Several years ago the offices of Sweet Entertainment Group (SEG), an adult entertainment company based in Vancouver, Canada, were raided by Vancouver law enforcement officers. Equipment and records were seized.Several years ago the offices of Sweet Entertainment Group (SEG), an adult entertainment company based in Vancouver, Canada, were raided by Vancouver law enforcement officers. Equipment and records were seized. Several months later, SEG offices were raided again, and again equipment and records were seized. The raids led to charges of obscenity; some of the BDSM content that the company produced mixed sex with violence, a fact that led Canadian law enforcement officials to conclude that such content was therefore illegal obscenity. Yet approximately two years later, a Canadian judge disagreed, and on April 23rd, Steve Sweet was acquitted on all 20 counts of making, distributing and circulating obscene videos. Connor Young spoke with Steve Sweet recently about his important court victory.
YNN: The first thing I’m curious about is what was the basis for the ruling in your favor? How did the judge reach the determination that the content in question was not obscene?
SS: Well it’s interesting … his decision was a 26 page decision, and there are so many different components to that decision. It basically took him a month to come up with that decision. We were in trial for a total of five weeks, and he reserved his decision for months to collect his thoughts and put it together in a well-spoken manner. There are so many different components with this particular case with the issues of Canadian contemporary community standards, the other issues were the issue of harm, or perceived harm … artistic merit, or what we refer to in this technical case as the ‘internal necessities test’. We covered so much ground to be able to get this kind of a victory. We spent literally two years doing the research, doing all the selection of the expert witnesses, there’s so much involved.
YNN: Were you optimistic that you were going to get this decision?
SS: You know, right from the very beginning I was extremely optimistic. I don’t think it’s optimistic, I think it’s more realistic, at least in my mind, and my mindset going into this was that I didn’t feel that I could lose if I fought for what I believed in, and if the judge would have given us a different decision I still would have been proud of the work that we did, and I still would have felt very comfortable with everything that we’ve gone through for the simple fact that I thought I was doing something that I believed in, and at the end of the day we got the decision that we wanted. There were a lot of opportunities for us to make a deal or take a technical out on this case … frankly I was encouraged by a lot of people to take [a deal], and I just completely refused because I look at it from a long term perspective, and I thought that realistically there was absolutely no way that I could settle for some kind of quick fix or sidestep of the issue, and I prefer to take it on the chin and deal with it straight on.
YNN: If you had taken one of the deals they offered you, would there have been anything to stop them from turning around and filing more charges next week?
SS: They could of. They could still file additional charges for things that we do or want to do in the future, but obviously it’s becoming more and more difficult for them, and we’ve noticed a definite change of attitude from the VPD as a result of what we’ve done. I don’t know if you have the full history, but we were raided twice in one year. We had all of our computer equipment seized on two separate occasions. The first of which was back in March of 2002, and then again in November. And we’re talking about over 100 machines, you know, equipment for 30 plus employees, video cameras, lights, decks, software, hardware, accounting records. They took stuff that was not even closely related to anything to do with production or hard drives or any of those things. I think realistically they pretty much hit us with everything they could with the intention and the full belief that they had put us out of business by doing that, and I don’t think that they were expecting us to be able to fight back with such ferocity.
YNN: Over here in America a lot of what we’re dealing with is kind of pushed by the religious right. Does Canada have that same situation? What are the motivations of the prosecutors in this case?
SS: I think that in actuality there’s probably a component of that perhaps moralistic view of what we do from certain members of the VPD, and I think that that was kind of the catalyst for pushing things… the Crown was actually very fair and cooperative with us and our attorneys, we were actually pretty lucky to be dealing with this particular individual that was dealing with us. Ultimately there were a few people that had a hard-on for us and wanted to make an example of us, but I guess good reasoning and judgment prevailed.
YNN: What was the judge like?
SS: When I first saw him the first impression of him was, ‘Wow,’ he really seemed like a fair guy. We had a sense of humor in court before we had a chance to present our case to him. We were extremely luck to have him.
YNN: So were you guys in court watching Sweet Loads?
SS: No, actually… close… we were watching SadoSlaves.com videos, we were also watching the MissPain.com videos, and one particular video from PeeLover.com. We watched them in their entirety, and I mean these videos ranged from five minutes for the Pee Lover content to forty or fifty minutes for some of the Sado Slaves scenes, and we watched them in their entirety from beginning to end while the judge took notes. And that pretty much encompassed the entire case of the Crown to the effect that they basically spelled out the current laws … and then proceeded with the videos, and then they rested their case. I guess they felt that that would be enough to convict us all.
YNN: How did they argue that this content was obscene? What was the basis of the obscenity claim?
SS: Well basically, as the Crown is reading this, whenever you combine sex and violence then it’s automatically obscene as per the definition of Butler. Ultimately our belief was that that was quite frankly an oversimplification.
YNN: Were you able to call into play contemporary movies and that sort of thing?
SS: Yeah absolutely. When you read the decision, we actually did play many different feature films that I felt were representative of a combination of sex and violence … a large portion of our case was to play currently available movies on DVD or VHS from the local video stores, including films like Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer … Irreversible, all these types of films. We also covered books, media like American Psycho … that was another movie that we played… Pulp Fiction. Basically I got to play all my favorite movies in the courtroom … When you look at the large variety of media that’s available in the mainstream and then try to apply at least the Crown’s perspective on the case then essentially all media, or at least a large part of Hollywood media that’s available currently, could essentially be deemed to be obscene. A lot of these Hollywood mainstream films combine sex and violence, at least to a certain degree.
Continued on next page…
Comments concerning YNOT News interviews can be sent to editor@ynotmasters.com, or you are welcome to discuss all YNOT News articles on the YNOTMASTERS message boards.
