TAMPA – For the record, if you’re a lawyer, the right to film yourself banging someone inside a jail’s private meeting room is not what the courts mean by “attorney-client privilege.”
Don’t tell that to Tampa attorney Andrew Spark, though – mostly because this helpful tip would be coming just a bit too late for the would-be porn entrepreneur.
Spark was arrested over the weekend at the Pinellas County Jail on a felony charge of introducing or possessing contraband in a detention facility and misdemeanor charges of solicitation for prostitution and exposure of sexual organs.
According to Pinellas Sheriff Bob Gualtieri, Sunday’s encounter wasn’t the first time Spark had used the pretense of meeting with a client to hook up with an inmate. Gualtieri said Spark is suspected of having repeated the practice several times at various county jails around Tampa Bay and the Central Florida region.
“He duped the system because he came in there representing himself as a lawyer,” Gualtieri said. “There’s something that is sacrosanct about that lawyer-client relationship, and that’s why we give great consideration and, frankly, deference to it.”
Spark wasn’t just visiting these female inmates for a quickie, though; he was simultaneously moonlighting as a porn director, filming scenes for a project oh-so-cleverly entitled Girls in Jail. The contraband charge Spark faces was levied against him because he failed to disclose the iPad he brought with him, which he used to film his encounters.
This is the problem with “reality porn” which gets a little too real; some of those fantasy scenarios are patently illegal when they’re not fake and scripted. (In case you’re wondering, picking a girl up off the street, having sex with her in a van, kicking her out of the van after you orgasm and then driving away without having her sign a model release and provide ID isn’t exactly legal, either.)
Making matters worse, at least from a professional ethics standpoint, Spark wasn’t really representing the women he was fucking and filming. Or maybe that makes it better from an ethical standpoint, as he wasn’t literally fucking his clients, on top of the usual, metaphorical fucking attorneys traditionally give their clients.
If you’re wondering how Spark got caught executing his surreptitious porn production plan, given the fact his scheme involved the use of a private room reserved for attorneys meeting with their clients, it turns out Spark wasn’t the only one recording in the meeting room that day.
After receiving a tip about what he was up to, sheriffs later learned Spark was headed to the county jail again over the weekend to again have sex with an inmate he’d previously met with in November. Investigators wired the attorney-client meeting room for sound and listened in as Spark started recording inside. As soon as Spark exposed himself, the sheriffs sprang their trap and caught Spark red-handed – or red-something’d, anyway.
I will say one thing in Spark’s defense: At least he was paying these women, and not the other way around. Granted, he was paying them significantly less than the usual per-scene rate – but hey, everybody knows incarcerated labor comes cheap, right?
“It was really ridiculously nominal amounts,” Gualtieri said of the $30-$40 Spark allegedly deposited in the accounts of the inmate-performers. “But when you’re in jail those ridiculously nominal accounts add up.”
Spark is free on $5,300 bail, after declining to speak to investigators.
“He wouldn’t talk,” Gualtieri said of Spark. “He said he wanted a lawyer.”
Well, that is Spark’s right, of course – just be sure that if the two ever meet inside the jail someday, you check his lawyer’s briefcase for undisclosed iPads, first.
