Law

It appears the tolerance level of her neighbors was shorter than her dress. When 20-year old Kymberly Clem went to the Richmond Mall* wearing a dress she had bought there the day before, she apparently seemed too attractive to be allowed to stay. She was approached by a security guard who humiliated her and forced her to leave because he said that several women had complained to him that their husbands were staring at her. (For the basics, see these stories in the Richmond Register and Fox News. The Fox story includes a photo of the dress.)

There are few places where our public and private lives become blended into such ugly displays as they do in custody and divorce proceedings. The current controversy surrounding Jefferson's appeal for support because of a custody challenge that is, at least partly, based on his blogging about his sex life demonstrates that better than almost anything could. The details have been documented over the past week in several other places, and I am coming late to the story having just returned to town.

Briefly, Jefferson is the pen name of a NYC sex blogger, author of One Life Take Two, and member of the community to which we all here at SITPS belong, to greater or lesser degrees.* He is currently being sued by his ex-wife for full custody of their children whose custody they had shared since divorcing, and it appears that information he revealed in his blog is being used against him in court. That information includes his bisexuality, his hosting of sex parties, his drinking, and his having sex with lots of different people, many of them women much younger than he. Some of his friends have set up a legal fund - the Friends of Jefferson Legal Defense Fund while others of his friends and some of his former lovers are advising caution about contributing.** This conflict started an online public debate about Jefferson's life, his writing, and the current custody dispute that has quickly spread throughout the sex blogosphere and has been occasionally ugly but also very thoughtful.

Max Mosely, head of Formula One racing, won his privacy suit against the British tabloid "News Of The World." The New York Times reports: 

The judge, Sir David Eady, awarded Mr. Mosley, 68, damages equivalent to about $120,000 and legal costs estimated to be at least $850,000 in his lawsuit against The News of the World.

Question: Because this was a lawsuit it had to be framed in terms of a legal question, hence the focus on "press freedom" v. "individual privacy", but wouldn't this kind of thing be better discussed in terms of journalistic ethics? Instead of worrying about whether this decision represents a limiting of freedom of the British press, should the British press be discussing ways to make sure its members adhere to ethical reporting standards?

I'm all for investigative journalism, but there has to be something in the public interest to justify it. Exposing a person's private, legal, consensual sexual activity is certainly not in the public interest. It may be very interesting to the public, but that's not the same thing! 

The story in last Thursday's New York Times began:

Twenty-one sexually exploited children have been saved from the streets, and 389 people arrested on charges of trafficking children for prostitution, in what the Federal Bureau of Investigation calls the largest such multistate sweep ever, officials said Wednesday.

The five-day operation, this week and last, spanned 16 cities and involved hundreds of local, state and federal agencies in the work of rescuing missing children, many of them runaways, and identifying networks behind domestic child trafficking for the sex trade. (Susan Saulny, "Hundreds Seized in Sweep Against Child Prostitution" June 26 2008)

It continued:

As Elizabeth careens through the Heartland of America on her road trip in search of anti-porn paranoia, I'm continuing to sit in the relative comfort of my apartment in Brooklyn doing my own investigations into the heart of America's traditional values crowd. Just think of me as Peter Fonda in cyberspace, baby. But without bad acid trips or getting shot by rednecks, hopefully.

So this afternoon, as the caffeine hits my brain, the first thing that comes to my attention is a news item from Black Jack, Missouri, via Ed Brayton's Dispatches From the Culture Wars. Black Jack has a certain infamy in the area of civil liberties already: in 2006, they were sued by Fondray Loving and Olivia Shelltrack because the couple, who had lived together for 13 years, was denied an occupancy permit on the grounds that they were in violation of a local ordinance that forbad three or more persons from living together if they were not related "by blood, marriage, or adoption." The couple had two children together, but the oldest was from one of Shelltrack's previous relationships. Loving and Shelltrack filed a federal lawsuit, and the city wound up settling by giving them the permit and spiking the ordinance.

Amber Rhea sent me a link to a news story about a very bizarre ruling in a sexual assault case. It is a strange story and I'm wondering if it has been accurately reported. It sounds too awful to be true. If it is being accurately reported, it is beyond outrageous.

Here is what we can know based on the news story:

Melanie Ross alleges that she was sexually assaulted by Daniel Day at his Mercer University fraternity house in 2003. (According to the article, Day comes from a powerful Georgia family. His father is Burke Day, a State Rep and he is of the Days Inn Days.)

Melanie Ross is brought a civil suit against Day because of the assault.

A Bibb County judge ruled in the civil suit that the lacerations she had did not prove rape, and that she needed to provide a list of her sex partners because "only virgins can bring a case for sexual battery in civil court." In addition, she was ordered to pay $150,000 of Day's attorney fees.

Last night as we were standing at the baggage carousel at midnight waiting in vain for my bag to arrive from Austin Will turned to me and said, "Oh, did you hear the news today?" Somehow I had spent most of an entire day in the Austin Bergstrom International Airport and had not heard a thing. So Will preceded to tell me about the Eliot Spitzer/Emperor's Club investigation.

I was stunned, not so much because I thought Eliot Spitzer was such a straight arrow who would never break the law, but because Spitzer has made such clear statements about his disdain for prostution. I hadn't imagined it was one of his own habits. I should have, perhaps. It's not like he's the first politician to publicly advocate positions or laws that he knows he doesn't follow. In my cynical mind I'm actually pretty sure that politicians are most vocal about passing laws against the activities that represent their onw "vices" as a kind of misdirection. "See? I'm certainly not the kind of person who would do ____."

Angela K. Brown of the AP (via the Fort Worth Star-Telegram) brings us this orgasmic news:

FORT WORTH, Texas — A federal appeals court has overturned a Texas statute outlawing sex toy sales, leaving Alabama as the state with the strictest ban on such devices.

The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Texas law making it illegal to sell or promote obscene devices, punishable by up to two years in jail, violated the Constitution’s 14th Amendment on the right to privacy.

From this article in the Times, a list of 20 weird court cases, come the following sex-related ones ~ nearly half of them! 

2. In 2005, a Brazilian woman sued her partner for failing to give her orgasms. The 31-year old woman from Jundiai asserted in her case that her 38-year old partner routinely ended sexual intercourse after he reached an orgasm. After a promising start the action ended in something of an anticlimax for the claimant when her case was rejected.

5. In 2005, the Massachusetts Appeals Court was asked to rule on when a sexual technique was dangerous. Early one morning, a man and woman in a long-term relationship were engaged in consensual intercourse. During the passionate event, and, without the man’s consent, the woman suddenly manoeuvred herself in a way that caused him to suffer a penile fracture. Emergency surgery was required. The court ruled that while “reckless” sexual conduct may be actionable, “merely negligent” conduct was not. It dismissed the man’s case.