Five hours ago, the offices of AbbyWinters.com were raided and the owner arrested.
POLICE raided a Melbourne porn business that makes up to $10 million a year from allegedly illegal activities. Detectives raided five premises as part of Operation Refuge, seizing computers containing footage of women allegedly performing explicit sex acts, which are illegal to produce in Victoria.
They are also investigating allegations that some of the models on the porn company’s website are under age. Police raided the Fitzroy head office of G Media – which runs a porn website – in the early morning raids, and arrested its director, Garion Hall, at his Heidelberg home.
Two storage facilities and another office were part of the Fitzroy raids. Computer records and explicit DVDs allegedly containing material too graphic to be legally made in Victoria were among items seized. It is illegal to profit from making porn films in Victoria. It is believed Mr Hall denies any wrongdoing.
Yesterday’s raids came after the Herald Sun provided police with a dossier of information about the allegedly illegal porn G Media, and companies associated with it, have churned out in Melbourne since about 2000.
G Media is believed to receive about $30 a month from 30,000 subscribers to its website, which contains more than 370,000 explicit images and almost 4000 sex videos.
The company specialises in filming female teenage students and backpackers in Melbourne and has explicit photographs and videos of almost 1200 young women on its website, many listed as being aged 18 and 19. (…read more, news.com.au, thanks Anonymous)
See also:
Australian adult website Abby Winters raided
June 16, 2009 – 7:55 pmG Media, the Australian company behind one of the web’s most popular adult websites, AbbyWinters.com, has been raided by Victoria police and it’s owner arrested. No charges have been laid.
According to The Herald Sun, computers containing footage of women allegedly performing explicit sex acts were seized by police because they are ‘illegal to produce in Victoria’. Under section 24 of the Victorian Classification (Publications, Films and Computer Games) (Enforcement) Act 199, a person must not, for the purpose of gain, make or produce an objectionable film. (…read more, somebodythinkofthechildren.com, thanks k0mmissar)
What works in the favor of rampaging authoritarian moralists is adult discretion. This discretion is a critical component that makes all of this work as well as it does but fails terribly as a social mechanism to force a change in perspective and knowledge about adult sexual activity and desire.
When adults so compartmentalize their activities or desires they often fall prey to approving or allowing strict controls on their own behavior to insure their social participation.
As long as this lack of assertiveness continues we will be plagued by moralists with absolutist versions of sexuality.
At some point you just have to say, “Fuck Society” and stand up for what you believe in.
I think the oddest thing about the laws in Victoria is that its apparently illegal to commercially produce porn there, but brothel prostitution is legal. Its the complete inverse of the situation in California and many other US States and an illustration of just how arbitrary and random laws around the sex industry are.
At the risk of shamelessly plugging my own blog, I’ll nonetheless link to a my post on the topic, as it gives some background about AbbyWinters and its troubles with The Herald-Sun:
http://bppa.blogspot.com/2009/06/abbywinters-raided.html
As a long time Abby Winters model I’m deeply distressed about the raids. G Media treats their models & staff with nothing but complete respect and would never knowingly shoot an underage model.
And from an ex model’s blog – http://web.archive.org/web/20080209093918/liandradahl.blogspot.com/2007/12/anti-censorship.html
Seems that her main concern was images ending up on other people’s sites. AW would have little control of that.
That journalist has apparently been on a campaign for 18 months or so.
http://www.news.com.au/technology/story/0,25642,22907748-5014115,00.html
Offshore porn thwarts watchdog
By Keith Moor, Herald Sun
December 11, 2007 05:51pm
http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,22858702-662,00.html
Porn exploiters attacked
Keith Moor
December 03, 2007 12:00am
Sounds similar to New Zealand’s laws on the matter. Our “Films, Videos and Publications Classification Act 1993” ( http://legislation.govt.nz/act/public/1993/0094/latest/DLM312895.html ) deems publications to be objectionable if (among other things) they portray or promote sexual conduct between or with “young persons” (under the age of 17). The age of consent is 16, so there’s a year between being able to do it and being able to be filmed doing it. (Or writing a note to your girlfriend saying “let’s have sex tonight”, for that matter, since that’s also technically a publication promoting sex with a young person.)
Interestingly, offences associated with production, distribution and possession of objectionable publications are one of the few places in New Zealand law where it’s a question of strict liability: if you possess it, and it’s deemed now or in the future to be objectionable, you don’t need to _know_ it’s objectionable in order to be guilty of a crime. There are some other issues with the legislation as written: for instance, sloppy wording means that all members of Police have inspector powers (search and seizure) under the law, including the tea lady, mechanic and part-time emergency call-takers.
I think the main difference between New Zealand and Australia is the way the laws are applied. For now at least, censorship in New Zealand has taken a relatively tolerant and common-sense approach whereas in Australia it seems the government and official bodies are increasingly leaning towards censorship and increased restriction of materials.
Of course, our worst “porn scandal” in recent years was when they did a sweep of the NZ Police intranet system in 2005 and found 5000 “inappropriate” images in the accounts of 300 officers. (I’m led to believe that most of those were topless photos of model Rachel Hunter that circulated in a chain email, though, and only 3 of 5000 were actually deemed to be legally objectionable. And no-one remembers what the Commissioner was being criticised for in the week leading up to that stunning revelation…)
Garion issued a statement:
http://www.somebodythinkofthechildren.com/abby-winters-garion-hall-issues-statement/
No charges have been laid, no hardware confiscated and the police were “polite and amiable.” If the Herald Sun hadn’t been on a witch hunt nothing much would have happened. I expect they’ll continue to beat their drum of moral outrage until “something is done.” Perhaps we can all expect raids in the future.
Australian censorship laws are fucked, pure and simple.
This makes me want to go out and get an AW subscription.
feeling rather patriotic at the moment. paul f. little style.
@ MichealK – that’s pretty much what’s always the cause of sudden police raids or moral outrages here… ‘morning infotainment’ television, newspaper, and chat-back radio will choose something to ‘stir’ the pot, make a deal out of it that day – and arrests usually follow the next morning.
we saw a raid on an art gallery a while back, one of australia’s most respected and commended photographers, here and overseas, had his work conviscated by police for featuring subtle pre-pubescent nudity. an ART gallery.
even two weeks ago, we had a satire comedy show taken from us, off the air as one of it’s sketches ‘outraged’ a small minority. heck, even the prime minister decided to jump on board and express his disgust, just like he did with the art photography above, to get his two cents in.
small (minded) population – outrage spreads fast.
(i hope they never find out about kink.com!)
“Yesterday’s raids came after the Herald Sun provided police with a dossier of information about the allegedly illegal porn G Media, and companies associated with it, have churned out in Melbourne since about 2000.”
So the newspaper needs to sell more copies and get a good “sexy!” story in, let’s go ahead and sic the cops on publishing we don’t agree with? That people actually want to buy instead of those boring newspapers?
Keep it classy, Herald Sun.
Anyone who’s had interaction with Australia’s OFLC, the UK’s BBFC, or the various Canadian film review boards can’t help but come away with a new found appreciation of our First Amendment rights, and the various voluntary ratings regimes in place in the US.
I don’t mean to offer our system is perfect, far from it. But it is vastly superior to the government mandated systems in place on other countries.