YNOT – No one in the U.S. paid much attention when Spanish media reported adult producer-director Pablo Lapiedra’s March 17 arrest in his native Spain on charges of employing underage performers for sexually explicit productions he filmed in Colombia.
The American adult entertainment industry’s focus shifted when Interpol revealed it also possesses an arrest warrant for Lapiedra’s possibly ex-wife, Zuleidy Piedrahita — better known as popular adult entertainer and Wicked Pictures contract girl Lupe Fuentes. According to the warrant, Fuentes is suspected of recruiting underage girls to perform for Lapiedra and providing them with falsified age-verification documents. The couple married in March 2007, but no record of a divorce has surfaced.
The charges against the pair resulted from an investigation begun in 2008. During the inquiry, Colombia’s National Police, working with Interpol and Spain’s Federal Bureau of Technical Investigation, uncovered a prostitution ring with links to Fuentes and Lapiedra. A school in Medellín tipped off authorities after a 16-year-old female student reported Lapiedra and Fuentes paid her to appear in 10 explicit films. According to published reports, Lapiedra, who can be seen filming and having sex with several girls in some clips, told the girls he was filming a “casting call;” however, footage later appeared on adult websites PabloLapiedra.com, Zuleidy.com and ZuleidyLapiedraStar.com, all of which are registered to Fuentes under her real name.
Upon his arrest, Lapiedra reportedly told authorities Fuentes was in charge of casting for his films in Medellín and Bello, Colombia. Fuentes, now 24, was born in Cali, Colombia, but emigrated to Madrid as a child and then to the U.S. in 2009. She has been a resident of the U.S. since.
Lapiedra expects to learn on Monday whether a Spanish judge will order his extradition to Colombia to face charges. In the meantime, authorities continue to search for Fuentes, who seems to have disappeared along with her boyfriend-manager, Biohazard frontman and sometimes-porn-stud Evan Seinfeld. Both Fuentes and Seinfeld usually are active on Twitter, but their accounts went silent just after midnight on Monday. They have not returned requests for comment from the media.
ColdHardCash, which operates the affiliate program for Fuentes’ official website ILoveLupe.com, on Tuesday notified affiliates the site has been removed from the web “due to circumstances beyond [the program’s] control.”
According to the notice, “At this time, we are not sure how long the site will be down for [sic].”
Meanwhile, in Spain, mainstream director Ramiro Lapiedra — who also directs adult productions and is the creative force behind the adult website PutaLocura.com under the nom de porn Torbe — remains convinced his brother and Fuentes were victimized by a disturbed “girl of 17 years who looks 20.”
In typically outspoken fashion, on his blog Torbe wrote, “[My brother and his ex-partner] are accused of falsifying actresses’ IDs. Really, you’d have to be a total asshole to do that, and I doubt Pablo is an asshole.”
