Trueman Claims 2257 Battle Is All About Hiring Kids to Do Porn

JESUSLAND—Former federal prosecutor turned anti-porn activist Patrick Trueman has read the Third Circuit Court of Appeal's latest decision in Free Speech Coalition v. Attorney General—better known as "the 2257 case"—and decided he knows what it's really about: The porn industry wants to hire minors to make porn movies. "It is an indictment on the porn industry that it has fought for more that 25 years to kill a provision designed to prevent it from sexually exploiting children in pornography,” said Trueman, president of the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCSE), formerly known as Morality in Media (MiM), on the organization's website. But Trueman was apparently a little more forthcoming in talking to the (aptly named) Charlie Butts of the religio-conservative OneNewsNow.com website. "Now, why did it take so long from the Reagan administration to now to have this [2257] upheld?" Trueman asked rhetorically. "It's because the porn industry, which wants to use children in the adult porn films, has fought it every step of the way." Butts' takeaway from Trueman's comments? "The pornography business is claiming First Amendment rights to use underage actors in its movies," reads the opening sentence of Butts' article. One might have thought that Trueman, at least, would have followed the course of the trial, which took place over about 10 days in June 2013. AVN provided on-site coverage, and it's been clear for several years that someone at MiM NCSE reads AVN's website on a regular basis, so Trueman can't possibly be ignorant of the several legal issues debated between the attorneys and witnesses for both sides—none of which involved claiming a "First Amendment right" to make sexually explicit content with minors. The MiM NCSE article briefly traces Congress's passage of the Child Protection and Obscenity Enforcement Act of 1988, which became 18 U.S.C. §2257 under the Reagan presidency as an outgrowth of then-Attorney General Edwin Meese's Commission on Pornography, the reason for which, according to the MiM NCSE article, was "to stem the use of child actresses in the mainstream porn industry"—as if the child pornography laws didn't do an effective job of that all by themselves. In the article, Trueman cites one of the five verified cases over the past 30 years of a minor, using fake or fraudulent ID, having snuck into the industry and performed sex on camera: Traci Lords, whom Trueman describes as "but one of many children exploited in adult porn films." Her "exploitation," of course, took the form of using a fake driver's license to obtain modeling work through World Modeling Agency, making upwards of 50 hardcore movies, then reportedly outing herself shortly after her 18th birthday, forcing all of her movies to be removed from store shelves at a cost of millions of dollars, and causing the arrest of her agent Jim South and producer Ruby Gottesman of X-Citement Video, both of whom had relied on Lords' false IDs. And speaking of false IDs, that's one of the reasons that 2257 is in fact nearly useless in preventing minors from making hardcore content: Though 2257 requires producers to keep copies of such identification documents, it doesn't (can't!) require them to be able to distinguish between 1) an authentic ID and an authentic-looking false one, or 2) an authentic ID that was falsely issued to the person possessing it. Hence, Trueman's description of the purpose of 2257—"The recordkeeping provisions were intended to stem the use of child actresses in the mainstream porn industry"—rings hollow when looked upon with a legally critical eye. But indeed, the plaintiffs' claims in the 2257 case did involve the First Amendment, since many of the plaintiffs testified that the incredibly complex regime of keeping and cross-referencing photo IDs, of maintaining a copy of the work together with the IDs, of labeling each work with a "2257 notice" that had to be worded exactly correctly and be printed in a specific font size, and of being forced to be available at least 20 hours per week at the records' location in case an FBI inspection team wanted to look at the records at a moment's notice, required too much time, effort and expense to make producing sexually explicit content worthwhile. Beyond that, even photographers who shot only people who could never be mistaken for children were still required to keep the records and spend half the work week watching over them—and then there's the case of sex educator Betty Dodson, who was forced to remove her "Genital Art Gallery" from the internet because the "owners" of the pussies and cocks pictured there didn't want their names revealed, even though it was impossible to tell from looking at the genital imagery what were the ages of the people who posed, non-sexually, for them! But none of that made any impression on Trueman. "They said that this [law] would have a broader effect than just the application to the porn industry, that it might cover other films," Trueman claimed. "But Congress had no intention to cover other films to keep children out of Hollywood films." Oh, no? Then why did Congress pass §2257A, which applied only to Hollywood and other mainstream producers of softcore content? Sadly, it seems likely that other conservative "news" organizations and possibly even some nonpartisan mainstream press will pick up on Trueman's comments and fail to investigate the issues further. After all, it's not as if they could actually call someone (like Free Speech Coalition or even AVN) and learn what the situation really was all about!