the litigation) PO Box 10480 Canoga Park, CA 91309 or donate online at www.freespeechcoalition.com.
Barking up the wrong tree, might as well go back to wasting time on mass-lawsuits against bittorrent pirates. Measure B was spearheaded by the AIDS Healthcare Foundation and it was a voter initiative, LA county can care less and OSHA has said multiple times that sex industry workers are not independent contractors and are therefore protected by the same health/safety rights other employees have. You can’t just sue a county because of a law that people voted for.
Or if they want, idiots like Steven Hirsch can keep making empty threats to leave California while ignoring the fact that California is the only state with legalized pornography. Grass is not greener on the other side, The same laws to prosecute Deep Throat are still on the books from 30 years ago.
An astoundingly ignorant comment. 1) Obscenity laws, such as those used against Deep Throat’s producers, deal with speech that is not protected, so there’s no comparison to this case. 2) Cal/OSHA is not the final arbiter, the courts are. 3) In fact LA County does care, and has zero appetite for this law, just as the LA City Attorney, and every city agency and department, opposed the unenforceable city ordinance. 4) California is not the only state with legalized porn production. 5) Yes you can sue a county over an unconstitutional county law, regardless of its origin.
1) Sure there is (Miller vs California) but the states are allowed to write their own obscenity laws. California is the most liberal state for porn production companies. Oh, plus the actors/directors/producers can also be prosecuted for pandering. Pandering laws carry a very steep prison sentence plus require sex offender registration. While we’re on the topic: Why don’t you go ask Rob Zicari and Paul Little how their obscenity trials went? I saw Rob on Louix Theroux the other month, looked like he’d been rode hard and put away wet.
2) I know, but suing the county will not produce results the FSC is looking for.
4) Source? If you want to include Florida, you might want to research that Paul Little/Rob Zicari comment I mentioned.
5) It’s possible but it’ll take a loooong time. How long did Prop 8 take to overturn, 4 years? And that was a state thing with a lot of protest from people like Rosie O’Donnell squawking about their rights. What does the porn industry have? Kyle Stone driving around in a bus and recreating the actors on strike scene from Crank 2? By the time they overturn it, it won’t matter because they’ll have carried out Plan B. Assuming they’ll have one. They don’t right now but 30 porn studios are capable of putting their dicks away for a couple of weeks to find a solution – It’s not like they’re making anything with a shred of originality anymore.
If the first amendment trumped worker or public safety, motorcycle clubs could refuse to wear helmets, construction workers could refuse to wear hard hats, factory workers could refuse eye and ear protection and dental hygenists could refuse to wear latex gloves. There’s no First Amendment right to expose an employee to a preventable, communicable disease. And whether an employee is a 1099 or payroll employee, an employer still has a duty to provide a safe work environment. It’s the reason an employer can potentially be sued for worker compensation if an independent contractor is injured on their work site. That’s pretty settled law.
I agree with the sentiment of your argument, bobt03, but sexual activity is a special category included within an individual’s right to privacy as afforded by the 4th and 14th Amendments. (Lawrence v Texas)
How many times must I explain this to you AHF trolls? Workplace safety laws protect employees from harms incurred on the job — harms which are EXTERNAL TO the job, not the job itself. A waiter or bartender was not hired to inhale customers’ cigarette smoke, a construction worker was not hired to subject his head to falling screwdrivers, etc… In a condom-less porn scene, condom-free sex IS THE BARGAINED-FOR THING.
Furthermore, as origen notes, the production of expressive speech embodied in audio-visual works containing performances — whether of a sexual or non-sexual nature — impacts rights that a job riveting girders and welding steel does not. Requiring a construction worker to wear a helmet does not substantially interfere with his/her ability to do the job AND it in no way alters the design of the building he/she is constructing. Throw in the sexual, Lawrence v Texas, bodily autonomy and human rights elements, and this is a no brainer.
There is NO legal basis for the claim that workplace safety automatically trumps free speech — particularly when the industry in question is being held to an extraordinary, and non industry-appropriate, standard. The ridiculous OSHA rules were not written for production, they were written for hospitals and mortuaries. We already apply differing standards of acceptable risk to different industries. Dear lord, we actually see several stunt performers killed on the job every year! No one shuts down Hollywood. The adult industry, under the OSHA rules (which are currently in flux because even OSHA can see that the regs are unusable and bear no resemblance to reality) is being held to an unheard-of ‘zero risk’ standard. Every exposure to uncovered genitals is considered a hazardous condition requiring immediate medical attention. This is obviously luducrous.
This is a case of a 1) content based law which 2) imposes a prior restraint on speech and 3) requires “forced speech.” Each of these elements make the law presumptively unconstitutional, and subject to strict scrutiny.
There is NO legal basis to forbid depictions of condom-less sex while allowing stunt performances, race car driving, MMA, most professional sports, etc. Moreover, this is a human rights issue: it’s a matter of whether adults own their own bodies or not.
Finally, there is no way that a sexually active person living in a community such as Los Angeles, with STI rates where they are, could ever prove to a legal certainty that they contracted a common STI on an adult film set. Aside from the fact that they would be no more likely to prevail in workers comp than someone who’d caught the flu, in terms of legislation like Measure B, the government only has a ‘state interest’ to act when it can prove the connection (causation) between production and infection. Outside of rarer diseases such as HIV, this is not possible to an adequate legal standard.
Gentleman. I am not an AHF troll. Origin – the right to privacy has to do with personal conduct in your private life. Presumably, it prevents the government from interfering what you do in the privacy of your home. Porn is scripted conduct in a commercial setting. There is no right to sexual privacy when the purpose of the production is for public, not private, exhibition. There is no bodily autonomy – whatever that means – when you are hired to perform a specific sexual act for a specific amount of money. A producer doesn’t say to an actress, I’ll give you $800 to show up on my set. When you get there, you can tell me what act you wish to perform. There are rates for blowjobs, vaginal sex, girl on girl, anal sex, double penetration. Compensation is based to some degree on the act. Actors give up bodily autonomy when they agree to allow specific things to be done to their bodies in return for a set amount of money. Apples and oranges. Mr. Whiteacre, the stunt and sports analogies simply don’t work because producers and team owners are required to take reasonable steps to insure that stunts are performed safely and to provide atheletes with protective gear. A quarterback can’t choose to play football without a helmet because the face mask obscures his field of vision. A race car driver wears a helmet, a seat belt and other protective gear. Further, the law doesn’t make distinctions with regard to communicable diseases. It doesn’t say: Well, you should take reasonable steps to prevent HIV, but syphillis – that’s okay. Example: Nevada requires prostitutes to use condoms. No one argues that a condom inhibits a prostitute’s ability to conduct her business.
1) The opposite of ‘private’ is not commercial; the opposite of ‘private’ is public.
2) Sexual matters are the subject of LIBERTIES, not merely RIGHTS. These liberties are protected through Substantive Due Process. The “privacy” concerns you cite are secondary.
3) The “public exhibition” standard you seem to endorse has been specifically dismissed as not relevant.
4) As for the rest, you simply don’t know what you’re talking about. Performers (they’re not actors) do not give up bodily autonomy when they perform, they EXERCISE bodily autonomy (and free speech/expression rights) when they elect to perform. This is the heart of the legal analysis regarding the right of people to engage in performance, even public performance, of any kind (including sexual performance.
This is what you AHF guys can’t grasp: a right or liberty does not go away when one accepts payment to exercise it. A journalist does not render his right to free speech subject to government abridgemenr when he accepts a paying job at a newspaper. A free newsletter does not become subject to government censorship when it chooses to start charging 5 cents a copy. A Hollywood studio is not subject to government restriction of its content because it charges the public to see its movies. Commercial intent has NO relevance to the status of rights and liberties,
Lastly, you also get the STI argument completely wrong. Quite stunningly so, actually. It’s not a question of which STI, it’s a simple legal question of what can the government prove in terms of transmission. The state, as a matter of law, does not have an interest in that which it cannot prove. Unlike people who are incarcerated, or who both live and work at brothels and are forbidden by contract from accepting sex gigs outside the brothel worker/brothel customer relationship, adult performers are NOT a separate, discreet population. They are instead a subset of the general population. They roam free! They have sex both with each other, and with others, off camera. Thus, they are exposed to the same illnesses as the rest of LA County, and the question of causation re: common STIs becomes crucially relevant.
You mention Nevada prostitutes’ rights not being infringed by laws requiring condom use in brothels. Of course not, dummy — it was the prostitutes who ASKED FOR that law, in order to protect them from the untested public.
What this entire exchange demonstrates is that the AHF authoritarian mindset requires a hierarchical view of law: that rights and powers are subject to a top-to-bottom/greatest-to-least list. In other words, that national security trumps public safety, public safety trumps speech, and so forth. That is not the way a system of law is structured in a constitutional republic, Bob. Ours is a system of valid competing interests which must be BALANCED. There are few, if any, absolutes. The public’s right to know is balanced against the governments need for secrecy, just as the rights and liberties of performers are balanced against the state’s interest in regulating workplaces.
Smedley Butler said “war is a racket”, and due process has gone out the window in the process during the AID$ war/racket, as the Wein$tein front follows the footsteps of Bush who suspended habeaus corpus during the “War on Terror” and Lincoln, who did it first during the “Civil War”. Porn has been declared the sexual terrorist enemy of our mythic and non-existent great society.