A RedRoseStory by any other name
For quite a while now I have spoken out very sharply and strongly about the incident involving the website ‘red rose stories’. Not about the claimed crackdown by the ‘evil FBI porn squad’, but by the out of control hysteria in the sex positive community over the incident.
On Friday October 7 2005 an update went up on the main page saying basically “Oh boo hoo hoo! The evil bush administration forced me to shut down!” With nothing else to go on, and no other information to back it up, kinksters everywhere feel for her story hook line and sinker. Free Internet Press. Anarchist Librarians. National Coalition for Sexual Freedom. Even Boing Boing. They all rushed to report that the evil right wing fundamentalist Christians were oppressing the freedoms of anyone whose sexuality fell outside the norm. How dare they! It wasen’t even pictures. It was just words. The government cant oppress what is just words. Why that violates freedom of speech! This is unheard of.
Im sure that George Carlin would agree that obscenity proposition for just words was a totally forging idea until the evil Bush administration took over and started pushing their fundamentalist views of sex onto everyone else.
Assuming for a moment it actually was the ‘porn squad’ attacking the freedoms of peaceful americans. Where was any supporting evidence? Arrest record? A copy of the official list of charges? The indictment? Where was anything besides just posting that was written by the website itself? The closest I ever discovered was from the The Free Speech Coalition who gave the name of the websites lawyer. But they also pointed out that no charges were filed and that details remained unclear. At least they went that far. Most other places simply slipped into full on panic mode screaming about how we were living in a police state.
Two things made me very very suspicious about the claims posted on the homepage. First of all, the update to the website came AFTER the website owner claimed that the FBI goons took her computer. If she didn’t have her computer any more then how did she do the update? Secondly, the timing of it all was just too convenient. The announcement came just two days after a similar announcement by the website MaxHardcore.
Website owners suffer from burnout all the time. Someone makes a blog, or a podcast, or a web comic any other kind of website and they devote their time into it as a hobby. Something interesting to pass the time with and maybe make a bit of money off of it as well. But eventually as the months and years wear on it becomes less fun. You wanna give it up but feel obligated to continue because of your customers or followers.
Heck, I have even experienced it myself. My last website before I started up Kinky Ropes I shut down after it had stooped being fun. So its totally understandable if someone writing a series of web fiction sees someone else get raided, then decides thats their opportunity to back out from their own website. Dump their customer base with a simple “Hey, I was raided too.” announcement and just walk away.
Its been demonstrated before that a story along the lines of “Pity me! I was shut down by the porn squad” can gain a lot of sympathy from alt-sex folks. Thats exactly what the website SuicideGirls did just a couple of weeks before. They pull a few photo filesets off their web server and make an announcement to the effect that they were getting fucked over by the porn squad. However, it was soon discovered that it was SuicideGirls who had called the FBI. Not the FBI who had called the SuicideGirls. They didn’t have that much credibility in the first place due to a lot of fallout and internet rumors about former models. Them lying to (or at least misleading) people into thinking that there were being oppressed caused a lot of backlash against the website.
So is it really all that far fetched that RedRoseStores would try the same trick? Just claim that whey were shut down by the porn squad as a cover story to distract people from what really happened? That it was just a small hobby website that had grown tedious and the owner wanted to quit? It seems to at least be a possibility if it weren’t for one important element.
I was wrong.
For nearly two years I searched on and off for information about the Red Rose Story case. I live in Pittsburgh where the event took place but I couldn’t find any leads. Not the name of the website owner. Not the charges. No police report. Nothing at all besides the posting by Red Rose Stories themselves. But that all changed yesterday.
I was actually googling around trying to find something else. I was looking into a case of obscenity that happened in Ohio. But I stumbled across an article on the Red Rose Stories case that happened to actually mention the name of the website owner. Karen Fletcher.
From there it was easy to google all the rest. Indicement came on Sept. 26 2006 and was filed by U.S. Attorney Mary Beth Buchanan. Charges are six counts of Transportation of Obscene Matters (18 U.S.C. §§ 1462 (a) and 2). She is being represented on a pro bono basis by the firm Weston, Garrou, DeWitt & Walters. Heck, I even discovered the number of suscribers there were to the website at the time of the raid. 29.
I am amazed at what happenes when there is actualy evedence to go on instead of an endless ocean of “this is just another example of how oppressive those evil Christians really are” whining. Im still not sure of all the details of the case, but at least now there is proof that the event did take place.