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Texas Couple Found Guilty of Distributing Obscenity 10/27/2003 Case reveals that un-enforced laws result in increasing depravity of the porn industry.
A federal jury on October 22 found former Dallas police officer Garry Ragsdale and his wife guilty on three charges of conspiracy and distributing obscenity. Investigators charged the Fort Worth couple with selling online videotapes depicting simulated rape and other deviant sexual acts. The jury ruled that the tapes violate contemporary community standards—the legal benchmark established by the Supreme Court in 1973 for defining obscenity.
Ragsdale, who joined the Dallas police force in 1990, began his Internet business selling weight-loss drugs over the Internet. Then Clarence Gartman approached him about selling pornography. Gartman pirated some videotapes from a Florida porn company. He told Ragsdale the tapes were legal and helped him set up the Internet site from which they were sold. An August 7 article in the Dallas Observer described the tapes as “a grisly collection of fetish tapes depicting adults acting out rape and sexual torture scenes.”
After the Ragsdales accused Gartman of cutting them out of some of the profits, they parted ways. Several months later, a citizen, who stumbled upon the Ragdales' Web site, sent an e-mail to the Dallas police tipping them off and triggering a rare federal obscenity investigation. After a five-year investigation beginning in 1998, Jane Boyle, U.S. attorney for the northern district of Texas, announced the three-count indictment against the Ragsdales on June 18, 2003, just before the statute of limitations expired.
The Clinton administration and the Reno Department of Justice initiated few prosecutions for adult obscenity. The Bush/Ashcroft administration has done little so far to change that trend. Many believe this case is little more than token enforcement of obscenity laws and hardly a warning shot to an industry that hasn’t seen any major obscenity prosecutions in more than 10 years.
Jan LaRue, chief counsel for Concerned Women for America, said it appears that the Justice Department is “picking off the little guys.” While prosecutors in Texas were finalizing the Ragsdale prosecution, federal district courts in Dallas and Reno, Nevada, granted ZFX Productions Inc. of Orlando, Florida, an injunction against Gartman to prevent further copyright violations of the ZFX videotapes. The Nevada court awarded ZFX a $450,000 judgment against Gartman. It’s believed that Gartman fled to Canada to avoid paying the judgment.
Pornographic videos that depict rape and other violent themes are not rare. Many pornographic Web sites feature sections devoted to bondage and torture, and a search for “rape videos” on Google yields nearly 70,000 hits. Pat Trueman, who headed the Justice Department’s Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section from 1988 to 1993, said that the feds’ current efforts appear half-hearted. Trueman, who noted that the previous Bush administration brought more obscenity cases in a month than the current administration has in two and a half years, believes that the aggressive policy worked. “Once you back off, you get more and more extreme stuff like this rape and torture tape genre being made available,” he said.
While Gary and Tamara Ragsdale now face fines up to $750,000 each, and prison time up to 20 years, the Department of Justice has not indicated whether it will pursue the producers of the obscene videotapes the Ragsdales distributed. This case should not end up being just another speed bump for the booming smut industry.
In recognition of “Pornography Awareness Week, October 26-November 1, CWA is highlighting Jan LaRue’s in-depth paper, Hard-Core Harm: Why You Can’t Be Soft on Porn.
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