Jeremy, Gross Talk Porn, Human Trafficking at NYU

NEW YORK—The room may have been full, but the 10,000th episode of the Ron Jeremy–Craig Gross Porn Church Show hit some sour notes yesterday when it pulled into the Big Apple for a gig at NYU. Okay, okay, 10,000 is an exaggeration, but it does feel like these two debating friends have been on tour forever. Yesterday, unlike many of the event themes, the alleged intersection between porn and human trafficking was on the agenda, and according to a report filed today on nyulocal.com, the subject was pushed all night despite being rejected as a sound theory by both the prodigious porn star and XXXChurch pastor. “Trafficking is more a prostitution of minors,” Jeremy told the crowd. “I don’t know of anyone videotaping, because why would anybody take a chance with breaking the law? People don’t want to just put you in jail. They want to kill you for something like that. They’re not going to video it because they’re going to be tracked down that way. Trafficking is more of a prostitution thing; it’s not a porn thing.” Gross pretty much made the same argument, saying, “There’s a lot of stuff that I’ve heard of with the Internet that’s not produced by the companies in L.A. that’s got girls underage that probably deals with potentially trafficked girls. They’re not going to touch it in their industry, but does it exist? Is it online? Yes.” Writer Claire Voon’s report contains a number of quotes from the two men on a variety of subjects related to porn and industry practices, but she was also quick to mention that it remained a civil debate and never devolved into a shouting match that some in the audience may have expected. “This is partly because the debate kept attempting to steer focus onto human trafficking,” noted Voon, “but Gross and Jeremy continually dismissed its connection to the porn industry with which they are familiar because it simply does not deal with the illegal. POL [The Price of Life: NYC, a “city-wide, campus-based, faith-inspired campaign addressing human trafficking in all its forms”] raised important questions; it just picked the wrong people to answer them.” Indeed, even POL’s campus coordinator, Andrea Mufarreh, appeared to backtrack on the claim of a porn/trafficking convergence, stating, “What we were trying to get at was that there is a link between human trafficking and porn. There are most definitely cases where women are forced into human trafficking and are being forced into the underground porn industry.” [Italics added]