Clackamas County to Pay Cop Fired Because of Wife's Cam Site

CLACKAMAS COUNTY, Ore.—Hey, anyone remember Jeff Davis, the Oregon drug cop who got "medically laid off" last year for allegedly violating the Sheriff's Office policy prohibiting "off-duty employment that poses a threat to the agency's ethics and code of conduct"? Seems that Davis' wife was (and perhaps still is) a cam girl on MyFreeCams, a profession she can legally practice in Oregon, and whose videos have never included her husband—but nevertheless, the county sheriff decided that the wife's camming somehow reflected poorly on his department, so of course Davis had to go. But perhaps more interesting is the fact that, according to the OregonLive website, "Sheriff's Office employees bought a membership to his wife's private porn site, tipped her using taxpayer dollars and commented under the handle 'pinchharder.'" Supposedly, the investigation into Davis' wife's activities, which began just one day after his suspension, was to determine whether Davis was telling the truth that he'd never appeared in his wife's videos—but that doesn't explain why, according to Davis' attorney, Dan Thenell, several of those investigators "recorded hours and hours of her online activities" and "spent hours watching [the] porn site, took hundreds of screen shots, interviewed about a dozen people and generated an estimated 1,100 pages of reports"—none of which yielded any evidence of wrongdoing. And now, Clackamas County is going to pay the price for their invasions of the Davises' privacy. The county Board of Commissioners will vote on Thursday whether to approve a settlement reached in Davis' lawsuit against the county which would pay the former lieutenant $82,000 for having violated his free speech rights and for causing him emotional distress. Not only that, but in addition to the $82K, the county is expected to contribute $24,000 to Davis' state pension account, and will allow him to "retire" rather than have a dismissal on his record—and will make him eligible for retiree medical coverage. The county has also agreed that if Davis looks for another job, the county will give him a "neutral job reference." As AVN noted in its earlier coverage of this situation, "The lesson to be learned from this, of course, is that one doesn't even need to work in the adult industry personally to contract the dread disease of Porn Cooties."