CYBERSPACE March 25 — Attorney Aaron Dyer, who represents Girls Gone Wild owner Joe Francis, appeared on the YNOT Bob Humpday Lunch Show on Wednesday to talk about a recent Florida court ruling which found that underage girls flashing their breasts is not a form of child pornography.CYBERSPACE March 25 — Attorney Aaron Dyer, who represents Girls Gone Wild owner Joe Francis, appeared on the YNOT Bob Humpday Lunch Show on Wednesday to talk about a recent Florida court ruling which found that underage girls flashing their breasts is not a form of child pornography. Dyer blamed the charges against his client on the politics of a local “witch hunt,” and expressed confidence that plans to bring up his client on obscenity charges would result in failure.
“This was just a preliminary ruling, but the case, basically, is an attempt by the state of Florida to charge the owner of Girls Gone Wild, or company that produces Girls Gone Wild, with racketeering and all kinds of other charges related to that in connection with their filming last Spring Break a year ago.”
Dyer noted that racketeering statutes were originally designed to combat organized crime, but claimed that some prosecutors take racketeering statutes “to the extreme” to target adult entertainment companies.
As for charges that the Girls Gone Wild crew filmed underage girls flashing their breasts, Dyer admitted that there was a “slip up” as a result of a deceitful model. “Somebody, who lied about their age wasn’t caught, and was able to get on film, and then [the Florida authorities] come after my client and the others that were involved and claim that they’re strictly liable, that it doesn’t matter whether they knew if the woman was underage.”
Asked whether he thought the Florida court’s ruling would result in a boom in underage topless content from the state of Florida, Dyer admitted that the ruling might “embolden” others, possibly even from other states, and also admitted that the ruling “very likely gives a free pass” to any content producers looking to film topless underage girls in Florida. He later rejected, however, a listener’s suggestion that the ruling might somehow lead to more explicit underage content, noting that Florida law does ban underage models from appearing in images that show them engaged in sexually explicit conduct or exposing their genitals for the sake of sexual arousal.
When YNOTBob asked Dyer if producing Spring Break “flashing” content was legally dangerous or especially risky, Dyer claimed that most of the charges that one could possibly face from filming tame Girls Gone Wild-style content were relatively minor. “It depends on how far you’re going to go … if you’re talking about something as mundane as women flashing on the street, there are potential charges … of just municipal ordinances of nudity in public and contributing to the delinquency of a minor, which are pretty minor charges, but those kind of charges potentially could be brought.” He then added that taking the content beyond breast flashing increases the risks involved.
Moving to the topic of obscenity, Dyer stated that the Florida authorities were now working to bring “obscenity” charges against his client, but he appeared confident that state prosecutors would find it extremely difficult to successfully convict anyone from Girls Gone Wild of obscenity.
When asked about the applicability of “solicitation” or prostitution laws to individuals filming adult content in Florida, Dyer noted that Florida law is not as clearly defined as California law in that regard, and that there is “still a danger that they will be able to prosecute somebody for prostitution for hiring an actress to be in a movie, and that really calls into question not just pornography, but any filming in the state of Florida that has what meets the definition of sexual conduct, and you have a lot of filming… you have R-rated movies that probably meet the definition.”
Noting that his client’s only criminal charges stem from Panama City, Florida, Dyer claimed that the charges are the result of a “witch hunt” at the hands of an abusive local politician. “It really is a local politician who has really pushed this and is really abusing the justice system, and I wouldn’t expect to see that anywhere else because it’s pretty clear that these statutes don’t apply. This was really a witch hunt where Girls Gone Wild… they wanted to make an example out of them to show that they were changing Panama City beach’s image.”
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