WASHINGTON, D.C. — Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Arizona, wrote a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland asking that the Justice Department investigate the parent company of OnlyFans for promoting and profiting from ‘online prostitution.’ Now, Gosar wants Attorney General Garland to use a racist, outdated federal law to bring about a criminal resolution to this so-called crisis.
“The site OnlyFans.com operates across state lines and provides a platform which, while probably immunized from tort under Section 230, does appear to facilitate and even encourage interstate travel of the sort directly targeted by the Mann Act,” said Gosar, a dentist by trade with no prior public service experience.
“On this site, individuals can advertise their willingness to travel across state lines for illegal or immoral activity, and the platform providing publicity for these individuals appears to subsidize and capitalize off this travel.”
Gosar’s letter proceeds: “It is worth investigating this issue further, given the volume of activity on this site and anecdotal reports about prostitution, child exploitative material, and illicit sexual coercion.” Gosar is asking Garland to use the Mann Act.
Today I’m writing the U.S. Attorney General requesting an investigation into @OnlyFans for promoting, and profiting from, online prostitution. I encourage @TheJusticeDept to vigorously protect vulnerable people from platforms that promote coercive immoral and sexual activity.
— Rep. Paul Gosar, DDS (@RepGosar) April 1, 2021
Also known as the White-Slave Traffic Act of 1910, the original form of the legislation makes it a felony to engage in alleged interstate or foreign commerce transport of “any woman or girl for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose.” The law is primarily intended to address prostitution, immorality, and human trafficking — particularly where trafficking is used for prostitution. The Mann Act was passed as so-called “protective legislation” aimed at national moral reform during the Progressive Era of 1897 to about 1920.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the 1917 case Caminetti v. United States that the term ‘immoral purpose’ included consensual premarital sex, not just prostitution, allowing prosecutors at that time to prosecute cases where prostitution wasn’t even alleged. While Congress amended the legislation in 1978 and 1986 to limit its application to transportation for the purpose of illegal sexual acts, Gosar is still adamant that OnlyFans is a hive of nonconsensual content distribution.
Gosar justifies his calls for the Mann Act to be employed by pointing out that OnlyFans.com is owned by a parent company, Fenix International Limited, in London.
Because of the premium subscription mechanics built into the social network, users can actually pay money to performers for their content. Sex workers often use OnlyFans as a means to monetize their content and marshal their users to support their creative endeavors. Gosar doesn’t understand the mechanics of this sort of platform, it seems.
“Platforms like OnlyFans changed our industry by giving our workers control of how they perform,” said Alana Evans, the president of the Adult Performance Artists Guild, in a statement made to other adult entertainment industry news organizations. “For the first time in history, performers can be self-reliant without working under anyone else’s direction. As a performer for 23 years, having the ability to control every aspect of the product I release is the ultimate goal in consensual content.”
Media reports also cite an “All Things Considered” feature published by National Public Radio in 2008 that indicates prosecutions under the Mann Act were still constitutional to some degree. However, the legislation was amended to redefine legal “debauchery” and “other immoral purpose” as “any sexual activity for which any person can be charged with a criminal offense.” That change purportedly allows the government to stop “legislating morality” while retaining the Mann Act’s so-called ‘essence’ as a weapon to fight human trafficking.
Paul Gosar photo by Gage Skidmore, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license. It has been resized, cropped and padded with a background.
